The Planetary Clouds of Michelle Lopez

As a seven-year-old, I remember watching the tragic explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger on the school television cart with my classmates in Ontario, Canada. Details of the first American astronauts to die in flight since the start of the space race and the distinct shape of the explosion’s white cloud — with its smoke trails extending outward and downward — were quickly transmitted around the globe through program interruptions, then evening news cycles, then the cultural archive. The Challenger’s cloud trails became visual shorthand for the political West’s collective optimism, transformed into a technological disaster.

From the Apollo 11 moon landing to the 1986 Challenger tragedy, American space missions became part of mass media culture, paraded as the leading edge of national — and global — Western technological achievement. In an address following the explosion, the late President Reagan commemorated the seven astronauts, whom he described as having “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God”¹ — words that serve as a reminder of the context of US Cold War provocation and neocolonial frontierism, within which these technological advancements were achieved. In time, the fallout from the catastrophe derailed space exploration and became emblematic of American hubris, rather than the exceptionalism of postwar humanity.

Memory of smoke clouds associated with a disaster that similarly shifted globalized narratives of a cultural and political “West” underline artist Michelle Lopez’s earlier works. While installing an exhibition in SoHo, she witnessed the 9/11 terror attacks. Her experience of the traumatic aftermath, the overwhelming expressions of horror and loss, being surrounded by dusty and charred debris and the long-smoldering rubble of the towers and nearby building fragments, all deeply impacted Lopez. The image of commercial airliners colliding with Manhattan’s twin towers broadcasted globally once again transformed peace-time technology into a destructive force that collapsed the post-Cold War era into renewed global binaries and cultural reorientations. Lopez’s sculpture series Blue Angels (2011–ongoing) embodies the paradox of the sustained optimism that marked the Jet Age even as the convergence of humanity and technology increasingly came to define global modernity, with the potential for large-scale and instantaneous destruction, as in the case of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The silver aluminium surfaces of Lopez’s Blue Angels face toward the viewer from their supporting walls. Their polished and mirrored skins are battered, so that the observers’ reflections are indiscernible, their bodies appear fragmented. To evoke aircraft, Lopez has sprayed the interior of each sculpture in the branded automotive paint shades of major airlines, such as United’s dark blue or Delta’s red. Their streamlined edges were shaped to resemble airplane wings, but also take on an anthropological demeanor evoking a weariness in the way their crumpled forms lean along the wall. Their scale and appearance are the result of the artist using her entire body to wrestle and manipulate the metal. Altogether, the sculptures appear like the aftermath of a disaster, in which the debris of machines performs the gesture of mourning.

Lopez’s recollections of the debris, clouds, and smoke after 9/11, which she compared to images of tornado touchdowns and their aftermath in rural towns and city streets, re-emerged in the wake of mass protests, such as those carried out at the height of the 2014 Ferguson uprising and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, when images of smoke trails from police tear gas canisters turned her attention towards the cultural and physical properties of clouds.

Lopez began to perceive dust clouds and storms as both sculpture and environment, leading to her series Smoke Clouds (2014–2016) — experimental works that focus on explosive phenomena as indexes of violence, whether political, technological, or ecological, and witnesses to crisis and collapse. To make the series, Lopez incorporated natural, alchemical, and drawing processes. She poured silver nitrate — an invisible liquid, limited in accuracy or predictability of use — onto architectural glass, which she then exposed to ultraviolet light. The evolution of Lopez’s clouds from memory of smoke to atmospheric clouds to the storm clouds of social media, which she approaches as “its own problematic cloud”² in her most recent work, reflects the artist’s practice of “shaping space with radically different materials from our cultural economy,” as she describes it.³

The framework of the planetary, as examined by writers Dipesh Chakrabarty and Jennifer Gabrys, involves a recognition that science and technology are as much components of human fallibility as they are of human mastery. Viewed in this context, Lopez’s work suggests a limit to post-Enlightenment human agency and rationality, and instead illustrates a humanity with sensorial capabilities and vulnerabilities like any other-than-human entity. Reflection, phenomenology, and spatial experiments are employed through her choice and manipulation of material, which can be read as an opening toward planetary thinking through the breakdown of boundaries between individual and collective and human, non-human, and environment. We can’t help but “think differently about being human” as clouds witness, cars desire, and plane wrecks mourn.⁴

In his 2021 book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chakrabarty illustrates an understanding of inseparability and entanglement as imperative for addressing the twinned contemporary crises of societal and ecological erosion:

