Cloud-Native Nomad explores new social narratives in the context of the technological age in a chapter-based structure.
Cloud-native, a notion and technical term emerging in 2010, has constantly expanded its meaning and usage over time. However, if we split the term and interpret it from a more literary perspective, “cloud-native” could also be read as cloud and natives, in other words, natives living on cloud. Applications under the structure of cloud-native are endowed with inherent advantages on any cloud, enabling them to run and link seamlessly.
Cloud-Native Nomad features five projects by artist Wu Ziyang during different periods, including A Woman with the Technology, Where Did Macy Go?, Future_Forecast, Pasig River 2030 – 6 Plus and Event Modeling. Delving into topics such as algorithmic control and bias, remote home community, planetary scale computing and new geographical relationships, evolution of cloud network society, “AI archeology” and collective creation, these works present the intricacies and contradictoriness embedded within.
Benjamin H. Bratton, American philosopher of technology, once put forward the notion of “the stack”. He divides this colossal structure into six layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.[1] Under the backdrop of an overarching global governance built on cloud platform, the artist become a nomad between the layers and cloud. Through the collection and organization of huge amount of external and internal information as well as integrated research on the current network ecology and social events, he explores and tries to conject, from both the macro and micro perspectives, the explicit and implicit impacts of current technologies on the society, people’s life and the world in a cross-cultural context.
In Wu’s recent projects, he focuses on the establishment of real-time platform system for “recursive simulation” of the various possibilities of social developments. Through constantly self-retrieved and computational simulation, the artist intends to create some positive impact on the real world and probes into the aesthetic stance developed from within. During the exhibition, viewers may rewrite the artist’s works on site in an interactive manner, participating in the construction of anticipated future landscapes through co-creation.
Cloud-Native Nomadic demonstrates the importance of technologies for artists through a large amount of hardcore technological creations, including personalized database construction through python data collection, training and generation of AI chat bots, scene modeling “co-created” by the artist and generative AI tools for 3D models, interactive network environment triggered by social media users, and computational simulation under complex structure co-realized through various API interfaces and player decisions.
With using and combing different technologies, the artist also casts light on how nomads search for a land of survival in the rhizome-like network that extends to all directions under the structure of cloud-native.[2] It pushes people to reflect on our own position in this drastically changing technological environment.
