about
Beginning in 2012, The Lost Cloud Project has entailed the creation and distribution of lost cloud posters made to mimic lost pet advertisements. These posters pose a question to the general public concerning Clyde’s whereabouts and provide multiple vehicles for response including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and email. For the past four years, we have periodically dispersed these posters throughout Toronto neighbourhoods and most recently downtown Vancouver. Although it began as a study of proximity, as a result of the public’s response, Clyde’s concept has since evolved and has come to mean a number of different things to different people.
Firstly, Clyde became a study of the contemporary urban dweller. The fact that we have received responses works against the negative portrait painted of city dwellers who refrain from noticing anything that does not involve their own agenda or appears useless. The responses reveal not only that there are individuals who notice our posters but there are those who take the time out of their busy schedules to reply.
Furthermore, by making a public intervention in the form of an advertisement, the lost cloud posters act as a satire of the very form they are meant to imitate. They are actually the opposite of their ordinary counterparts in the way that they advertise the pursuit of something that can never be found. However, even the seemingly useless search seems more meaningful than the many commercial endorsements amongst which they are inserted. Thus they emphasize the emptiness of the majority of such advertisements.
The Lost Cloud Project is also a mediation on the concept of ownership. By naming a particular cumulus cloud, we cast an identity onto something that no person including us can ever materially possess or tie down. However through our pursuit to find Clyde, we realized a new definition of ownership. Viewers who interact with the lost cloud posters can be said to own Clyde. This is because, be it a double take on the streets, a mindless ‘like’ on Instagram or an active response of imagination via email, any interaction makes him theirs.
Lastly, the Lost Cloud Project is not only about ownership, but also about loss. We give loss a face in Clyde and in this way he becomes a metaphor for all things that we lose and never get back in life. However, Clyde also reminds us that while things may drift away, they often reappear in different forms.
Forever chasing clouds,
Julia and Heather