The organizers had invited PRIVACY to host a workshop at this year’s Computer, Privacy, Data Protection Conference in Brussels May 21-24, 2024. The delegation included Centre Director and Editor in Chief at Privacy Studies Journal (PSJ), Mette Birkedal Bruun, recently published authors of PSJ, Natacha Klein Käfer and Mateusz Jurewicz, and assistant editor of PSJ, Emma Klakk. The conference was packed with panels, workshops, book sessions, art, and networking sessions, involving organizations, scholars, businesses, policy makers, and activists.
We have come back with a lot of food for thought concerning interdisciplinarity, collaborations, and networks of people, technologies, and values in relation to privacy, data, and AI.
Privacy Studies Journal workshop
On the first full day of the conference, Wednesday 22, PRIVACY and PSJ hosted the workshop Artificial Intelligence and Privacy: Causes for Concern? The workshop was introduced with a presentation by Centre Director and Editor in Chief, Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun, of the journal, the centre, and our comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to privacy and the private. At PSJ we consider privacy a broad and multifaceted concept that manifests in, and is contested by, ideas, architecture, laws, technologies, art, norms, social structures, and relations et al., and thus we see efforts across disciplines and sectors as a key to approaching, understanding, and tackling privacy related issues. After Mette’s presentation, assistant professor of history at PRIVACY, Natacha Klein Käfer and Computer Scientist Dr Mateusz Jurewicz presented the principal results from their newly published position paper in PSJ Artificial Intelligence and Privacy: Causes for Concern, as well as some insights into their interdisciplinary collaborations around the paper.
At the workshop Mette presented the heuristic zones which are developed in PRIVACY’s historical research. Mateusz, Natacha, and their co-author Esben Kran have structured their PSJ article according to the heuristic zones.
The participants in the workshop were students, consultants, and officers from policy, law, technology et al. with expertise in areas such as health care, AI, religion, human rights, social affairs, data collection, classification, and protection. We are genuinely excited about the interdisciplinary participation at our workshop, which enabled fruitful and nuanced discussions. Nevertheless, when we bring people from many different backgrounds together in order to understand and learn from each other, it is important that each of us is explicit about terminology, focus, and perspectives. As an example, we discussed at the workshop what human-centred means. Which humans are at the forefront when we take a human-centred approach to privacy and AI? The immediate association of human-centred AI is that it concerns those humans who, as users, objects, and data subjects, are influenced by AI, and whose privacy is threatened or protected. However, human beings also populate the tech-companies, their board rooms, and their investor circles, and human beings run the AI training sessions, the policy fora, and the regulating offices. Each of these human beings comes with a particular baggage of explicit and implicit assumptions as well as cultural, economic, moral, and political norms and values. At PRIVACY and in Privacy Studies Journal, we argue that history can contribute to showing how different cultural outlook, personal intentions, social conditions, and inherited values influence the way in which people act in a given situation. Such actions and their underlying motives colour the development and usage of any given technology in past and present. Accordingly, we argue that human components are indispensable if we want to understand technologies such as AI and the inherent presence and absence of privacy, and that scholars from the humanities and the social sciences need to engage with such connections in order to reach a holistic view of the technologies at hand.
Systems of technology, data, values, and labour
The hot topic at the CPDP conference this year was Artificial Intelligence. CPDP recently rebranded as CPDP.ai. It seems that we can no longer discuss computers, privacy, and data protection without considering AI. We argue, however, that we cannot discuss computers, privacy, data protection, and AI without considering the humans involved in producing, consuming, regulating, promoting, or contesting it.
On the opening night of the conference, Tuesday May 21, director of SHARE Foundation and associate professor at the New Media Department of the University of Novi Sad, Vladan Joler, gave a lecture about territories, interconnections, and resources in the age of AI. In collaboration with professor at the University of Southern California, Kate Crawford, Joler has mapped the systems and networks of producing and consuming AI technologies. Through different visualizations he showed how AI technologies are part of interlaced systems and histories of labour, natural resources, money, and classification of concepts.
