Mural and Landscape Painting Revisited The Art of Mapping the Digital Technosphere

The elusive dimensionality and ecologically entangled materiality of clouds have always made it hard to map and visually depict them. But while visual artists of the Romantic and Impressionist eras at last managed to relate the ecological entanglement of man-made clouds and their 'natural' counterparts, the 21st century is facing another challenging addition to the almanac of clouds: the cloud of the digital technosphere. In this article, artistic attempts at capturing its dimensional elusiveness and invisible ecological entanglement will be presented which draw both on previous representational strategies and on innovative practices to render visible this quasi-autonomous force of planetary magnitude.