The Clouds documentary is one of the most interesting projects I have seen in a long time. Technically speaking it is incredible the way they merged the creative code visuals with the “kinect” rendered film process. I also love that this film is a “choose your own adventure” format and each time you watch it you can have a unique experience. As a creative coder myself, I am totally inspired by the aesthetics and concept behind this film. I was particularly interested in the conversations on Biology, Statistics, Data Visualization, and the Universe. Almost all the people that are highlighted in the film are huge inspirations in my life and work. Some examples: Kevin Slavin is one of my mentors for my thesis, thus it was pretty exciting to see him come across the screen. Martin Wattenburg and Fernarda Viegas, data visualization artists whose work can be seen in MoMA, have also had a huge impact on me. Two of my most favorite Parsons professors, Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Ramsey Nasser, both amazing coders also are highlighted in the film. Jessica Rosenkrantz (one of the co-founders of Nervous System) is also a person who has been incredibly inspirational for me. Her talk on modeling biological systems was very interesting. She suggests that it is impossible and really all we can do is make approximations. I think we have a long way to go before we can create “a universe in our machines”, as suggested during the Universe section, but in the meantime the process has produced some beautiful work that continues to inspire an entire generation of coders.

I think for me one conversation was particularly impactful. Under “Data as narrative” there is a sub-topic “How does your artwork respond to current events?”. For me, given the events that unfolded in Paris last week, this is something we should all be thinkgin about. Vera Glahn discusses Energy Flow a project that reflects a “feel[ing] [that] a lot of the things in this world are in turmoil”. For me this resonates with me now. Both Memo Atkin, a code artists from Istanbul, and Jen Lowe, a NY based coder, discusses the emotional quality that art work should have to bring the audience to respond. This is sometimes difficult when we are talking about code, but that is what separates a great artists from a good artists – that ability to bring out emotion from lines of code.