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—except that they are newly deployed as a metaphor for distributed computing—and they aren’t tethered to anything—not 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:
- Andrew Madl
- Benjamin Vanmuysen
- Carl Lostritto
- Catty Dan Zhang
- Chelsea Limbird
- Daniel Escobar
- Dustin Altschul
- Eashan Chaufla
- Emily Lavoll
- Evan Saarinen
- Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar
- Galo Canizares
- Heather Ligler
- Hilde Maassen
- Hollie Sikes
- Ian Callender
- Jennifer Akerman
- Jordan Cleek
- Julie Kress
- Kailum Graves
- Laboratory for Material Propositions (Leighton Beaman + Zaneta Hong)
- Mark Stanley
- Michael Frush
- Nero Chenxuan He
- Nina Coulson
- Scott Singeisen
- Sergio Gomes Costa
- Sewon Roy Kim
- Termrak Chaiyawat
- Uri Wegman
- Yinqing Zhu
