Cloud Profiles

Inspired by the Pera Museum’s Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection, this project consisted of 3d animations installed in the collection exhibition. In Cloud Profiles: Weightless Measures, a digitized figure, partially engulfed by a cloud, must assume unrecognizable positions to interface with it. The impossible struggle to log a place for oneself in the cloud is a degraded reality that everyday users experience in cloud computing’s laborious, often frustrating interfaces. “Cloud computing,” a colloquial name for loosely networked, web served applications and data storage, connotes an amorphous nonentity floating innocuously in the ether. But to imagine the cloud as frictionless, immediate, or beyond critique is a “clouded” misperception that misses the gravity of these technologies.

About Katherine Behar

Katherine Behar explores issues of gender and labor in contemporary digital culture. Her work has been presented at festivals, galleries, and performance spaces throughout North America and Europe. Her most recent solo exhibition and catalogue, Katherine Behar: E-Waste, premiered at the University of Kentucky and travelled to Boston Cyberarts Gallery. Since 2005, she has collaborated with Marianne M. Kim in the performance art duo Disorientalism, which studies how technologized work, junk culture, and consumerism mediate race and gender. Her publications And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, co-edited with Emmy Mikelson, and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity were both published by punctum books in 2016. She is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, forthcoming in 2016 from University of Minnesota Press. Behar holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, an MA in Media Ecology from New York University, and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is based in New York and is currently Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College.