along the Medieval Silk Road
Hypothesis
The cloud, once a central concept in premodern cosmology, has returned as the governing principle of our technological era. This research investigates the hypothesis that our cloud infrastructure is not a new invention, but the technological return of an ancient, encodable matrix of the world. By bridging the mythical forerunners of the Silk Road with contemporary AI, we uncover a genealogy where code, atmosphere, and cosmos are once again entangled.
The Spiral of History
History is not a linear sequence but a turbulent spiral where past and future fold into one another. As the rigid maps of the Renaissance fail to orient us in the digital age, we search for alternative reference points such as postmodern archaism, electronomadism, digital handicrafts, neomedievalism, and the digital baroque. This inquiry is rooted in my time at the offices of Kengo Kuma and SANAA, where I encountered the notion of a “primitive future” expressed through blurred and ambiguous spaces. At the heart of this movement lies the cloud, functioning simultaneously as a global infrastructure and a sacred symbol.
Thought Beyond Intelligence
As we delegate our cognitive functions to machines, we risk losing the very trait with which we have identified ourselves as Homo sapiens, the human who knows. In response, we must reclaim uniquely human modes of thought to survive the age of AI. Confronted by the speed and opacity of neural networks, we turn back to myths as flexible tools for navigating complexity. We explore concepts such as competence without comprehension, nonconscious cognition, and the art of thinking the unthinkable. Yet these questions are not entirely new. Along the Silk Road, a striking myth invites us to ponder the nature of thought and creativity: the famous contest between the Chinese and Roman painters at the court of Alexander the Great.
Dragon’s Breath
This chapter traces the cloud’s emergence as a cosmological symbol in East Asia. Originating in the dynamic monsoon climate of Neolithic China, the cloud was seen as an auspicious harbinger of abundance, standing in contrast to the obscuring clouds of Western thought. Clouds embodied qi, the vital energy of the cosmos. They are the exhalations of dragons and the vehicles of gods. Watched as celestial prophecies alongside stars, they revealed the hidden rhythms of the universe. Chinese and Japanese painters used these clouds and mist to evoke this invisible yet omnipresent energy, creating open-ended and networked immersive visions.
The Turkish Storm
Asian dragons and clouds traveled on the banners of Turkish and Mongol empires, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, from Khanbaliq (Beijing) to Constantinople. These Chinese clouds would even drift over the French and Italian rivieras when Matrakçı Nasuh, the da Vinci of the Ottomans, depicted the cities he saw from a ship during joint Franco-Turkish military campaigns. We explore the inclusive and cosmopolitan culture of the nomads, not as barbarians but as builders of civilization. Along the Silk Road, a myth arose of Turkish princes as curious patrons of art, collecting the “eyes of the world.” We trace the flowering of this vision in the Turkish Renaissance of Samarkand (Uzbekistan) and Herat (Afghanistan). We compare the spatial compositions of two miniatures with two examples of contemporary architecture, revealing a shared skepticism of rationalist expression and of rigid linear hierarchies.