Vladan Joler, Associate Professor at the New Media Department of University of Novi Sad gives the opening keynote lecture at CPDP.ai.
Joler’s visualizations are a striking reminder that often when we discuss ethical AI, we talk about biases in the Large Language Models, privacy, as well as data protection for the consumers, and maybe gender-based violence enabled by AI. While these are very important issues to discuss and attend to, they are only the top of the iceberg (or the map) of ethical issues: what about the working conditions of those mining for the cobalt used in our devices from which we use AI? What about the huge energy consumption of the data centres that drive the AI systems? What about the impact of AI on the planet? It is important to ask, how did we get here? What choices were made on the way and by whom? What are the supply chains and the histories behind AI technologies? What people, resources, technologies, labour, languages, and data does the development and use of AI technologies rely on? The historical research can help us answer such questions.
At the CPDP.ai conference, we were reminded once again of the fact that focusing on the human component of privacy and surrounding issues, as we strive to do at PRIVACY, means also to pay heed to responsibilities. If we talk about technologies and laws without talking about the people who produce the technologies, the people who make the laws, the people who market and use the technologies, as well as the people who abide by laws, and those who violate the laws, we are missing parts of the picture. A panel at CPDP.ai discussed gender-based online violence. A main topic in this debate was deep nudes; non-consensual sexual images/videos (primarily) of women and girls produced with AI technologies by adding faces of specific people to pictures and movies of either bodies of sex workers/actors or AI-generated bodies. These kinds of AI technologies do not only raise questions regarding regulations, but also questions concerning the cultural norms of consent, sexuality, and bodies. To tackle problems with deep nude technologies we need to understand the norms, values, beliefs, and practices among, e.g., young boys, who use these technologies. Of no less importance is, however, a focus on those who market such technologies, targeting, for example, young boys.
With our basis in Archaeology, Church History, History of Architecture, History of Ideas, Legal History, Archeology, and Social History and our work in interdisciplinary teams PRIVACY researchers are used to approaching privacy from several perspectives at once. We consider both legislative, religious, social, cultural, material, and architectural aspects. The CPDP.ai conference inspires us to pursue the past-present perspective with even greater vigour. The insights from our historical research into privacy continue to prompt questions about contemporary notions and issues of privacy. At PRIVACY we ask such questions in an ongoing exchange with scholars and practitioners working on privacy today. We do this by inviting scholars and practitioners to seminars and workshops at the centre, by meeting them in fora like CPDP.ai and the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), and by conducting interdisciplinary research with a past-present dimension (e.g. STAY HOME). While historical research helps contemporary privacy professionals to pose questions regarding the assumptions that underlie notions of privacy, current debates on privacy exemplify the historical and cultural situatedness of notions of privacy.
Tiffany Jenkins discusses her upcoming book with the Centre for Privacy Studies at Copenhagen University
Tiffany Jenkins, Edinburgh-based author and Doctor of Sociology, is working on a longue durée investigation into the history of privacy.
The provisional title for Jenkins’ book isStrangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. Impressively, Jenkins begins her enquiry with the Ancient Greeks and traces the history of privacy through the early modern period to the present.
I had an intuitive sense that all the discussions on privacy at the moment were ahistorical.
Two PRIVACY scholars, Anni Haahr Henriksen and Frank Ejby Poulsen, had the chance to sit down with Jenkins and ask her a few questions about her interest in privacy, her experience with tracing the complex concept historically and her impression of the Centre.
Why privacy?
I had an intuitive sense that all the discussions on privacy at the moment were ahistorical. Much of it focuses on the last few decades and on the changes brought with technology, but I thought one piece of technology can’t change human behaviour completely. There must be something else going on.
I wanted to ask whether privacy was natural. Eternal? So, I began an investigation. Where does it come from? What causes it? What threatens it? And how novel is it?
