Cloud’s Memoir II is a work of meteorological theater told from the perspective of a “cloud”. It brings together fleeting natural media including clouds, light and shadow, bubbles, and electric currents. The “cloud in the sky” is a forgetful chronicler who carries volcanic ash, industrial exhaust, and fragments of war, yet lets the wind scramble and erase its records. The “digital cloud” is a biased and fanciful chronicler who stores vast quantities of information but often falls prey to hallucinations and cannot distinguish truth from falsehood. Against the contemporary backdrop of climate change, frequent warfare, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the work asks how we remember—and how we forget. The interdisciplinary art collective Black Void (Cai Yixuan and Xiao Yuhan) uses weather-control technology to generate real clouds onstage. They form and billow, are scanned and sliced by lasers, and finally disperse. The theater invites the audience to enter the mist, while performers collect electromagnetic signals live from the venue. With every breath and every shift between warmth and cold, we sense one another’s presence. This is a theater of remembering and forgetting—and you are standing within the mist.
