Humanities on the Edge presents John Durham Peters

Humanities on the Edge invites you to join us for the final lecture of the 2015-2016 "Posthuman Futures" series:

Do Clouds Have Meaning? On the Relation Between Media and Nature

John Durham Peters
A. Craig Baird Professor of Communication Studies
University of Iowa

Sheldon Museum of Art
Thursday, March 31, 5:30 pm

Those who advocate an expansive understanding of media often face the objection that the concept loses meaning if applied too broadly. This talk takes seriously the idea that clouds are a medium as a way to test this objection. Often considered to be the most arbitrary and nonhuman thing possible, a careful reading of clouds reveals them to be subtle and complicated as sources of meaning. Although many voices in the western tradition have enforced a ban on reading clouds as meaningful, that ban is in urgent need of being lifted in an era in which the atmosphere is increasingly an object of technical knowledge and manipulation. Probing how clouds mean opens the question whether human beings are the only source of meaning.