Can a historical awareness of privacy inform contemporary discussions?
A longer view allows us to understand not just where privacy comes from and what brings it about, but what is or is not unique about the contemporary period. It allows a broader and deeper study of the influences at play than you get in the many discussions today.
Luther’s challenge to a monolithic authority germinated the seeds of private life
Tiffany Jenkins and PRIVACY scholars in June 2022
At the Centre for Privacy Studies, we focus on the early modern period as a birthplace of privacy. Do your results align with this hypothesis, and what were your expectations when starting out?
When I started my investigation, I thought privacy might be tied to prosperity and bourgeois society, and to developments in architecture. These are important, but not as important as the idea of conscience, which is the real beginning of privacy.
The dawn of private life has three components: freedom of conscience and religious freedom; what would become known as civil liberties; and the establishment of sexual and domestic mores as private matters. Each does not start out fully formed, nor does one inevitably lead to the other. Nor they do emerge at the same time, or develop in a straight line, at the same rate.
The early modern period was crucial to the birth of privacy
Luther’s challenge to a monolithic authority germinated the seeds of private life. That, over the course of centuries, with many twists and turns, brought about freedom of conscience. Of course, conscience was limited, and it was supposed to stop at religion. But once these ideas were out in the world, it was not possible to contain them.
All that means, that I too reached the conclusion that the early modern period was crucial to the birth of privacy!
Have you identified other cornerstones or patterns of development in the history of privacy?
The most important factor is the relationship between the public and private spheres: most discussions of privacy are shallow and don’t account for that broader determining relationship, which sets the role of authority and where its borders lie. Another key influence is the conception of human beings – what are they capable of and what do they need.
If you understand the relationship between public and private, and the conception of the self at any given period, you can tell what the vision of privacy will be. Essentially, it comes down to ideas about authority – what is it for and the limits to it and the conception of the self.
Conscience […] is the real beginning of privacy
Which would you identify as the major epochs in the history of privacy?
I would say, the seventeenth century: conscience. That was the foundation stone.
The birth of the public and the private sphere is the second – in the eighteenth century. For it is important to understand that for the rise and fall of private life is not a simple story of the progressive growth and decline of a private space free from the reach of authority. One of the most critical influences on the private sphere, on its expansion and definition, is the rise of public life.
The third is the nineteenth century and the liberal arrangement with between the state and the liberal subject.
The divide between public and private which had been established in the Victorian era was eroded
For the twentieth century, progressivism in the early part of the century triggered a shift in the relationship between the state and the individual, which meant authority creeped into the private world.
Then, a key moment that brought us to where we are in today, was in the sixties and seventies which saw the rise of the authentic self and the politicisation of private life encapsulated in the feminist mantra the ‘personal is political’. That changed everything for public and private life: the private self was projected ever outwards, whilst political scrutiny and activities had the private world in sight. Thus, the divide between public and private which had been established in the Victorian era was eroded. And all this this happened before the age of the internet.
That is what we are living with today and that explains a lot of our ambivalence about public and private.
Privacy is not natural, but a historically and culturally specific set of ideas.
What were your biggest insights about privacy and its history?
My biggest insight is that privacy is not natural, but a historically and culturally specific set of ideas. And that technology is not the driver many think it to be.
Sounds a bit boring, doesn’t it?
No, it sounds ground-breaking.
Has the Centre for Privacy Studies, its research, and your discussions with us enlightened you or changed your perceptions?
It was a really informing and invigorating visit for me. And it actually has given me some ideas that will go into the book, and may help also with the conclusion.
Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life will be published by Picador in 2023. Find out more about Tiffany Jenkins’ work here: https://tiffanyjenkinsinfo.com
Yesterday, I had the pleasure to attend the kick-off of PRIVACY BLACK and WHITE, a new research collaboration between In the Same Sea, CopeNLU, and the Centre for Privacy Studies. Our project will tackle the role of privacy practices in the development of slavery and racism in the Caribbean-European colonial nexus (c. 1600-1850).
