Furnishing the Cloud
March 10, 2015 - March 22, 2015
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Related Public Programs
POSTPONED: SENSORY INFRASTRUCTURES Roundtable Discussion
Friday, March 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
“Bark Room,” Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 2 W 13th Street, Ground Floor
Free and open to the public; no RSVP required
How do we perceive the presence of data? How do our bodies interface with information streams and the digital technologies that bring them to us? What aspects of “the cloud” are rendered sensible to us — not only visible, but also audible and tangible? Join the curators for “Furnishing the Cloud,” Kimberly Ackert, Orit Halpern, Shannon Mattern, and Brian McGrath, who will offer short provocations, exploring the exhibition’s themes from the perspectives of furniture and exhibition design, history, media studies, architecture, and urbanism.
Please visit
furnishingthecloud.net for updates on the event.
Presented by the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, with funding from the Provost Office Research Cluster Grant and the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons School of Design. With additional support from Historical Studies, New School for Social Research, and the School of Media Studies, New School for Public Engagement.
Exhibition Designers: Kimberly Ackert, with assistance from Jordana Maisie Goot
Curators: Kimberly Ackert, Orit Halpern, Shannon Mattern, and Brian McGrath
Web Development:Daniel Udell
Curatorial Assistant: Nadia Christidi
Students from Kimberly Ackert’s Furniture, Detail and Space course:
Dhafar Al-Edani, Mariam Alshamali, Tanyaporn Anantrungroj, Derick Brown, Felipe Colin, Kristina Cowger, Jo Garst, Jennifer Hindelang, Jacqueline Leung, Pei Ying Lin, Valter Lindgren, Mochi Lui, Matilda Maansdotter, Emmanuela Martini, Simon Schulz, Whitney Shanks, Raquel Sonobe
Web Projects: Zachary Franciose, Laura Sanchez, Eishin Yoshida
Students from Orit Halpern’s Making Sense: Methods in the Study of Media, Attention, and Infrastructure course:
Nicholas Cavaioli, Raquel DeAnda, Joseph Goldsmith, Angelica Huggins, Ian Keith, Kate McEntee, Awis Nari Mranani, Erika Nyame-Nseke, Kevin Swann, Shea Sweeney, Daniel Udell, Michal Unterberg, Kyla Wasserman
Much of our common stock of knowledge — from the inscriptions of early civilizations, the classic texts of the ancient world, the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and the maps and scientific treatises of the Renaissance, to the tweets and open data sets of today — now resides in The Cloud. That Cloud seems to have no boundaries, no place; it floats above us, bringing its intellectual riches to those of us who are connected to it, wherever we might be. Yet The Cloud isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as the weather. Its accessibility is limited by protocols and cables, and its “content” has to be shaped, formalized through various interfaces, in order for us to perceive and process it. While artists, designers, and researchers have acknowledged that The Cloud has an architecture — from the routers generating wisps of wifi in our homes, to the massive data centers storing that “rain of data,” to the cables and satellites that function as the system’s plumbing — we’ve paid little attention to the places where The Cloud meets our individual bodies. Furnishing the Cloud considers both how we have historically imagined the architectures and containers of our common stock of knowledge — the universal library, the endless bookshelf, the collective brain, among other structural/architectural metaphors — and proposes new infrastructures for storing, accessing, and processing The Cloud. What are our new ergonomics of reading and viewing and auditing digital content, and how can we design to support those postures and modes of perception? How
might we Furnish the Cloud?
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