Keynotes

Clouds have excited thinkers for millennia, from Anaximenes’ 6th century BC Theory of Air to Peter Sloterdijk’s early-twenty-first century philosophy of Bubbles, Globes, and Foams (1998-2004).

 

We invite participants across the humanities to consider the interstitial nature of the cloud in culture, both as natural object and artificial media ecology.

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How do the clean lonely clouds pootling through Wordsworth’s Romantic poetry relate to the “asbestos-y texture” of Tan Lin’s millennial urban skyscapes? Do the toxic textures of the Anthropocene influence contemporary ecocritical ideas like “solastalgia”? Might “cyberspace”, which, as Joanna Walsh puts it, “is an old-fashioned word for the Net, which has evaporated into the Cloud”, relate to Virginia Woolf’s view that in modernity even “the air seemed to become fibrous”?

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