I really appreciated the sense of discovery and the alternative narrative offered in Clouds. It was also fun to see familiar faces from DT, like Patricio Gonzalez and Ramsey Nasser and other superstars we learn about in the program. The medium through which the story is told was inspiring and surprising for a documentary. As I am also interested in alternative forms of storytelling, I’m really glad I encountered this amazing project. Some of the quotes I found particularly interesting are as follows:

Kevin Slavin: “When we make poetry, art, what works is when we’re doing something unexpected. It is meaningful because it’s a thought that has never been thought before. Computers are good at simulating every possible thought that has been thought.” Kevin addresses the topic of computers and creativity. It is intriguing to compare the outputs of computers to thoughts. Are thoughts only reserved for the human (or animal) thinker? Even though computers are much more efficient than humans at tasks involving large amounts of computation, you can’t get a computer to simply output something that is artistic as you can get it to solve a math problem. What is valuable in a creative sense is so difficult to define and constantly changing. Is it possible to get a computer to understand creativity the same way an artist or writer understands it? And if it did, would we be accepting of it?

Satoru Higai: “I love working with things that cannot be controlled.” Satoru’s statement is ambitious and interesting to think about. We are always looking for shortcuts in our work. We assign meaning to things when they are regular and comprehensible, and seek to clean up the chaos. It is refreshing to hear someone who enjoys the unpredictable behavior of life, the mysterious and uncontrollable forces of nature. I think we can get a lot further in the field of creative technology if we learn to embrace and work with the uncontrollable instead of shying away from it.

Kyle Chayka: “Science is fiction. Kilograms don’t exist, numbers don’t exist.”
When coding a digital project, you often think about how to convert real world data into the digital screen. One of the liberating realizations in a creative undertaking is that you are the master of your invention. There is no magic number to make a project behave with the correct physics properties. So many things are variable and you define the components that make the most sense to your creative project as you develop it. Figuring out how to work creatively with technology is also being the god of the universe you create, which is both a problem that you have to figure out and a freedom to expand on the existing technological experiences. The openness of this statement is a reminder to not let predefined notions limit the scope of your creative visions.