The titular cloud painters are a class of workers\u2014artists\u2014in a society that has resorted to living under a dome to protect themselves from the Earth\u2019s unliveable atmosphere. Visitors to the gallery enter the cloud painters\u2019 world through a custom-designed cube whose interior is set up exactly like an office cubicle, with a rear-projected looping image of a cityscape, similar to Toronto\u2019s, filling the (fake) windows. The cramped space will feel familiar to the arts administrators who staff artist-run centres and are accustomed to second-hand office supplies\u2014the cheap desk, uncomfortable furniture, file folders, corkboard, and out-of-date telephone produce a true arts-office simulacrum, as many of the exhibition pieces have been either sourced from the Artist Material Fund (an organization that recycles exhibition and office materials from galleries and museums) or were found or recycled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Andreas-Buchwaldt-&-Joshua-Vettivelu-Cloud-Painter\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_CR_Wilkinson_CloudPainter_vueexpo_012.jpg\")
Cloud Painter<\/em>, exhibition view,
Trinity Square Video, Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Darren Rigo, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
We learn about the plight of the cloud painters through a CP24-style news report that fills in details of past and present through news clips, weather reports, and upbeat morning-television hosts. The edges of the protective bubble are, predictably, where life is more difficult, air quality is worse, and the weather and atmospheric privileges afforded the wealthy are virtually nonexistent. Still, this is where many of the cloud painters and other labourers are forced to live. We learn that clouds are \u201cpainted\u201d (digitally rendered) on the ceiling of the bubble to provide a pleasing, calming effect, so that the wonder of looking skyward can still be experienced by those at its centre. The rationale seems clear: watching clouds is enjoyable. A world without atmosphere would be depressing. Visualizing fake clouds on the interior surface of a techno-bubble is, oddly, the most relatable, and disturbing, aspect of this project. In a future in which actual clouds are toxic and humans are perpetually inside, never able to experience the wonder of connection to the universe at large, of course mediated images of nature would be highly valued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many artists engage with science fiction to convey and critique the realities of the present. Part of what the genre does so well is offer a displacement of time: current anxieties shift into scenes of future fantasy so that the present can be viewed with some distance. Buchwaldt and Vettivelu tread in this arena, but without the distance: their reality is crisp. The integration of rear-projection imagery is seamless: you truly feel absorbed by the futuristic red and orange clouds as they dissolve and form again in this windowless and otherwise ordinary office. The simulated immersion is detailed right down to the geo-coordinates of the gallery, as the location approximates the view one would have if Trinity Square Video were actually atop a forty-storey building. The artists smartly deploy this simulacrum effect through analog means, producing a total environment without relying on virtual or augmented reality for the otherworldly effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Andreas-Buchwaldt-&-Joshua-Vettivelu-Cloud-Painter\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_CR_Wilkinson_CloudPainter_vueexpo_020.jpg\")
Cloud Painter<\/em>, exhibition view,
Trinity Square Video, Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Darren Rigo, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
On a small tablet on the desk, the twenty-minute newsreel-style video makes this world even more real, too much so. The video was created using text-to-video AI, and all the \u201cactors\u201d in the news clips appear human but are artificial. Their unreal\/too-real, plain but stilted speech conveys the news of the day, and the deep-fake-style language is not immediately apparent. It\u2019s a perfectly timed conceit to have AI \u201cactors\u201d discuss the redundancy of the cloud painters due to the automation of their jobs, just as current discussions around how AI could replace artists seems to have reached fever pitch this season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A recent New York Times<\/em> article by famed linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky, along with linguistics professor Ian Roberts and AI director Jeffrey Watumull, rehearses such anxieties, passionately and convincingly articulating how machine learning cannot approximate the complexity of human language. It\u2019s a wonderfully humanist plea, but it misses the mark slightly\u2009. It\u2019s not so much a general fear of AI replacing humans in the making of great works of art or literature, or even in adequate communication or grammar\u2009; rather, it\u2019s that AI will further legitimize corporate culture and exacerbate wealth and class divisions. Like the internet, search engines, and social media before it, AI will be used by the global corporate class to generate further profit, rather than, for example, for its radical potential in democratizing education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To me, this corporate reality is more alarming than the fear-based assertions about AI\u2019s still-unknown capabilities\u2009; AI is a tool, after all. But it\u2019s a short step from being fired over Zoom to being terminated by an AI chat-bot. The eerie tone of corporate-speak used by the AI reporters throughout the Cloud Painter<\/em> video mimics the language of finality in which all HR departments indulge. It\u2019s a precise, chilling comment on how little value, or compassion, is given to workers\u2014a critique that easily extends to artists and art workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cities are already structured around financial flows that produce real, visible divisions of access and wealth. In the future, this will only be exacerbated, as air, earth, and water are increasingly divided, commodified, and sold back to us. In a lecture from 2002, the nearish-past of our continuing post-9\/11 present, author Salman Rushdie said this about power: \u201cAt the frontier, our liberty is stripped away\u2014we hope temporarily\u2014and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are.\u201d We\u2019re on the precipice of defining radically new relationships with technology, in which centre-periphery interactions will be structured digitally rather than geographically, and those at the edge will be under incredible, likely quite violent scrutiny\u2009. In Cloud Painter<\/em>, Buchwaldt and Vettivelu have articulated just how close our present is to this future reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An editor and writer, Jayne Wilkinson holds an MA in art history and critical theory from the University of British Columbia, and her writing has appeared in Artforum<\/em>, C Magazine<\/em>, e-flux<\/em>, Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, Momus<\/em>, and other magazines and journals.<\/p>\n![\"Andreas-Buchwaldt-&-Joshua-Vettivelu-Cloud-Painter\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_CR_Wilkinson_CloudPainter_vueexpo_002_lr.jpg\")
Cloud Painter<\/em>, exhibition view,
Trinity Square Video, Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Darren Rigo, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n