Rewarding myself today by attending A Symposium on Clouds (in the Cloud), with talks on s in Woolf's Orlando () avant-garde cinema () and a host of other media & disciplines w/ keynotes by Esther Leslie + Joanna Walsh. Starts at the top of the hour https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-symposium-on-clouds-in-the-cloud-tickets-135368467731?keep_tld=1

(I'm currently writing an article [in part] about clouds in Finnegans Wake so technically this counts as "work", but that doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy it)

Fascinating address from Esther Leslie explores the animate, mutable materiality of s in terms of extension + (dis)orientation in cultural, symbolic, medial, commercial, political, Romantic, kitsch & phenomenological spheres (thought/word/dust/mushroom/digital/emotional clouds)

It wasn't central to Prof. Leslie's point, but a really interesting detail I learned was that etymologically the word "cloud" derives from Old English "clūd" meaning "mass of stone, rock, boulder, hill” because they looked like lumps of petrified matter - named for their opposite

Panel 1: Emily Simon on materialism, temporality & the poetics of change in Robertson's The Weather; Matthew Riviere on hoarding, transience & how storms reveal historical, economic & infrastructural contexts in Robinson's Housekeeping + Pipkin's It Was Raining in the Data Center

Sarah Edwards explores diverse intimacies between humans, technologies + clouds, set up through the encounter between human technology, urban life & environment in Turner's Rain, Steam & Speed: The Great Western Railway in which clouds are human actions that have taken to the sky

Edwards turns this relationship between technology, action, clouds toward discussion of contemporary "cloud protesting" (via L Robertson, JB Carpenter, J Parikka). Tension between the simulacra of a digital polis afforded by The Cloud & its suppression by material tear gas clouds

"Every time it rains, media history soaks into our skin. Clouds...are full of the chemical remnants of the on-going industrial age...[which have]...made the air part of our chemical cultural history" (Jussi Parikka, "On Media Meteorology" in J.R Carpenter The Gathering Cloud 1/2)

"..Many prefer to think of the current informational culture as one of light, marked by the weightlessness of fibre optics and the speed of digital transactions, yet it is also one of weight: of minerals, metals, energy consumption & entropy" (Parikka, "On Media Meteorology" 2/2)

Panel 2: Zoe Kempf-Harris discusses the duality of clouds in Woolf’s Orlando. Clouds in modernism allow authors to navigate space between abstract/concrete, virtual/actual realms, allowing for collapse, abstraction, manipulation, obscuring of form through their nebulous qualities

"The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the 19thC stayed..long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of England"- Ch 5

Kempf-Harris explores clouds as vehicles for emotion & transformation in Orlando. In their liminal form & symbolic relation to imagination/cloud-gazing,s provide a vitalist metaphor for the novel's themes of spatio-temporal collapse & of passing through abstraction to new forms

Didn't take notes on rest of panel as I was hanging up my washing while listening (to get the full Zoom conference experience) but was v good. Will Fleming on 60s poetic community via Sweeney; Maria Sledmere on the anthropocene lyric; Nicholas Lauridsen on poetic enjambment & OOO

Also no notes on the next panel because I was cooking throughout (a somewhat cloudy mushroom risotto) but it was a very cool series of talks on cloudscapes in avantgarde cinema from Alice Guy-Blaché & Walter R. Booth to Isaac Julien, James Benning, Peter Gidal, Larry Gottheim

Wonderful, performative keynote by Joanna Walsh on identity + affect in Cloud Aesthetics. We often fail to appreciate that the digital cloud is material: it requires materials to power it; it impacts the environment; it produces power, labour, aesthetic relationships & identites

Walsh brings us on a tour d'horizon of kitsch, cute, queer fascist cloud fandom aesthetics & political identites - from Pepe the Frog to cottagecore - via McLuhan on metaphor, Mark FIsher on capitalist realism, Angela Nagle on the Alt-Right, Wilde on aesthetics & Benjamin.Great

Walsh's reflections on aesthetic fandoms also drew a distinction between the academia of capitalist realism & fandom academia; adopting an identity to claim a platform as a prerequisite of neoliberalism; & how, as time has stopped in the pandemic, we turn from plots to aesthetics

My main takeaways from the day are an increased awareness of the pre-history of the digital cloud in the technological & industrial clouds of the 18thC & how clouds allow for rethinking form as an amorphous becoming that is still material & vital. Thx to the organisers & speakers