clouds & the cloud — ecology & machine learning — forecasting & sorcery
A disembodied voice easily becomes the word of the oracle, reverberating in the mountains or flickering across a glowing screen. Inscribed on stone tablets or inked onto the thin, bleached skins of pulverized trees (though these days, who prints anything anymore, anyways?), the words of the oracle hover between wisdom and gibberish. In reality and in metaphor, we look to the sky for the source of this throatless voice, but all we see against the blue are clouds… growing, drifting, maybe raining or snowing or hailing, scudding along magnificently—but silently.
We are, and rightly so, skeptical of the grandiose yet vague nature of oracular pronouncements. We have follow-up questions and points of clarification and politely ask for laymen’s terms instead of lingo and simile. But the voice always seems to grow quiet when pressed for specifics, and in this vacuum we become unsure of our doubt.
Because, there is at least a kind of magic here. We feel a little sheepish admitting it, but know we are hypocrites if we don’t give it some due. We use this magic every day. Scores and scores of times, each and every livelong day. We burn dead dinosaurs to make it run, which is about as ritualistically wacky as you can get, and argue that oxymoronic clean nuclear energy is a reasoned solution to keeping our lusting oracles in power. At the computers’ behest, we take water from the rivers and pump heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, hurting, irreparably, our own planetary dwelling. We forget this is something–a tool–that we (well, corporations) have in fact made, and become defensive over questions about who is serving who. “No!” we object. “This isn’t a new religion. It’s just the weather forecast. It’s a chatbot answering FAQ’s. It’s cyber-warfare, (a sad reality but if the bag guys will, the good guys must…). It’s an AI virtual office assistant helping you complete work tasks with greater efficiency. Or, ok, maybe just downsizing you.”
Instinct knows this isn’t the wisdom of the spider on its web, moon-pulled tides, networks of neurons in each of our very own brains, the blind gravity of dark matter tugging at the weave of space and time, at the architecture of the universe itself. We know, when we stop to think of it, that there is an infinite plurality of ever-fluxing clouds, but not an actual, singular, the cloud.
And yet, the oracle’s presence approaches the elemental as scores and scores of times each day, superstitious or seduced or just seeking that dreaded efficiency, we can’t, we don’t, quite bring ourselves to look away.
Detail of spiderweb monoprint over painted photograph of AI generated illustration of a fantasy data center. 4x5 inches, unique, 2025
“I know the number of the sand, and the measure of the sea; I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voiceless.”
Attributed to the Oracle of Delphi, spoken in an “oracle off” competition with another oracle about whose predictions were more accurate. The Oracle of Delphi won.
A small selection of the photographs, postcards, brochures and souvenirs currently for sale on ebay related to the Greek archaeological site of Delphi, home to the Temple of Apollo and of the famous Oracle of Delphi.