But today it is a question of feeling safe on a planet where many areas may become uninhabitable — not just for humans but for many other species as well. Protection therefore has to be extended not simply to the citizens of a nation-state but to immigrants, refugees, and aliens whose numbers will most likely swell both within and across nations…. And the politics of human well-being has to be in conversation with the problem of “habitability” of this planet.⁵

Lopez’s Smoke Clouds and the forthcoming Pandemonium represent the threat of the storm cloud, hinting at the current and recurring moments in which humanity’s claims to modernity and safety through reason, free expression, and technology are revealed to be vulnerable to irrationality, provincialism, political violence, and breakdown. Such sociocultural storms might be what Gabrys was referring to when she wrote, in 2018:

The planetary is the difference, distance, and duration with, within, and against which it might be possible to think differently about being human and becoming collective. The planet might even “overwrite the globe” to undo the assumed uniformity of global systems and exchanges.⁶

This interrogation of the exceptionalism of human world-making is apparent in Lopez’s Pandemonium (2025), a multimedia performance and installation, where her use of the storm and cloud expands to reference social media and mass information as failures of knowledge and communication that Lopez focuses on to mirror the storms that threaten democratic institutions, erode empathy, and portend oncoming disaster:

This project is deeply rooted in both the conceptual framework of “technology,” [and] based on an intuition that our screen-based world alienates us. Technology has become weaponized as its own form of violence through planes as a weapon of mass destruction or digital information/social media as a thing that divides.⁷

Pandemonium’s 360-degree format features circular brick patterns which are projected above the audience, echoing the dome structure of the planetarium, where the work is intended to be screened and performed. The artist turns the planetarium’s association with mastery over the vastness of outer space into an immersive experience of helplessness in the midst of earthbound forces. The bricks appear aged, as if part of a founding structure. Cracks and fissures appear, and debris starts to fall into the audience. The ceiling’s center collapses in, revealing an opening through which the cyclone clouds of a powerful storm can be seen. Increasingly, the crumbling ceiling evokes the bodily sensation of vulnerability and imminent danger as the brick structure is slowly blown away, exposing the viewer to the full force of the storm’s violence.

The vulnerability of our technological shelters in the face of the planetary storms of both the climate crisis and human irrationality reflects the doubts expressed by Chakrabarty about humanity’s evolving relationship to the technosphere, and the abundance of information as a form of insulation, rather than illumination:

For good and bad — maybe for good and bad — we inhabit a world that keeps our brains stimulated far more than was possible at any other period in human history, thanks precisely to our technical inventions. And this same flourishing of the period of the “great acceleration” of human economy and numbers has also created our current sense of planetary crises.⁸

Chakrabarty, referencing Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, goes on to propose that Homo sapiens become Homo prudens, to desire being in the world rather than exert dominance over it, and renounce human exceptionalism as separate from the non-human and the environment.⁹ This moves the condition of being human closer to a praxis, as observed by theorist Sylvia Wynter.¹⁰

Seemingly playing with visual cues we experience as human or human-like, Pandemonium includes an apparatus that Lopez and her collaborators engineered with multiple hydraulic legs to move like a body. The robotic mechanism houses speakers that amplify a live performance of violas, part of a compositional soundscape by Joshua Hey and sound design by Eugene Lew. As Lopez’s work creates an affective experience for her viewer through the buildup of a tornado, the central robot appears to have agency to influence and respond to the images overhead, but is based on the motion-captured choreography of a dancer.

Further montages within Pandemonium might be read as toggling between the praxis of becoming Homo sapiens or becoming the more planetary-situated Homo prudens. A second storm in Lopez’s video montage evokes social media and the relentless flow and expansion of information, particularly incendiary and distorted narratives that engender extremism and othering, hinted at in the snippets of headlines Lopez has included. This video footage was filmed at RAIR, a waste-facility-based artist residency in Philadelphia. Lopez included some of her own collection of academic and personal papers alongside ephemera and American flags, all of which were fed into a “tornado-machine” to place the viewer in the midst of a cyclone of data, discards, and cultural texts.

The last scene in Lopez’s projection is a prologue of sorts, featuring a crowd among which individuals are indiscernible from one another, each holding up their illuminated cellphones, evoking the experience and being within of Chakrabarty’s Homo prudens.

Lopez’s immersive work produces an environment for collective rehearsals of these recalibrations of the human. Her catastrophic storms and sentient clouds become technologies for reinscribing the collective, the porous, and the fragmented as planetary human-ness.