ABSTRACT
Sensing the Cloud explores research-creation as sensory anthropology through a large-scale video projection artwork titled white clouds in blue sky (2021). The authors consider how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems as generative sensing tools for this project created critical engagement with the cloud as a deeply sensory phenomenon, entangled with human labor and intuition. As an extension of their research-creation work with fugitive archival collections and the material politics of anthropological documentation, the work shows how improvisation and collaboration are deeply relational and sensory modes for art-making and ethnography. Can a sensory anthropology of the multimodal be one of the ways through which we come to understand anthropological mediality in this new age of AI and media making, so that we might counter rather than reproduce dynamics of extraction and exploitation?
