CLOUD [Clouds(C) Lent(L) Out(O) Use(U) Discipline(D)]
Clouds Lent Out Use Discipline is a collaborative project initiated by Catty Dan Zhang and Carl Lostritto at the beginning of 2024 as a monthly ritual of making digital clouds. A collaboration formed upon shared interest in atmospheric form and a diffuse creative practice, it is conducted through divergent computational processes that explore clouds as objects, elements, architectures, spaces, systems, or constructs.
Everyone knows what a cloud is, but the open-endedness involved in drawing, modeling, and even perceiving clouds is tantalizingly unsettled. Clouds are specifically ambiguous. They are figure and field, outline and volume, mundane and spectacular, form and space, romantic and realist, foreground and background. In that sense, they become elements of architecture. Of course, clouds are not new鈥攅xcept that they are newly deployed as a metaphor for distributed computing鈥攁nd they aren鈥檛 tethered to anything鈥攏ot to a movement, not to an aesthetic, not to a time period, and not the ground.
Throughout the year of 2024, Catty and Carl passed cloud content back and forth each month to produce new clouds. This allowed the clouds to dissipate, transform, and shift. In 2025, the project has been joined by expanded pool of authors who signed up via an open call to participate in the making and exchanging of cloud contents. This project lives and grows on Instagram as #cloudslentoutusediscipline.
List of authors:
Galo Canizares听
Nero He听
Uri Wegman
Dustin Altschul
Andrew Madl
Emily Lavoll
Hollie Sikes
Julie Kress
Mark Stanley
Eashan Claufla
Scott Singeisen听