Under the joint leadership of Gunvor Simonsen, Isabelle Augenstein, and Mette Birkedal Bruun, our team will count with one postdoc from the Saxo Institute representing In the Same Sea, one PhD candidate from the Department of Computer Science, as well as Natacha Klein Käfer and myself, from the Centre for Privacy Studies. In addition to doing research, I will also act as the project’s coordinator.
From left to right: Isabelle Augenstein, Natália da Silva Perez, Gunvor Simonsen, Natacha Klein Käfer, and Mette Birkedal Bruun
From roughly the fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Europeans were responsible for the abduction and enslavement of c. 12,5 million Africans. In that context, property practices, religious beliefs, sexual mores, philosophical ideas of European origin, all helped to shape the racialization of manual labor, resulting in centuries of exploitation of Black people in Caribbean colonies as well as elsewhere in the American continent. Strategies for regulating access to bodies, goods, and ideas are at the core of the colonial exploitation, and these ideas are also crucial for our understanding of privacy. Africans and their descents also resisted appropriation of their bodies, notably through marronage, something that we can study as a strategy to obtain privacy. Can we find traces of these long term, trans-imperial developments in the historical texts we study? This is part of what our team will explore.
My own research within the project will focus on studying European discursive practices in print that undergirded justifications for the reproductive exploitation of African women. I am also interested in discursive representations, across different imperial borders, differentiating between European and African women. Women were crucial for the economic success of colonial enterprises and the enrichment of European imperial powers. I will draw from my experience on the history of women from different linguistic communities. Some of the questions I have been thinking about are: what did people of different religious or philosophical persuasions say about the enslavement of African women and of African children? What differences can I find between discourses present in early periodicals, for example, and religious literature, such as printed sermons and published devotional manuals? How about legal treatises and slave codes?
To tackle research questions stemming from a trans-imperial context, we need to examine a lot of historical documents. This is why we will use a collaborative intelligence approach that combines historical methods with purpose-built NLP tools capable of dealing with the complexity of our historical material. Building on the NLP paradigm of cross-lingual transfer learning, we will develop models that can handle temporal, geographical, and gender variations in cross-lingual contexts. Then we will train our classification models based on these representations.
One battleground of contemporary privacy issues is the world of big data gathered in the so-called digital cloud. This is quite an intangible battleground. The cloud evokes an elusive realm of ever accessible and simultaneously concealed data: a territory of digital data doubles of concrete counterparts that we might touch and smell, but that we cannot harvest for correlations and predictions. The cloud constitutes an all-encompassing realm where data is placeless and liberated from the bodies that generate it.[1] This cloud is a metaphor. It denotes large data sets gathered as digital information on remote servers, in data centers. It shrouds information politics and privacy regulation in the elusive intangibility of metaphoric vapours.
Using the atmospheric, and in particular clouds, to explain data transmission has important precedents in the Western history of art. They can help us to visualize privacy in relation to the ever-mediated world of digital information. For example, we will show how the motif of the Annunciation – the fateful surprise visit of angel Gabriel to Mary to announce her immaculate conception (cf Luke 1.25-38) – evocatively illuminates today’s digital culture that reconciles constant connectivity with (an illusion of) optional privacy. In the Annunciation, the private, the atmospheric and data meet. Figure 1 shows a paradigmatic visual representation: In the privacy of Mary’s chamber a mysterious data transfer permeates her space and her body, communicated by Gabriel and conceptually facilitated by atmospheric props of clouds and rays of light.
Figure 1: Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1645/8. Oil on canvas, 334 x 214.5 cm, The Wallace Collection, London. Public Domain.
