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jeftavarwijk at gmail dot com
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In To Caress a Cloud, I construct clouds in the forest and capture them on a decades-old Photo-Sonics 16mm camera, combining the footage with sound and voice to create an immersive cinematic loop. The work unfolds as a meditative, sensuous experience, an invitation to feel rather than resolve the instability of perception, and to experience uncertainty not as a vice but to embrace its beauty.
This project employs 16mm slow motion cinematography and high-speed analog film techniques up to 500fps, allowing clouds and subtle movements to unfold in time and space in ways that are invisible at normal speed.
To Caress a Cloud is an Expanded Cinema piece in development, and grounded in the science of perception with support provided by Utrecht University’s AttentionLab, run by professor Stefan van der Stigchel.
This instability is not only of waves or clouds, but of perception itself. Neuroscience tells us (through Predictive Processing) that what we see, hear, and feel is not a direct mirror of the world, but our brain's best guess. Perception is expectation meeting sensation, shaped by memory, attention, and uncertainty. To perceive a cloud is to surf uncertainty, to live in approximation.
But there is also the human weight of it: to know that everything we love, every face, every touch, every held breath, it will one day disappear. To live in this impermanence, while knowing we never even perceive things as they "truly are," only as shimmering approximations.
The work asks: how do we stay with this fragility? How do we hold what cannot be held?
The clouds, slowed down by the camera and layered onto and next to eachother, stretch into a seamless loop, endless in its dissolves.
Voices echo fragments of Mahler, stretched until they resemble breath, or mourning. Birdsong bends in and out of time. Bells dissolve into rain. The viewer is held in a space where perception never settles, where every edge blurs into another, clarity never quite in reach.
Underlying this work is what I call a Functional Gradient Ontology: nothing is fixed as a thing in itself. Objects, feelings, memories (like clouds and waves) exist only in gradients of relation, function, and attention.
In close dialogue with professor Stefan van der Stigchel and his team of researchers from Utrecht University, the installation grounds its poetic gestures in the science of attention and predictive processing.
This work does not resolve these questions, but invites the spectator to inhabit them. To feel, not define. To notice the instability of perception, the trembling edges of things. To dwell in the moment a cloud forms, dissolves, and becomes a cloud again.
Installation-view, prototype viewing september 2025
What if you could caress a cloud
Wave your hand softly,
though its white, milky skin
Stick your arm deep inside,
finds its organs
The heart of a cloud,
is shrouded in unknowing
The deeper you get
The more you get it
The more it gets you
Inside there,
are no sides
Just this
Inner mist
You miss
You
Nothing amiss
Just this
All there is
Technical development: 16mm slow motion cinematography (high-speed analog film)
The camera itself is a unique amalgamation: a Photo-Sonics Actionmaster 500 (PAM500), originally owned by the nature documentarian Hugo van Lawick, combined with components of a 1PL system used by the US army in Japan, developed for scientific high-speed imaging, including use in weapons-testing contexts. This hybrid system has been reconfigured for handheld, tripod, and steadicam operation, allowing 16mm high-speed filming in outdoor environments such as the forest setting of To Caress A Cloud.
A jerry-rigged video tap, built specifically for this setup, provides basic framing and feedback. While technically crude and still under development, it proved surprisingly reliable in the field, making it possible to work more intuitively (both handheld and on steadicam) with a camera that is otherwise difficult to operate outside controlled conditions.
Light is measured carefully, and digital tests are often used in advance to anticipate exposure and material behavior. This preparation allows for a different mode of working: once the conditions are aligned, the process becomes less about calculation and more about trust: both in the technical capture and in the emergence of the image itself.
Ongoing development focuses on extending this method further within analog film practice. This includes exploration of Super16 slow motion, anamorphic 16mm high-speed cinematography, and experiments with vertical Super16 (2x) formats. The aim is to continue developing 16mm high-speed cinematography as a precise yet open-ended tool for artistic and perceptual investigation.
Created by Jefta Varwijk
Produced by Chris de Krijger, Nienke Huitenga, Jefta Varwijk, There Will Be Film, Studio ZZZap
Cloudmaker by Daniel de Bruin
Camera support by Etkon, Edwin Schouten
Film development and scan by Haghefilm
Nederlands Filmfonds
KFHein fonds
Fentener van Vlissingen fonds
Kees Eijrond Fonds
Gemeente Utrecht Cultuurfonds
Vevam steunfonds