KLOUDS BROWSER is a proposal by me, Billy Rennekamp on behalf of the organization KLOUDS (Kids Lying Out Under Daytime Skies). KLOUDS is primarily concerned with the phenomenon of shape recognition in clouds (Aristophanes called it nephelococcygia) as a personal and communal art. Up until now, the organization has focused its endeavors on group cloud watching and documentation of nephelococcygia using instant film. We have compiled the collection of clouds from 2007 into a zine that is freely available while supplies last.

KLOUDS BROWSER is an online collaborative image production and display community, informed by the surveillance of nature in the forms of Hudson Valley sky and a live algorithm--tricked out to mimic the movement of real clouds. Framed by serene rolling green hills, the user is first presented with the ability to capture and archive any shape seen in live clouds via webcam in New York's Hudson Valley. The area was important for the Hudson River School of landscape painting which shared similar reverence for the artistic beauty of nature. Being the home of KLOUDS the organization, we thought it was important to have KLOUDS BROWSER open in the Hudson Valley as well. We do, however, entertain the idea of a future with international cloud cams. The default content on the site's homepage would be entitled "irl" for in real life.

If the time is not ripe for well formed or visible clouds irl, the user is able to navigate to another section, called "cgi" for computer generated imagery, where synthetic clouds are present. These clouds are generated by a program created with Processing. The program will be a modified version of Ira Greenberg's Puff, altered with permission from the artist and still getting worked on. Below is a prelimenary version: