CLOUDS is an interactive documentary about code and creativity for virtual reality, macOS and Windows. It was the first volumetric film, captured using the initial Depthkit prototype.
Buy the documentary on a collectable USB drive.
A generation of artists and hackers have emerged on the internet using open source technologies for experiments in art and design. CLOUDS is a portrait of this community of digital pioneers, explored through the lens of code. The project asks questions about the future of creativity at a time when algorithms play an important role in shaping culture.
CLOUDS premiered at Sundance 2014 as one of three titles on Oculus VR (before the company was acquired by Facebook). The documentary went on to show worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (pictured above), Barbican in London, Yebisu Photographic Arts Museum in Japan, and numerous festival including Tribeca Film Festival and International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.
At the MoMA, Co-Directors Jonathan Minard and James George guided the theater audience through a live, curated tour of CLOUDS. The screening was part of the Slithering Screens exhibition, curated by Rajendra Roy (MoMA Film) and Shari Frilot (Sundance New Frontier).
The entire hour-long CLOUDS Director’s tour from Eyeo Festival 2014 is available to watch online below.
CLOUDS features over 40 artists, technologists, and curators who contributed to open source initiatives Processing and openFrameworks. They were captured volumetrically using the first prototype of Depthkit, which was developed in tandem with the documentary production. The volumetric format allowed the artists to exist in the same virtual world as their code-based creations.
Along with the interviews, the artists contributed original code-base interactive artworks that execute right within the CLOUDS interactive application. Original works of generative art are woven into the experience in a virtual exhibition.
The interviews in CLOUDS have been edited, tagged and inserted into a semantic database. Seeded with a question from the viewer, the StoryEngine software traverses the network of ideas to generate a novel sequence of clips based on the viewer’s curiosity.
CLOUDS won the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Transmedia, and was also an PRIX ARS Honorary Mention.
Official Site