Silvio Vujičić’s device artwork Cloud (2010.)[1] at first provokes entertaining thoughts on how it relates to the artist’s previous and current researches on the traditional painting pigments and materials. The device itself has captivating charm: it projects rhythmically and with a faint smack a white cloud. It is composed of the powdered carbonate mineral (calcite) and the Gofun Shirayuki, a traditional Japanese non-toxic white pigment (contrasting the poisonous lead white that dominated Western painting). After its short life in the air, the particles of the cloud deposit either on a black background with velvety structure (prepared with soot and other black pigments) or on the gallery floor. If compared to the installation Alchemical Polyptich (2009)[2] – where Silvio Vujičić analysed the grammar of natural dyes of one of the milestones of the European painting, Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) – with the Cloud he introduced mineral pigments and meditative black-and-white display.
But, the device artwork Cloud has also its mechanical part that enables the projectio as well as its software component that regulates it. The device – with its preinstalled timing, strength and texture – “paints” another cloud at the black “canvas”. While projected it is shaped like a Cirrocumulus, when settled on the background it transforms to something alike a Stratus. The iconography of clouds has a glorious history in visual arts and in literature: it is enough just to mention El Greco’s or Pussin’s or Constable’s dramatic protagonists of the sky-stage. John Ruskin devoted to the clouds quite renowned series of lectures named The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century; they are often treated as a conceptual metaphor; they uplifted romantic soul as in the lyric poem by William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils); Proust observed frequently “a few loitering clouds” in the In Search of Lost Time, (here quoted from the Swan’s Way); and the references could extend all back to the biblical “the clouds of Heaven” or to Aristophanes comedy The Clouds (Gr. Νεφέλαι) But, the question that transcends the first impressions and thoughts on Silvio Vujičić’s Cloud is the one that concerns invisible aspects of his device artwork: it is similar to the one posed by Lev Manovich in the Software Takes Command (2013): “What happens to the idea of a ‘medium’ after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? […] In short: What is ‘media’ after software?”[3] In that aspect, Silvio Vujičić’s device artwork Cloud appears as metamedium, or to put it less cloudy: “a computer can be used to create new tools for working with the media types it already provides as well as to develop new not-jet-invented media”-[4] The Cloud as metamedium communicates only to the visitors who have time, patience and interest to stop and hang around the device, because the Cloud is not a showy device, even if on the show. Everything comes to him who waits: the projected cloud(s) have to be expected, not with the impatience with which we wait for the water to boil; more with the respect we wait for the old-wise-man to answer some intriguing question. And then, as a substitute to the words, the cloud appears.
Fortunately, no words can compare to the genuine appeal, hank of emotions, thoughts and questions that Silvio Vujičić’s device artwork Cloud stimulates just watching it in silence and solitude, but one more I have to add: Silvio Vujičić’s Cloud anticipates by year the birth of Apple’s iCloud.
[1] Device, Gofun Shirayuki, calcite, black wall, various dimensions. Property of the author. Exhibited: Inner Colors
at Platform3 in München, Germany, 2010; T-HTnagrada@msu.hr at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Zagreb, Croatia, 2011; Translife, International Triennial of New Media Art, in Beijing, China, 2011.
[2] Wooden frame of the polyptich, fluorescent tube, textile, natural dyes, silicon, books, 304,5 x 400 cm. Property
of the author; different private collections. Exhibited: Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia, 2009.
[3] Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command: International texts in critical media aesthetics Volume 5. New York,
London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 4.
[4] Op. cit., pp. 102-103.