Other Clouds
Aerosoles (Aerosols), 2022. 12 x 17.3 in. Color pencil on laser etched paper. (Images at nanoscopic scale of dust sample collected in San Juan, courtesy of Simge Uzun, Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory, Cornell College of Human Ecology). Courtesy of the artist.
Every year, the same footage of clouds swirling into view. Always from the right side. Hurtling towards the top left corner, pausing, and maybe even rewinding, before charging towards the left and out of view. My local news stations’s hurricane coverage was a precise choreography: anchors at the station sharing updates on the trajectory, news from the then-state-owned water and electric power companies about service interruptions, interviews with people from evacuated towns, interviews with people who refused to evacuate, footage of local politicians chastising those who refuse to evacuate, press conferences with the governor and the department of civil defense (as if hurricanes care that we’ve mobilized the military).
“Under a gray sky full of clouds, families gather outside their homes,” one anchor narrated as Puerto Rico prepared for 1989’s Hugo, adding that hurricanes have a way of turning everything from un-anchored construction supplies to flimsy electrical poles into dangerous projectiles. She added: “Their victims might be those who are still out drinking, dándose el palo, laid back in public places.” Something for the folks at home to shake their heads at.
My local news anchors always introduced the radio images taken from the National Weather Service’s Doppler radar with such enthusiasm, Ialways misremember it as: “el Súper Doppler Max,” a super-sized name with a catchy rhyme that made looking at incoming storm clouds fun and entertaining. The Doppler’s clouds were made up of yellow and orange patches that bloomed in and out of view, more like mold than clouds.
But a variety of maps colored the clouds in a variety of ways: Satellites that produced composite images of white clouds with gray streaks moving over a navy blue sea and forest green islands render a live portrait. Infrared satellite images gave clouds white-hot centers and magenta fringes that spiral out over a dark brown sea. Satellite images show us clouds and water vapor, they’re pictures from up above. Whereas radio images (like the Doppler’s), which are taken from the ground, show precipitation—a measure of the clouds’ footprint.
Silicon Valley insists its cloud has no footprint. But it’s a heavenly body in metaphor only, or as James Bridle writes in New Dark Age, “it is the central metaphor of the internet.” Bridle writes: “The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves… it is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fiber optics satellites, cables on the ocean floor…” In short, the cloud is a metaphor that obscures the material, labor, and environmental realities that sustain the internet and it has quite the heavy footprint.
The earliest use of the term “cloud” in relation to the internet can be found in a 1996 (my birth year) MIT research paper called “The Self-Governing Internet: Coordination by Design, e-Flux re-created the diagram that showed a “cloud” of networks floating between routers connected by the Internet Protocol. But the word “cloud” already existed among engineers as early as the 1950’s. “Whatever this engineer was working on,” Bridle explains, “it could connect to this cloud, and that’s all you needed to know.” Bridle suggests the cloud was born “a puffball,” a relative of the thought bubble. A cloud could be anything: “a power system, or a data exchange, or another network of computers or whatever.” Silicon Valley’s cloud is a neat little icon that conceals and obscures.
Silicon Valley’s Cloud is omnipotent and imperceptible. My iCloud has been too full to function for about two years. Now, my phone offers me to increase my Cloud storage in exchange for a monthly tithe of $0.99. The e-Flux article from earlier notes that the basic premise of Cloud computing guarantees that, “if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn’t matter weather you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you—or new devices still to be developed—you can get access to the Cloud.” Despite the Cloud’s unending promises about freeing us from the material limits of space and time, the literal omniscience of being able to summon information anytime and anywhere, it’s suspiciously eager to remind me there never seems to be enough room for my memories. Like the Old Testament God, Silicon Valley’s Cloud is impetuous and cruel.
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Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra was a Benedictine monk sent to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century, where he worked as a confessor and the first historian to thoroughly document Puerto Rico’s history and customs. (Yes, the best we have is a document of what life on the archipelago was like nearly two-hundred years after the Spanish invasion). He described Puerto Rico’s “not-so-common” storms and hurricanes like the God-fearing man he was, using words like: perjudiciales, funestos, terribles, and phrases like, “fenómeno más horroroso que puede imaginarse” (“the most horrifying phenomenon one can imagine”) and “las circunstancias más terribles y devastadoras que pueden reunirse para destrozar un país en pocas horas” (“the most terrible and devastating circumstances that could possibly come together to destroy a country in just a few hours”). He felt the world was going to end: “últimas convulsiones del universo y agonías de la naturaleza” (“nature’s last agony and the final convulsions of the universe”). Clouds so violent they were apocalyptic.
