Just so you can’t say I didn’t mention the clouds 99 Figure 1: Isabel Löfgren, “Cloud.jpg”, from the series Accumulations, 2005. Photo-collage, 60x80cm. Source: Courtesy of the Author. In the early 2000s, I was a young new media artist, hunting clouds on Google Earth and recontextualizing them with images from the newly launched Google Images search en- gine, using open-source image generation software – a primi- tive form of AI – to form composite photographs of the world as seen through the Internet (Figure 1). Concurrently, I worked at a small Internet 1.0 start-up, had a blog, had profiles on Orkut and Flickr, and participated in various peer-to-peer software communities. Politically, in Brazil we witnessed Lula’s first election in 2002 and were buoyed by the optimism of the early editions of the World Social Forum3 in Porto Alegre, where the possibility of societal participation in the digital transformation of the new millennium was envisioned. The then-Minister of Culture, legendary Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, took digital cultural policies seriously, believing that new modes of digital socializa- tion accessible to all would create a free and democratic Internet (P2P WIKI FOUNDATION, n.d.). 3 The World Social Forum is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, to discuss and create an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization.
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