“Tuesday I Became Clouds” is an ongoing art and research project exploring imagination, sky, clouds and weather apps. This visual essay contains a series of drawings created over six occasions in the fall and winter of 2024/2025.
The spontaneous idea of drawing clouds for one minute according to a given prompt became the basis for a repetitive exercise. The exercise was repeated every few weeks. The guiding question for the exercise was how and whether our way of drawing changes as our knowledge of clouds and cloud observation grows. Can drawings be read, categorized, compared and evaluated as visual empirical material?
Text fragments accompanying the drawings trace the position of the project, it’s possible directions, and make the intersections and the space in between tangible.
AB
March 2025
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In this interview, Zahra Mirza (ZM) speaks with artist and academic Adnan Balcinovic (AB), who teaches at the Department of Cross-Disciplinary Strategies in Vienna. Their conversation unfolds around his visual essay “Tuesday I Became Clouds”, using it as a lens to explore ideas of polymathy and artistic agency and whether the polymath takes on novel form in the twenty-first century.
Zahra Mirza (ZM): So, clouds. They’re shapeshifters— leaky, impossible to pin down and yet we obsess over predicting them, naming them, storing them (in servers). What does it mean to think like a cloud and why frame your polymathy or rather your gaze on polymathy through this metaphor? What’s at stake in ‘becoming’ and how does temporality affect this becoming at the intersection of disciplines?
Adnan Balcinovic (AB): To think in shapes and movements. Shapes that may seem unique, but are always in relation to other shapes. They have very soft boundaries and are moving towards, into and through each other.
When I was asked to participate in this issue about polymathy, I wasn’t sure how to position my practice in relation to this idea. I thought of a drawing routine I had started some time ago for a new work of mine called “Tuesday I Became Clouds”, which is about cloud observation through weather apps. The title refers to Anne Carson’s “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” in which she describes how Sky, on its second day of trying to become a writer, struggles with the human need to categorize things. To make it easier for us to grasp the ever-changing shapes, Sky decided to use only 4 shapes.
It’s quite a strenuous activity for Sky, but it convinces Luke Howard that there are actually only 4 types of clouds, within and between which the different forms move and change. He was the first to name the clouds. His system has been adopted and expanded, but still remains the basis for the categorization of clouds.
This drawing exercise is about practicing and developing a view of things by simply drawing the clouds as prompted: often exhausting but sometimes rewarding work. Prompts used are weather categories. You practice trusting your own eyes, but even more your own movements on the paper. It is about deciding to stop and not question, but continue with the exercise. It is also about creating a series of drawings, a sequence of images. Not one! The earliest attempts to record movements and create moving images were not made by artists. They were undertaken by scientists who were interested in depicting processes in image sequences in order to understand them.
ZM: Your essay feels like both research and refusal: of genre, of containment, maybe even of resolution. How do you position it within scholarly discourse, if at all?
AB: Since I started collaborating with colleagues from different fields of knowledge production on the education and development of cross-disciplinary practices, I have been trying to figure out where my own artistic practice sits in this field. Although it feels natural to work in this field, it is actually difficult to answer this question.
But I have experienced that scientists from all fields are amazed and inspired when they engage with the ideas of artistic production. How we use space and the concepts of time and movement within it to produce, but also to collaborate. How communication through material speaks in tongues, yet provokes the creation of knowledge and transmits it in all its ambiguity. So it works. And my own experiment is to work in different modes and see how these “naturally” intersect, blend, and reinforce with my existing visual practice.
The products of artistic research often leave me visually unsatisfied. This is surprising because a lot of artistic research seems to aim for a strong visual language or realisation. I have therefore asked myself whether the amount of knowledge does not overwhelm me and whether what I see is already too fixed. So the essay is about experimenting with how to represent a contextual framework visually and through fragments of text without spelling it out completely. The repetitive drawings after prompts made once a month speak of rethinking one’s idea of filling up a A5 sheet of paper with lines representing something in the sky, while the text fragments offer a wildly subjective cross-section of academic, poetic, and experimental attempts to capture our need for visualization and categorization. Carson quotes John Cage in her lecture: “Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.”
ZM: Do you think visual media allows for a kind of cross disciplinarity that text struggles to achieve? Or does it just shift the legibility problem somewhere else?
AB: Yes, but beautifully written and comprehensible arguments also have their charm. I don’t want to play one off against the other. There are many examples of scientific texts that speak to me. I have borrowed text fragments from some in this visual essay. I can’t say exactly how sometimes, and often I’m not even able to share my understanding of certain literature or scientific texts. But what connects these texts for me are often simple words like imagination, spark, splash, cloud, marvelous, … Perhaps for the sake of clarity, we artists should sometimes not abandon linear argumentation, and more figurative or imaginative language should find its way into academic text.
ZM: There’s this nostalgic idea of the polymath as the master of many domains. Your work feels like it’s pointing to a different model: not mastery, but maybe drift, assemblage, or glitch?
AB: Working with assemblages is a great way to let your eyes and mind drift. We see slightly different things with every observation.
But to the topic of mastery, in my view, the impetus behind academic programs such as Cross-Disciplinary Strategies where I teach in Vienna, lies in a deliberate move away from traditional conceptions of disciplinary mastery. Rather than upholding mastery as an ideal, such programs seek to interrogate and unsettle it. From this standpoint, references to mastery should prompt critical reflection. We must dare to experiment and use unfamiliar languages and materials in order to create space for thought and action.
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Adnan Balcinovic,
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Cross-Disciplinary Strategies,
In his artistic practice, Adnan Balcinovic deals with sequential image production in the context of the moving image. Adnan works mainly with found materials and searches for concepts, structures and patterns. Important terms for his artistic practice are repetition, reproduction and presentation. As an educator and collaborator, he is interested in cross-disciplinary experimental teaching formats.
References:
1. Carson, A. (2019). Lecture on the history of sky writing. Luisiana Literature Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9xUhaimTY | Carson, A. (2024). Wrong Norma. London: Jonathan Cape.
2. Learn the weather icons on iPhone
https://support.apple.com/en-gu/guide/iphone/iph4305794fb/ios
3. Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.
4. SFMOMA. (2016). Tacita Dean on chalkboards, paint, L.A.’s beautiful clouds and her work H265. https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2016.474.A-D/
5. Sturtevant, Dressen, A., Hainley, B., & Hergott, F. (2010). The razzle dazzle of thinking. Zürich: jrp ringier.
6. Ley, W. C. (1894). Cloudland: A study on the structure and characters of clouds. London: Eduard Stanford.
7. Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Towards a philosophy of elemental media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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