Cloud-Connected Ecosystems: Fog as Medium, Model, and Experience of Wind

This essay takes the perplexing perceptibility of wind and fog through one another as a heuristic to trace a set of material and metaphorical understandings of cloud-connected ecosystems in the San Francisco Bay Area. In an elemental analysis of fog as medium, model, and experience of wind, I explore fog through atmospheric sciences, data centers, embodied encounters, and aesthetic experience. I suggest that Fog Bridge #72494 , a fog sculpture in the Port of San Francisco by environmental artist Fujiko Nakaya, coalesces ecological, technological, and embodied modes of sensing a local ecosystem. As such, Fog Bridge #72494 speaks to a wide range of interventions in environmental scholarship and art practices that complicate notions of embodiment and abstraction, measurement and experience, particular and universal, and planet and globe as dualistic modes of environmental perception.