What if you could own a cloud? Not a photograph or an artistic representation, but an actual drifting, shape-shifting mass of vapour? BuyCloud, a provocative project by artist and researcher Noa Jansma, turns this question into a reality, exposing the deep-rooted mechanisms of ownership and exploitation.
Exhibited as an interactive video installation that invites visitors to lie on a patch of grass and gaze up at floating clouds, BuyCloud transforms the sky into a marketplace. Each cloud carries a QR code and a price tag, linking to a virtual market where they can be purchased and archived. This digital marketplace mimics the logic of land acquisition, applying it to something so intangible that the absurdity of it forces reflection … will you buy a cloud, or will you challenge the system that allows them to be sold?
Jansma explains that the project harks back to the 15th century when European explorers sought to ‘buy’ land from indigenous peoples who had no concept of land as private property. That same process of turning nature into a commodity now extends from forests and minerals to the very air above us.
Since its launch, BuyCloud has amassed a growing network of over 120 cloud ‘owners’. Currently on display at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the project continues to offer an unsettling but critical reflection on our extractive relationship with nature.
Star names have been sold by gift companies for years, albeit never officially recognised by the scientific community. It could be argued that the selling of clouds offers a greater economic opportunity, as with rising carbon emissions, cumulus clouds are predicted to disappear in the next 100-150 years, making them a more valuable asset.
We love how this project highlights the way climate change and corporate land grabbing are shaping our present, while also warning of a future where even temporary weather conditions are vulnerable to occupy the landscape, or skyscape, of private ownership.
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