In this post we approach, in three tentative steps, some problems of visualization posed by the plurality of issues inherent in privacy.[2]. First, we will delve into the implications of describing privacy as an atmosphere, by referencing philosopher Gernot Böhme’s description of atmospheres. Second, we use the spaces usually depicted in Annunciation paintings to draw attention to the spatial construction of privacy, in terms of thresholds, furniture, objects and atmospheric components. Third, we will reflect on the element of communication and information transfer in relation to the private setting of the Annunciation. Here, the integration of the cloud as symbol and device contributes to the construction of an atmosphere of privacy. Reading the Annunciation paintings with a view to Durham Peters’ understanding of media as atmospheric conjures up the promising beginning of an exchange between otherwise quite distinct historical and contemporary nexuses of privacy and clouds. The goal of this blogpost is to offer the conceptual intermediary of atmosphere as a possible link in our ongoing efforts to reach a useful conceptualization of privacy – in this case, the relationship between the digital cloud and privacy. To our mind, a more accessible visualization is a key remedy for counteracting that elusiveness of privacy which leaves users open to abuse.
Thresholds
“When we talk about privacy in today’s society, it’s your eye that is looking. It’s your eye that is doing the invasion of privacy,” says Trevor Hughes, President and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals that is devoted to digital privacy related education and regulation. This quote is indicative of the visual vocabulary that permeates digital culture. Delving into the visual representation not of invasion of privacy but of the actual concept itself, Koerner explored the profuse use of the padlock as its visual icon online, in a former blog entry.
In line with the accessible and inaccessible realms suggested by the padlock, at the Centre for Privacy Studies we usually approximate the fluid concept of privacy by thinking with a series of heuristic zones or thresholds that can be crossed and upheld in relation to privacy (Figure 2). These heuristic zones are not a theoretical model, but a research tool. They help us to gain common discursive ground in our interdisciplinary approach to a shared set of historical sources. And while these thresholds between the zones at first glance suggest definitive boundaries, they are in fact constantly renegotiated and they shift with moving bodies, activities, political and social circumstances, seasons, and time. Thus, these constantly changing shapes and conditions of the protean[3] concept of privacy resist the visual vocabulary that often accompanies it. In this reflection, we shall pursue a different spatial trope. What happens if we conceptualize privacy as an atmosphere – an affective atmosphere?[4]
Figure 2: Centre for Privacy Studies, Work Method, Heuristic Zones
The notion of atmospheres has become increasingly popular over the past three decades, championed in particular by philosopher Gernot Böhme. The concept is especially interesting in relation to privacy as it describes a subjective, environmental condition: “atmospheres are always something spatial, and atmospheres are always something emotional.”[5] Atmospheres can be consciously “produced”[6] and they can overwhelm: “Atmospheres fill spaces; they emanate from things, constellations of things, and persons. The individual as a recipient can happen upon them, be assailed by them.”[7] Let us then consider privacy as a matter of atmosphere rather than solid materiality. Let us ponder the hazy atmosphere of privacy. And let us ponder invasion of privacy as a matter of gusts that can dissolve or alter this atmosphere at any moment. A shift from a solid material to an aerial register comes with representational challenges akin to the challenges encountered by artists who want to represent the meeting of the secular and the divine – as it is the case in the visualization of the Annunciation.
Private Space and the Annunciation
The Annunciation is a key liturgical feast in the Christian tradition. The representation of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will bear the son of God, which is at the same time a representation of the immaculate conception of Christ, became a popular pictorial motif from the late Middle Ages onwards.[8] This motif gathers several important – and complex – aspects, and offers a possibility to ponder issues such as God’s agency in the world through the Holy Spirit; the very foundation of the mystery of the Incarnation; as well as Mary as a model believer who is absorbed in withdrawn pious reading or prayer when the angel accosts her, and responds to his surprising message with docile humility. The motif also invites pondering from a privacy angle. Firstly, the scene is set in Mary’s chamber and depictions often abound in thresholds, marked by walls, curtains, windows and doorways (ex: Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciation (1485-92), Figure 3), which establish layered zones of privacy. Secondly, the scene depicts an act of communication that disturbs Mary’s private reading or prayer while establishing a different kind of privacy between woman and angel in a vicarious representation of the vital meeting of Mary and God. Thirdly, the motif hints at a third form of private space – that of the virgin’s womb where the incarnation is about to be initiated. Portrayals of the event prioritize these different dimensions and temporalities in different measures.