I first became aware of clouds as something other than animal shapes in the sky through Catholicism. Catholic clouds are aspirational, it’s heaven, and thunder—adults would tell me—was just the sound of God and his angels rearranging their heavy and sumptuous furniture. In the book of Exodus, God guides the Israelites with the help of a pillar of clouds, he protected them and spoke to Moses through clouds. When Jesus was being nailed to the cross, God claimed him through the clouds and when Jesus was resurrected, he rose on a cloud. But my favorite Biblical mention of clouds comes from the book of Revelations, where angels made of fire and rainbows fly around wrapped in clouds—I’m imagining a Pride float.
I’m inclined to think Silicon Valley’s cloud fancies itself a sort of heaven, and not just a regular heaven, a heaven that lets us all play God. It promises a near-heavenly utopia of modern life where we work, bank, socialize, and shop in a great white cloud of glass buildings and spiraling staircases floating along a clear blue sky. A cloud that obscurs a very exclusive paradise, a cloud that might emit a strong light, protective shadow, a stern voice, or a guiding hand whenever it's convenient or necessary to avoid questioning.
Obviously, Taíno natives weren’t as thoroughly surprised by hurricanes as Abbad y Lasierra. The monk wrote that Taínos could predict those “unhappy catastrophes” by observing the winds, the sun, the ground, the clouded sky, and the mist in the air. They could predict an impending storm up to three days in advance. They could taste an incoming storm in their river water and see it in the heavy fog atop the mountains.
There is a lot that we don’t know about our histories. We can’t ever scapegoat The Cloud for obscuring reality and making ourselves and each other harder to know and understand because The Cloud is just doing what it was designed to do. And before The Cloud, there have been centuries of technologies—including historical documents like Abbad y Lasierra’s—that have scrambled our past, especially pre-Columbian history, producing what I jokingly call: Taíno Mythology, the mythology about Taíno mythology, a product of the information-starved ouroboros of the neo-Taíno blogosphere.
The word “hurricane” has its origin in the languages spoken by the Taínos. Hurricanes fall under the domain of Guabancex, the spirit of wind and water, the angry lady-goddess with the S-shaped arms. S-shaped arms that look a lot like the interlocked spirals of the hurricane’s we see swirling across the TV while we watch the news. Interlocked spirals that are documented in La Piedra Escrita de Jayuya, a Ceramic Age stone carved with what we think are Taíno images, that “must have been drawn by people hanging over the top of the rocks,” as one researcher surmised.
Close-up of La Piedra Escrita de Jayuya in Puerto Rico. Photo by Félix López/Flickr.
La Piedra Escrita de Jayuya in Puerto Rico. jailynnettemarie / Wikipedia Commons.
The state-mandated quantization of this site, via the National Register for Historic Places Registration Form, determined the value of the rock’s data. Dr. Michael H. Hayward and his team of New York-based researchers with the Panamerican Consultants, Inc. completed the form in 2000, marking the following two of the four possible choices under the “Applicable National Register Criteria” section under the application’s Statement of Significance:
“[x] Property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values, or represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components lack individual distinction.
[x] Property has yielded or is likely to yield information important in prehistory or history.”
I still haven’t outgrown the twinge of excitement I get when I see my land or my people described with words like “masters” or “high artistic value” or “important,” even if it is always preceded by “property.” These aren’t the ideal terms, I know, but I know they’re compliments in the eyes of those researchers. Until I read through the unmarked options, the ones the researchers didn’t feel applied to La Piedra Escrita, despite having the option to choose “one or more”:
“[ ] Property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past.”
