Thesis Advisor: Amit S. Rai

Thesis: Rendering the Fugitive: On Clouds, Complexities and Confusion

September 2022

Abstract

A relational new-materialistic study on materiality, digitality, knowing and thinking in three acts: Screen (a thing), rendering (a performing) and cloud (a metaphor) acknowledge their active participation in coming-into-being, or world-making. In focusing on new materialism and personal relation to technological devices, this is an attempt in thinking with the characters and speaking from an entangled perspective: the three acts intra-act and inhabit each-other, are of each other. Through the notion of confusion, the cloud will serve as a thought-concept for the fugitive, the gaseous, the elusive cloudiness that incorporates material, economic and racial capitalist complexities and potentialities–eventually aiming towards a non-innocent understanding of cloudiness and confusion. In inhabiting complexity and virtuality, the (confused) cloud as a metaphor 2.0 is an entangled one: a gaseous, vivid, ever-changing, actualizing, queering, multitudinous, relational, intra-active being.

Author: Isabelle Weber