Figure 3 Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciation (1485-92). Public Domain.
Late medieval Annunciations such as those by Robert Campin (1428), Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1440) and Joos van Cleve (1525) engage intensely with Mary’s chamber, detailing her furniture, as well as the paraphernalia of piety.[9] Dealing with specific artworks, some scholars have associated this interior with female domesticity[10] while others read the furnishing as signifiers of spiritual elements belonging to contemporary devotional literature.[11] As a via media between these two readings we suggest that the key spatial signifier here is not the home, but the chamber. Mary has withdrawn to her closet to pray (cf Matthew 6.6). This may be represented as a physical space, but connotations of interiority loom large.
After the late medieval Italian taste for architectural perspective and the more northern predilection for richly furnished rooms, early modern Annunciations seem to have become more focused on the communicative act. This is the case not least in the Annunciations painted by Philippe de Champaigne (1602-74). Perhaps he painted as many as seventeen different versions of the motif, ten of which still exist.[12] In the article ‘A Private Mystery: Looking at Ph. De Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny’ Bruun has looked at the three Annunciations that have been associated with the Hôtel de Chavigny in Paris, and they will serve us well in this context too (Figures 1, 5, 6).[13] The three paintings all show Mary and Gabriel in an indoor space with enough furnishing to indicate the privacy of Mary’s chamber (respectively a bed, a fireplace and a prie-dieu: reading desk and kneeling cushion in one). They represent the communication between Gabriel and Mary by way of gestures and the communication between heaven and earth by a ray of light emanating from the dove of the Holy Spirit with clouds and angels supporting the celestial message.[14] These three Annunciations reveal a spatial constellation in which Mary’s chamber meets with heaven. Clouds, populated by cherubim and opening up towards rays of divine light, are literally superimposed onto the domestic setting.
Cloud machinery: atmosphere as performative device
While the floor of the room is detailed realistically with varying tile patterns (Figures 1 & 5), instead of a ceiling, the gaze encounters a seemingly infinite upward extension, beyond the domestic realm, into the heavenly. Especially since the quattrocento, the metaphorically vertical movement of saints and angels between the realm of the mortals and of the divine has been conceptualized as facilitated by clouds. In religious theatre productions, particularly in Florence, co-called cloud machinery that developed out of a simple plinth—“a flat pedestal, camouflaged as a cloud”[15]—into a complex, technologically ingenious illusionary system that could be lifted and suspended, thus creating the illusion of flight or ascension from ground to sky. These props were known generally as “cloud” or nughola/nuvola (Italian), nuée (French) or nube (Spanish).[16] The sturdy iron or wood structure and pulley system were hidden by wadding, feathers and painted fabric to create the imitation of a cloud. In art historian Alessandra Buccheri’s words, the props “were used mainly for the representation of the episodes which involved some communication between heaven and earth”.[17] Actors who represented saints, were able to navigate this interface between the worldly and the heavenly—an elusive border of two realms that meet but do not mix—with the help of the cloud machinery: it quite literally lifted them from one realm into the other.
Figure 4: Andrea Mantegna, Tryptich, ca 1463-1464, 86 x 161.5 cm, Uffizi. Public Domain.
