According to Dictionary.com, a cloud is “a visible collection of particles of water or ice suspended in the air,usually at an elevation above the earth’s surface.” I think clouds are important because without them we would not have rain, and rain is what gives humans the water we need to survive. Also…

HAHA JUST KIDDING. Okay. For real now.

Watching “Clouds” mainly made me think about the form of the piece itself. It’s clearly an attempt at a “new” or “non-traditional” documentary format. It succeeds in some ways — though I suspect that it may be MOST successful with casual viewers who have very little direct knowledge of or experience with the technologies discussed and presented. For this audience (which would have included me 2 years ago), much of the visuals and VR are probably pretty jaw-dropping, and it’s exciting to hear people speak about the possibilities of technologies they work with firsthand.

When you’re more familiar with the tools and methods used to create the film’s visuals (VR, shaders, flocking & noise algorithms, etc.), a little of the magic is lost. At times it felt like I was looking through the openFrameworks “examples” folder while people talked about technology in the background.

At the same time, many of the questions asked of the film’s participants are the salient questions that we are constantly discussing in the MFADT program — and in the larger world of academic digital design and creative technology. Here, though, I felt less engaged for a different reason: I’ve had the opportunity in DT to hear many people (including some of those in the film) speak about these questions firsthand and in far greater depth. Compared to those interactions, the clips in the film felt limited — which may simply demonstrate the constraints of the “documentary” form that new narrative and presentation techniques are still struggling to overcome.

Focusing just on what was said in the film, the strongest impression I came away with was that we really don’t have good answers to many of these fundamental and timely tech questions. When I clicked to the topic “What happens when the singularity arrives?” nobody really had a good answer. The “future of storytelling” sections were even more vague — one guy just said “Words could be algorithmic” and then disappeared from the screen.

This again brings me back to the form of Clouds — it’s a piece that explores the future of interaction and narrative while also trying to BE, in some way, a step toward the future of interaction and narrative.

Some of the things it did here were cool. Searching 3-D space for questions that I could click was a much more rewarding way to explore content than a list of topics in a book or on a web page; and it was better than many linear documentaries that don’t pace or present their content well and easily start to drag. The VR speakers may also be really cool IF watched through an Oculus… that part’s just hard to know. Without VR, they seemed more like traditional “talking heads.”

But Clouds also highlights how far we have to go to create alternative narrative forms that fully outshine traditional models. Without the structure of a traditional documentary, there is less pacing, flow, or building toward emotional engagement or climactic moments. It even becomes harder to make the interviews seem coherent, or to pull their threads together into overarching messages or points. It does feel more like an exploration or a visit to a museum — which may not be a bad thing, but is just different from, rather than an improvement on, traditional documentary forms.

The final thing that Clouds made me keenly aware of was that the very technology questions we are trying to address may actually become harder to discuss the closer we are to them. So many of those interviewed in the film are hugely accomplished technologists that produce incredible work, but when I watch them try to answer the existential questions of their field I realize how hard this is to do, even when you have immense technical expertise. Maybe the ultimately lesson there is that there is still a place for “philosophers” in the digital age — people whose primary job is not to “do” technology, or to create things with it, but to clearly articulate its principles, lessons, cautions and implications. If we assume that technical mastery alone qualifies one to speak with insight about the philosophy of technology, we may wind up disappointed and limited in our intellectual understanding of this hugely important field.