Open call for #cloud exhibition

The #cloud project is: Clouds(C) Lent(L) Out(O) Use(U) Discipline(D). #CloudsLentOutUseDiscipline.

As part of the ongoing #cloud (Clouds Lent Out Use Discipline) project, the Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture at University of Tennessee Knoxville will host an exhibition during October 27–December 2, 2025. We invite you to participate in a monthly cloud-making cycle and have your cloud featured as part of the exhibition.

The #cloud project
Clouds Lent Out Use Discipline is a collaborative project initiated by Catty Dan Zhang and Carl Lostritto at the beginning of 2024 as a monthly ritual of making digital clouds. A collaboration formed upon shared interest in atmospheric form and a diffuse creative practice, it is conducted through divergent computational processes that explore clouds as objects, elements, architectures, spaces, systems, or constructs. Everyone knows what a cloud is, but the open-endedness involved in drawing, modeling, and even perceiving clouds is tantalizingly unsettled. Clouds are specifically ambiguous. They are figure and field, outline and volume, mundane and spectacular, form and space, romantic and realist, foreground and background. In that sense, they become elements of architecture. Of course, clouds are not new—except that they are newly deployed as a metaphor for distributed computing—and they aren’t tethered to anything—not to a movement, not to an aesthetic, not to a time period, and not the ground.

Throughout the year of 2024, Zhang and Lostritto passed cloud contents back and forth each month to produce new clouds. This allowed the clouds to dissipate, transform, and shift. In 2025, the project has been joined by expanded pool of authors who signed up via an open call to participate in the making and exchanging of cloud contents. This project lives and grows on Instagram as #cloudslentoutusediscipline.

How to participate
Sign up via the link. On the 1st of the next month after signing up, you will receive an invitation from the curators via email with details and a source cloud produced by a prior cloud author. The source material shared with you is typically a static or animated 3D digital cloud model (.obj, .fbx, .abc, etc.), which you can use in some ways to make a new cloud. You would commit to submitting a video file by the end of the same calendar month, and provide content that someone else can use to make a subsequent cloud  (for example, if you sign up on June 20th, 2025, you will receive an email invitation with a source cloud on July 1st, and you will make a new cloud by July 31st; and similarly, if you sign up on July 1st, you will receive materials on August 1st and submit your cloud by August 31st). In addition to the exhibition, the video file might be published as part of the #cloud project (format and timeline are yet to be determined), and your source material may be given to others to make another cloud without restrictions. You’d retain all claims to authorship of your cloud, and you’ll commit to give credit to the author of the source material that you use.

There are no restrictions on how your cloud is produced, as long as it is either made digitally or includes a creative digital component in the process of making.

There is no end date for joining the #cloud project, but the cutoff date to sign up for being included in the Ewing Gallery exhibition is July 20, 2025, with the month of August being the last cycle to make your clouds for the show.

The #cloud exhibition is curated and designed by Carl Lostritto and Catty Dan Zhang.

Contact
For questions, please list them in comments on the sign up form, or DM on Instagram: @lostritto, @cattydanzhang.