Rachel Phillips: Not a Cloud in the Sky

Rachel Phillips' work interrogates the relationship between nature and technology, symbolically intertwined yet physically distinct. Phillips captures photographs of the clouds in the skies above well-hidden, windowless data centers powering cloud computing and AI applications; she applies pearlescent paint, and carefully creates a monoprint from ink sprayed directly onto delicate, discarded spider webs. “By remembering something of what the natural world is, we keep a hold of what our technology isn’t. For whatever power, possibility, and yes, even magic, our digital web might possess, it most certainty is not just a cloud in the sky.” — Rachel Phillips