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Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, published by MIT Press in August 2015, is a necessary excavation of the material infrastructures that undergird the fantasies of freedom proposed by cloud connectivity. Hu charts the evolution of the user as a synthetic identity, providing useful tools for thinking through the ways in which distributed networks have announced and celebrated the supposed liberty of ubiquitous coverage while reconstituting otherness, social partitioning, and paranoia through the ambient dissemination of control. Drawing widely from artistic explorations of DIY cartographies and clandestine topographies of information exchange from Ant Farm’s Truck Stop Network in the early 1970s to the recent work of Trevor Paglen, the book talks through the ways in which hacktivist subversions of the network may not be as effective as they appear at first, and seeks to address the real impact that data sovereignty may have on the bodies of those it seeks to locate and implicate in extra-judicial techniques of power. We met in the suitably bunker-like confines of London’s Barbican Centre to discuss Hu’s ideas, his personal experience as a network engineer, and the pressing issues faced by artists seeking to explore cloud labor platforms.
