Noa Jansma
"Sometimes it feels like everyone in the world has read the manual of life, but I just missed the briefing.” This hypothesis, and the probability that everyone feels this way, excites and frees me to openly explore seemingly fixed infrastructures and rusted power-dynamics. Using multi-media techniques I use design to create methodologies that research our interrelationship to the more-than-human world. This results in projects wherein I nudge conversation about the connection between a.o. food, capitalism, ecological awareness, colonialism, urban-rural-dynamics and the (institutional) infrastructures around these themes.
Buyclouds is a research on the transformation of “natural phenomena” to “exploitable resources”. A process carrying a story that must be told in relation to the past (colonialism), the present (climate change, corporate landgrabbing), and the future (extraterrestrial occupation). As a research-methodology I copied the dominant Western processes, philosophies and theories on how ownership and exploitation are constructed, and I pasted them onto one of the last phenomena remaining outside of these systems; clouds. Something so fluid and beyond our monetised culture, that it questions the validity of existing capitalistic models themselves. I am selling clouds. The research is expressed in an interactive video installation with an attached virtual speculation-market in the form of a web-app and a website. Within the installation people lay down on a piece of grass while looking up at projected clouds with QR-codes and prices attached. Each step of a cloud-acquirement is guided by several new media techniques and justified by a manifesto based upon a default land-property contract. All certificates are archived on the online map cadastre. With rising carbon emissions, cumulus clouds are threatened to disappear in 100-150 years. Catastrophic for the planet but very good for the cloud market, since all markets are based on scarcity and demand… Climate change becomes a paradoxical marketing tool whereby spectators are provoked to reflect upon their own position between climate justice or economical growth. Buycloud has been exhibited in various international exhibitions and has now created a community of over a 120 cloud owners.
