Statement

Inspired by the Pera Museum's Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection, Cloud Profiles: Weightless Measures is a site-specific installation in the collection's permanent display which seeks to restore weight to data's measure. A powerful technological commodity, data seems poised to standardize the world by digitizing everything, transparently translating and transferring value under a universal standard of ones and zeros. Data is a contemporary manifestation of the same universal standards that began with physical weights and measures, but today's standards seem to have lost their weightiness.

This animation cycle, showing a misshapen stone figure cloaked by wavering clouds of data and obscured by her own digital shadow, seeks to restore weight to data's measure. The project alludes to "cloud computing," a colloquial name for loosely networked, web-served applications and data storage that connotes an amorphous, innocuous nonentity. But to imagine the cloud as frictionless, immediate, or beyond critique is a "clouded" misperception that misses the gravity of these technologies.

Description

This project originated as a silent site-specific video intervention created for the Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection gallery at the Pera Museum, Istanbul. In the installation, 24 variations of six videos played in randomized loops across four screens integrated into the gallery's permanent display.

The project has been updated to include a single-channel screening version with sound.