The Bureau of Cloud Management (BCM) is a government agency of the alternate reality that oversees the entry of clouds into its designated monitoring area. It is a simulated environment where we recreate our shared memory of clouds with cloud technology.

Concept & Story

In an era when the "cloud" is interpreted as the core concept of global-scaled network computing systems, it represents advancement - faster speed, broader access, higher efficiency, and greater connection. While the world enjoys the adrenaline brought by technical revolution, feelings of fatigue and languishing are also widely experienced as we try to catch up with technology adaptation and overloaded information.

Are we closer to or further away from being free? Driven by this thought, we trace back to the original cloud - and its characteristics associated with our primitive thinking of and connection with the world.

Perhaps every human being has had a moment of looking up at the clouds - those afternoons of laying on the lawn and simply observing the fluffy, cotton-like clouds slowly floating by, constantly changing shapes. These moments draw the initial picture of the dreams of every one of us. Building upon countless gazes and primitive human imagination across time and space, clouds constitute the broadest interconnection of the world while embodying an ultimate form of unrestricted freedom.

Technical Implementation

The project utilizes various technologies and tools:

Generation & Training

• UMAP and Word2Vec (2021), Arctic / Cohere / Gemini (2023-) for embeddings
• Llava and GPT / Gemini families for text generation & image-to-text conversion
• CLIP Guided Diffusion (2021), Stable Diffusion (2022-), Flux (2024-) for image generation

Interactive Development

• Three.js for web version
• Unreal Engine 5 for Virtual Reality version
• Cinema 4D for scene building

Recent Exhibitions

• We May Be in This Together, Duo Exhibition, :iidrr Gallery, New York, USA (Nov 2023)
• Code:ART, City of Palo Alto, USA (Oct 2023)
• Alpha, :iidrr Gallery, New York, USA (Dec 2022)
• INDEX Biennial of Art and Technology, Braga, Portugal (May 2022)
• Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, NeurIPS 2021

Project Components

Web Portal

The online version of the project is a web-based experience that presents the monitoring interface of BCM. Participants will be given the identity as a BCM worker and get to record and archive the passing-by clouds. It is one of the four online artworks selected in the INDEX 2022 Open Call and part of the INDEX Biennale 2022 in Braga, Portugal.

We processed the collected folklores and local cultural reports about Braga using GPT-J, an open-source text-generating ML model. Keywords with visual reference were extracted as the text prompts to be fed into a tuned CLIP-Guided Diffusion model to generate various 2D cloud shapes. The cloud shape images were later processed by a custom computer vision pipeline and turned into textures for rendering the slowly floating clouds on the website using Three.js.

The portal is accessible at https://CLOUDS.MANAGEMENT/

VR Experience

The VR prototype uses real cloud trajectory data observed in Brooklyn as the path for finding "cloud prompts" in UMAP embeddings of Word2Vec. Generated clouds are converted into 3D assets for the immersive Bureau environment.

Community Engagement

The project maintains an official Instagram account for remote cloud reports from observers worldwide, creating a growing community of cloud observers.