Buycloud

2020-ongoing

Buycloud

-When in the 15th century the Western ‘explorers’ went to what-we-now-call-America, they told the natives that they wanted to buy their land.
The natives were confused: Their land? To buy it?
Their vocabulary did not have a word or understanding for ownership over natural phenomena.-

Buycloud is a research on the transformation of “natural phenomena” to “exploitable resources”.

A process carrying a story that must be told in relation to the past (colonialism), the present (climate change, corporate landgrabbing), and the future (extraterrestrial occupation). As a research-methodology I copied the dominant Western processes, philosophies and theories on how ownership and exploitation are constructed, and I pasted them onto one of the last phenomena remaining outside of these systems; clouds. Something so fluid and beyond our monetised culture, that it questions the validity of existing capitalistic models themselves.
I am selling clouds.
The research is expressed in an interactive video installation with an attached virtual speculation-market ↗ in the form of a web-app and a website. Within the installation people lay down on a piece of grass while looking up at projected clouds with QR-codes and prices attached. Each step of a cloud-acquirement is guided by several new media techniques and justified by a manifesto based upon a default land-property contract. All certificates are archived on the online map cadastre ↗ .
With rising carbon emissions, cumulus clouds are threatened to disappear in 100-150 years. Catastrophic for the planet but very good for the cloud market, since all markets are based on scarcity and demand… Climate change becomes a paradoxical marketing tool whereby spectators are provoked to reflect upon their own position between climate justice or economical growth.

The infrastructure of a cloud-acquirement are conducted in the Commodifying Cumulus Cloud Manifesto ↗
Clouds are sold and archived on www.buycloud.space ↗

Buycloud has been exhibited in various international exhibitions and talks, has been featured in a variety of books and publications, received the Dutch Design Award and has had a wide press-coverage.

It has now created a community of over a 120 cloud owners.