The cloud machinery influenced quattrocento painters. The relationship between the cloud as performative device and mediating environment can be seen in Andrea Mantegna’s (1431–1506) triptych of The Ascension of Christ, The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision (1460-1464). Both the Ascension and the Adoration feature cloud machinery (Figure 4), which supports Jesus in the former, and Mary with the Christ child in the latter. The cherub-embellished, mandorla-shaped, blue ascension clouds differ starkly from the meteorological clouds in the distance: these are white, their consistency is less dense, and their sizes and shapes are more irregular than the machinery’s wadding. Philosopher Hubert Damisch draws attention to the close connection between these painted “ascension tools” and religious theatre: “with all the precision of an ethnographer, Mantegna carefully represented the vertical metal rod, the tip of which upheld a star and a foursome of angels in a cloud of wadding”.[18]
It is intriguing that Mantegna depicted the prop rather than a “real” meteorological cloud. The cloud as performative prop—and as symbol—can here be understood as a veil that discloses information in the very act of obscuring it, as it mediates an otherwise impossible exchange of bodies and of information, between earth and heaven. Böhme’s understanding of atmospheres can be extended to the cloud as connective device: “atmosphere is what is in between, what mediates the two sides.”[19] Like the digital cloud metaphor for digital data, the theatrical cloud machinery enables mobility and communication while partly blurring the hardware that enables the exchange. Both mimic the meteorological cloud that is transcendentally mobile, borderless and locationless, that conceals and reveals.[20]
When we link the concept of the digital cloud as a data transfer medium to the theatricality of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we arrive at an intriguing set of figurations of an invisible and inaccessible space. In the Early Modern Annunciation paintings discussed above, the clouds are still imbued with a mediating agency, despite no longer being quite so explicitly performative. By creating an intermediate space, the cloud apparatus in Renaissance theatre and in Champaigne’s paintings pre-empted any enquiries into the how of the ascension or message transmission. These historical precedents help us to situate the metaphorical, pseudo-meteorological digital cloud, which so omnisciently umbrellas remote computing and archiving, in a long tradition of clouds enabling communication between two bordering but ultimately distinct realms. The cloud is thus a connective device, or rather a mediating environment, as its responsive nature defies clearly defined boundaries.[21]
Figure 5: Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1643. Oil on canvas, 215 x 170 cm. Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montrésor. Photograph by Alain Crozemarie (2015). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Atmospheric Medium
Not only does the cloud have a history of representing physically inaccessible regions, but it also has a history of mediating. In media historian John Durham Peters’ words, “the idea that media are message-bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history”.[22] Media scholar Jochen Hörisch also emphasizes that “well into the nineteenth century, when one spoke of media, one typically meant the natural elements such as water and earth, fire and air”.[23] In Durham Peters’ understanding, media “are vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible”.[24] As ‘bodies without surface’[25] clouds are exemplary of spatial entities that have no clear outlines, no beginning and end, making them dynamic media for information transmittal. Rather than as particular messages per se, media can also be understood as data environments that can be tapped into as they invade or permeate our private spaces.
Despite the joyous aspect, Mary’s portrayal in the Annunciation paintings also evokes John Berger’s – possibly a little crude – differentiation between the perception of women and men in paintings. While man conjures agency – “the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others”, he finds that “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.” Although the immaculate conception is miraculous, according to the Gospel of Luke, Mary was at first “greatly troubled” but succumbs and says to Gabriel, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Berger’s stereotyping thus resonates strongly with Mary’s role and depiction. She is in her private chambers, this is where she sleeps behind curtains, this is where she reads and prays, her outer piety presenting her inner sincerity – and yet, put simply: the ceiling opens up, amidst clouds and holy light an unexpected guest penetrates her space and nestles a fetus in her womb. If there is privacy in the relation with God through prayer (as she was engaging in just moments before), this moment is different. The affective atmosphere has completely transformed: The heuristic zones of Mary’s self, her body, and her chamber have all been permeated by an atmospheric shift visualized by the clouds and light that question her self-determination and privacy through the revelation of a message.
Figure 6: Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1639. Oil on wood, 260 x 210 cm. Notre-Dame-du-Port de Clermont-Ferrand. Photograph by Quentineo (2018). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Inscribed in the conception of privacy as an atmosphere is the notion of energy or agency. This agency is a contextual and performative freedom to reveal and to conceal at will, at any given moment. On the one hand, there is the freedom to adjust the contextual parameters in order to withdraw from others’ presence; on the other hand, there is the power inscribed in dynamic, external agents that can affect our ability to do so.