In Puerto Rico, we don’t just have clouds on our rocks. We have rocks in our clouds, too. The Saharan winds follow similar paths to tropical storms to bring to the Caribbean another kind of cloud: Dust Clouds. The term, “las nubes del Sahara,” (the clouds of the Sahara), carries an implication of a displaced sky. As if a forceful breeze undressed the Sahara Desert of all its protective clouds and pushed them all the way into the Caribbean’s sticky air—up to 100 million tons of dust a year. This dust is made up of quartz, calcite, and aluminum. Iron, which is good for marine life. Also nitrogen and phosphorus, which might trigger an overproduction of algae that in turn, damages coral reefs. On exceptional years, satellites can spot the golden-brown dust swoop across the world and the cloud can be so thick and heavy it blurs horizons and coats everything in a dusty film.
Frances Gallardo’s Aerosoles (Aerosols) 2021-22 made me laugh when I saw it hanging on the walls of the Whitney. The series consists of drawings of nanoscopic images of dust particles from the Saharan winds. These aerosoles regularly prompt the Puerto Rican government to issue warnings for asthmatics and the allergy-prone to stay indoors. Whenever talk of Saharan dust took over a room, all eyes fell on me, the girl with the runny nose and the pockets full of soggy tissues. There I was, an allergy-prone, almost pressing my nose into the art trying to make-out the shapes and contours of those dark drawings of images of particles of dust clouds.
Silicon Valley insists on a supremacy of clouds. But the clouds that float through the sky and blow through our lungs—the real clouds—have always challenged singularity. Dust clouds, for example, can weaken tropical storms and even prevent hurricanes from forming. So, one cloud can weaken another. Clouds blow at and through each other, leaving not just footprints, but crawl paths across the earth. No cloud is too high above our heads for us to read through, to feel on our skin and in the air.
Aerosoles (Aerosols), 2021. 12 x 17.3 in. Color pencil on laser etched paper. (Images at nanoscopic scale of dust sample collected in San Juan, courtesy of Simge Uzun, Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory, Cornell College of Human Ecology). Courtesy of the artist.
Aerosoles (Aerosols), 2022. 12 x 17.3 in. Color pencil on laser etched paper. (Images at nanoscopic scale of dust sample collected in San Juan, courtesy of Simge Uzun, Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory, Cornell College of Human Ecology). Courtesy of the artist.
When I got my latest issue of The Puerto Rican Review in the mail, I scanned through the table of contents to see if anything was immediately relevant to what I was currently working on—like this essay—but no such luck. It wasn’t until I started doing research on some of the works in the Whitney show about Puerto Rican post-María art, that I found an image that had been sitting on my coffee table for months: snapshots from Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s Celaje (Cloudscape) (2020). Cloudscape was filmed on a 16mm camera and it stars the artist’s grandmother in her home in Levittown, Toa Baja. I recognized the cloud-white foam that crested on the waves as they rolled towards the camera, the nostalgic blues of the sea and sky. The Review’s editors introduced Cloudscape as a work that considers the precarity of archiving in the Caribbean, how it struggles against the tropical climate and decaying infrastructure. In Cloudscape, the artist doesn’t just record her grandmother’s history, she also exposes the film to the salt, air, and wind that whip around her house. To borrow from an essay she co-wrote with a fellow artist, her dealing with archives is “work that stems from a desire to come to terms with the impermanence of images and the material evidence of history in Puerto Rico.”
In Puerto Rico, clouds are not only observable, they are a presence. Like the internet, clouds in Puerto Rico connect us across space and time. The hurricanes, the storms, the Saharan winds, the clouds swirling in Taíno petroglyphs, and radar imaging local news broadcasters used to tell the weather, clouds—“real” ones that move through and around us—are central to our way of knowing and being. The clouds erode, shape, carry, disseminate, displace, connect, and obscure us. Our clouds don’t offer omniscience or centrality. Our clouds come and go. Cloudscape isn’t anxious about the impossibility of creating a continuous and congruous Puerto Rican archive, it’s striving to let go of that anxiety. Imagine a Puerto Rican cloud archive: nebulous, blurred, evanescent. A way of remembering and documenting that embodies the uncertainty of our condition and is legible only by its keepers.
Michelle Santiago Cortés writes about art and technology. To keep up with her work, find her on Twitter or her website, michellesantiagocortes.com