Lisa Walder

Lisa Walder
© Fotograu / Lisa Walder

Lisa Walder is studying psychology and German literature at the University of Zurich and previously attended the University of Arts in Zurich, completing the propaedeutics focusing on film and photography. She engages in transdisciplinary approaches entangling cultural and social sciences as well as scientific psychological concepts with her artistic practice. Her recent works focus on experiments with images, text and sound speculating about non-human agencies. She is also involved in theatre work through her dramaturgical contributions, most recently at Volksbühne Berlin

Report during the symposium:

Cloudscapes

This talk will be about my research on clouds as an example of attentive rethinking of our surroundings and the resulting essayistic documentary called ‘Cloudscapes’. In this work, the cloud is viewed as a non-human actor in the Anthropocene whose agency has long outstripped the weather situation. ‘Cloudscapes’ explores moments where codes, taxonomies, computers, and machines meet and form intersections with inhumanity, humanization, and appropriation. A ‘cloud-catalogue’ is opened up, which critically examines the gaze that recognizes creatures in clouds; the scientific categorizations of ‘cloud species’ as human appropriation and the phenomenon of ‘manmade clouds’ of all kinds [motor exhaust, industrial smoke, smog, military weapons, artificial cloud seeding and digital clouds]. In ‘cloudscapes’, the cloud is understood as an ephemeral actor trespassing the bio-, eco- and technosphere and in doing so elicits conversations on perceptions of the world.

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