One of my new essays is out and is entitled Wet Me: Cupio Dissolvi ad Nubes et Lumina, for the issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac titled Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics published by MIT Press. I also edited the full volume with Paul Thomas and Edward Colless. Thanks, in particular go, to two new members of LEA Team of assistant editors: Candice Bancheri and Ashley Daugherty. It is an interesting set of contributions from authors around the world and follows the event that I organized in June 2014 in Istanbul as part of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference. The full article is available here.

Lanfranco Aceti
Director of Arts Administration
Boston University
Reference this essay: Aceti, Lanfranco. “Wet Me: Cupio Dissolvi ad Nubes et Lumina.” In Leonardo Electronic Almanac 22, no. 1, edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. Cambridge, MA: LEA / MIT Press, 2017.
ISSN: 1071-4391
ISBN: 978-1-906897-62-8

Abstract

The desire of being dissolved—or the desire of transcendence—is the focus of this essay which, by analyzing the concepts of both cloud and contemporary digital media, explores the dramatic tensions of the life and death in the digital archive. The essay questions the corporate and state enforced processes that shape and determine the condition of digital existence, as well as the participation of the individual in these mediated re-presentations of one’s life, which create a fracture between the clouded-human and the grounded-human.
It is this new divide—added to social, economic, geographical and digital fractures—which points directly to contemporary cloud and molecular aesthetics as sources of tension, division, and opportunity. It is in the tension of being and not being produced by the cloud—and its processes of transubstantiation—that lays the possibility of overcoming divides that can no longer be resolved and reconciled. The cloud may offer the opportunity for a post-postmodern re-interpretation of existence that could afford humanity the dream to be and have it both ways by being and not being dissolved, by being disseminated present and archived past, by being dead and alive at the same time.

Keywords

Clouded-human, grounded-human, cloud, molecular, aesthetic, archive