The powerful image of the Annunciation can help us conceptualize the digital cloud and its traversal of many privacy thresholds. Privacy as an ever-shifting affective atmosphere transforms with information flow, activities, spatial and temporal markers. In terms of privacy, the digital cloud can then be understood as a portal into our bodies through health data; into our souls through documentation of intimate conversations, thoughts, and images; into our finances through bank data; into our political mind through Facebook (Cambridge Analytica); into our homes through the internet of things, etc. The digital cloud permeates our private lives quite literally, as do the divine clouds in Champaigne’s annunciation paintings, as they override the affective atmosphere of privacy in Mary’s chamber.
Endnotes
[1] Natalie P. Koerner, “The Digital Cloud and the Great Outdoors,” The Site Magazine 37, no. Future Legacies (2017): 116–22.
[2] Daniel Solove. Understanding Privacy (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008).
[3] Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2.
[4] While some voices emphasis that all atmospheres are affective (Mikkel Bille, “Review: Gernot Böhme, 2017, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. Edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud. London, Routledge,” Ambiances. Environnement Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain, February 20, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/1065.), other focus on the affective aspects in relation to affect theory. For example, in his work on affective atmospheres, Ben Anderson takes a point of departure in Marx’s reconfiguration of the epicurean distinction of air, liquid and earth, and his interest in the affective agency that can be developed with the metaphorical deployment of atmosphere as something that ‘presses’ and ‘envelopes’. The metaphorical potency of the notion of atmosphere rests with its slightly ambiguous, indeed airy, implications when it comes to agency/energy and materiality. See also Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres.,” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77–81.
[5] Gernot Böhme, An Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud (New York: Routledge, 2016).
[8] David M. Robb, “The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”, The Art Bulletin 18.4 (1936) 480–526; see also Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996): Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Gary Waller, A Cultural Study of Mary and the Annunciation: From Luke to the Enlightenment (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).
[9] These works contrast Antonello de Messina’s Virgin Annunciate (1476) which draws the viewer into Mary’s inner life solely by means of her gestures and facial expression.
[10] Annette LeZotte, “Defining Domestic: An Examination of the Characteristics and Function of the Home Setting in Early Netherlandish Paintings”, The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space 6.1 (2009) 5–17 Jeanne Nuechterlein, “The Domesticity of Sacred space in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands”, in S. Hamilton and A. Spicer (eds.), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006) 49–79
[11] Reindert Falkenburg, “The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the Merode Triptych”, in M. Ainsworth (ed.), Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current Methodologies (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001) 2–17.
[12] Bernard Dorival, “Les oeuvres de Philippe de Champaigne sur le subjet de l’Annonciation”, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’Art Français (1970; publ. 1972) 45–71 (50).
[13] Mette Birkedal Bruun, “A Private Mystery: Looking at Philippe de Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny” in Quid est sacramentum?: Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700, ed. Walter Melion, Elizabeth Pastan, Lee Palmer Wandel (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 606–55 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004408944_021
[14] Mette Birkedal Bruun, “A Private Mystery: Looking at Philippe de Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny,” n.d., 632.
[15] Alessandra Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 2.
[16] Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre.
[17] Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre, 14.
[18] Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 71.
[19] Gernot Böhme. “The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Spaces).” Apple Books.
[20] Parts of the discussion on the digital cloud and the cloud prop developed out of Natalie P. Koerner, “Towards the Meteorological: The Architecture of Data Centres and the Cloud” (PhD diss., KADK, 2019).
[21] Koerner, “The Digital Cloud and the Great Outdoors.”
[22] John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2.
[23] Jochen Hörisch, Ende Der Vorstellung: Die Poesie Der Medien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 134, 140.
[24] Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, 2.
[25] From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, cited in Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 218, 124, 141, 218, and in John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 256.