Process — Cloudfulness

The journal

Month by month

What comes next

Taking the cloud to new people and places, and trying the belonging workshop. We’ll add it here as it happens.

October 2026

Article1 October 2026

What the process taught us

Eight lessons from imagining, testing and building Cloudfulness: about invitation, interaction, sensing, materials, atmosphere and leaving room for others.

September 2026

Watercolour bells, wind chimes and flowing musical staves moving through blue and pink storm clouds.

Article24 September 2026

The final score: the sounds of the installation

How the installation score was implemented: drones, pads and bells tied to the day cycle, with enough direct synthesis control to respond to breath and light.

Making16 September 2026

Sprites that arrive with a sound

The strange flashes of the magical twilight now come with their own sound cues, so light and sound strike together.

The cloud glowing lilac and pink in the workshop, brightest along its top.

Making9 September 2026

Highlights

Bright glints where the sun catches the top of the cloud, like the silver lining on a real cumulus.

A new controller, a battery and a larger buck converter laid out on a desk.

Making3 September 2026

Cooler electronics for the beta

A 20 A buck converter and an ESP32 WLED controller, so the cloud no longer needs a fan to stay cool.

Inside the pyramid: LEDs in card tubes on a square mesh, with rolled-mesh struts rising between them, lit blue.

Making2 September 2026

Aiming the light from inside

Short card tubes around each LED, so every pixel lights its own patch of cloud.

August 2026

The rebuilt cloud glowing pink, with its layers of wadding and mesh visible at the edge.

Making26 August 2026

Building the cloud in layers

One layer of fibre showed its lights. The rebuilt cloud has four: a diffuser, thick wadding, mesh and pulled cotton.

Making18 August 2026

Bump mapping the digital twin

Adding bumps to the digital twin, so light sweeps across the cloud according to its shape instead of lighting each flat pyramid plane all at once.

Making18 August 2026

Giving the digital twin bumps

Adding bumps to the digital twin, so light sweeps across the cloud according to its shape instead of lighting each flat pyramid plane all at once.

July 2026

A person lies on white sheets on the floor beneath a large glowing cloud of white fibre, in a dark room with a blue backdrop.

Making30 July 2026

The pilot: lying under a cloud

A body of fibre pinned with bamboo skewers, a pyramid of LED pixels inside, and a corner of the studio turned into a small sky. Over two days, people lay beneath the first full cloud.

Making28 July 2026

Outtakes

Some of what happens when you spend weeks making a cloud.

The complete electronics setup for the pilot: Cityork battery, DollaTek buck converter and QuinLED Dig-Quad controller laid out on the bench.

Making28 July 2026

The electronics of the pilot

Battery, buck converter and QuinLED controller: powering the lights, running hot, and fixing it with a fan.

Zéphir stands under the hanging white mesh shell, stuffed with cotton and pinned with skewers, wearing it like a giant cloud hat.

Making25 July 2026

Cloud couture

Having some fun with the mesh shell once it was stuffed with cotton.

Shaping the white hexagonal mesh of the outer layer by hand.

Making24 July 2026

Making the outer (pilot) layer

Hexagonal mesh over the pyramid, to hold the fibre away from the lights.

Making23 July 2026

Masking and spraying the pyramid

Every LED and connector masked, the whole pyramid sprayed white in the garden, and hung up to air out overnight.

Looking up inside the mesh-wrapped pyramid, with strings of LED pixels zip-tied in rows along each face.

Making22 July 2026

A pyramid of light

The printed parts became joints for a wooden frame. We wrapped it in the same green mesh as our very first cloud and covered it in LED pixels.

A tall ladder beneath the lighting rig in the black-box theatre at ENS.

Making22 July 2026

Scouting ENS for a venue

We explored a theatre and large room at ENS as possible venues, and learned how the height and reflective rigging could shape the installation.

The 3D-printed joints for the pyramid frame.

Making17 July 2026

Printing a skeleton for a cloud

A cloud that has to hang, hold lights and survive being moved between venues needs a skeleton. We started printing one, and the printer did not survive the first attempt unscathed.

Inside the spheroid cloud, with its mapped LEDs.

Making10 July 2026

A bigger cloud to map

A larger cloud with LEDs mapped inside it: dawn, moonlight and the first real lightning.

Making8 July 2026

The story of a night

The experience takes the shape of a compressed night — dusk, storm, moonlight, shared breath, sunrise, tea — and a 3D simulation lets us walk through it before building it.

Zéphir presenting in a wood-panelled room at the Académie du Climat, beside a slide mapping belonging to design choices.

Article2 July 2026

A research notebook at “Quand le ciel recule”

First public sharing of the work in progress, at an art–science day on atmosphere at the Académie du Climat in Paris.

A mountain path rising through clouds towards a vast anvil-shaped cloud, with fine golden circles crossing the sky.

Concept formationJuly 2026

Improvising to a cloud script

Acting out a cloud-related script with Joshua Nijiati Alimujiang and discovering what improvisation could add to it.

June 2026

Making30 June 2026

Lighting up our first prototype

Three lighting tests with our cotton prototype: external flashes, an LED matrix inside it, and the first mapped day cycle.

Conversation26 June 2026

A conversation with Amos Blanton

Rough notes from an informal remote meeting: exhalations that form a cloud, the Diamond Sutra, Olafur Eliasson — and designing for an adjacent possible that people can lean into.

A tulle cloud hanging from a ceiling grid, lit in pale blue and green by a projector below.

Making24 June 2026

Breath as sound, and the sun below

Breaths become sound objects that play the cloud like an instrument — and a projector on the floor turns us into the sun.

The Cloud Bottom LEDs interface: a simulated LED cloud with four breathing points, a colour histogram, breathing waveforms, a tint timeline across the day, and panels of pattern, breathing and hardware controls.

Making23 June 2026

Designing patterns for the LED matrix

A small tool for designing light patterns for the LED matrix and seeing them on screen and on the real LEDs at the same time.

Making22 June 2026

Exploring an LED matrix

Trying out an LED matrix behind different diffuser materials, to see whether a grid of lights could make a cloud feel like it is moving.

A pencil sketch of a vest seen from the front and back, with a breathing sensor band drawn in magenta around the waist.

Making12 June 2026

A belt that listens to breathing

Building a wearable breath sensor from a stretch band and a tiny microcontroller — and testing which band width actually hears a breath.

A hand reaching towards a circular copper-wire web strung with glowing white LEDs, against a dark background.

Article11 June 2026

Sensitive webs: two days of sensitive machines

At a two-day Sensitive Machines hackathon with the Institute for Future Technologies, we built two webs you play with your hands: one that answers with sound and spoken prompts, and one that answers with ripples of light.

Concept formation10 June 2026

Belonging, not control

There is a difference between having control and playing a role. What if, for a while, participants could enter the logic of a cloud?

May 2026

Concept formation28 May 2026

February 2026

A sketch of a dim room with people lying on large beanbags under soft coloured ceiling panels, abstract glowing lamps and a microphone in the foreground.

Concept formation10 February 2026

A Space For You: the first proposal

Before there was a cloud, there was a room to pause: a research-creation proposal asking whether art and technology can open a door to contemplative practice.