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One battleground of contemporary privacy issues is the world of big data gathered in the so-called digital cloud. This is quite an intangible battleground. The cloud evokes an elusive realm of ever accessible and simultaneously concealed data: a territory of digital data doubles of concrete counterparts that we might touch and smell, but that we cannot harvest for correlations and predictions. The cloud constitutes an all-encompassing realm where data is placeless and liberated from the bodies that generate it.[1] This cloud is a metaphor. It denotes large data sets gathered as digital information on remote servers, in data centers. It shrouds information politics and privacy regulation in the elusive intangibility of metaphoric vapours.Using the atmospheric, and in particular clouds, to explain data transmission has important precedents in the Western history of art. They can help us to visualize privacy in relation to the ever-mediated world of digital information. For example, we will show how the motif of the Annunciation – the fateful surprise visit of angel Gabriel to Mary to announce her immaculate conception (cf Luke 1.25-38) – evocatively illuminates today’s digital culture that reconciles constant connectivity with (an illusion of) optional privacy. In the Annunciation, the private, the atmospheric and data meet. Figure 1 shows a paradigmatic visual representation: In the privacy of Mary’s chamber a mysterious data transfer permeates her space and her body, communicated by Gabriel and conceptually facilitated by atmospheric props of clouds and rays of light.[caption id="attachment_1138" align="alignnone" width="325"] Figure 1: Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1645/8. Oil on canvas, 334 x 214.5 cm, The Wallace Collection, London. Public Domain.[/caption]In this post we approach, in three tentative steps, some problems of visualization posed by the plurality of issues inherent in privacy.[2]. First, we will delve into the implications of describing privacy as an atmosphere, by referencing philosopher Gernot Böhme’s description of atmospheres. Second, we use the spaces usually depicted in Annunciation paintings to draw attention to the spatial construction of privacy, in terms of thresholds, furniture, objects and atmospheric components. Third, we will reflect on the element of communication and information transfer in relation to the private setting of the Annunciation. Here, the integration of the cloud as symbol and device contributes to the construction of an atmosphere of privacy. Reading the Annunciation paintings with a view to Durham Peters’ understanding of media as atmospheric conjures up the promising beginning of an exchange between otherwise quite distinct historical and contemporary nexuses of privacy and clouds. The goal of this blogpost is to offer the conceptual intermediary of atmosphere as a possible link in our ongoing efforts to reach a useful conceptualization of privacy – in this case, the relationship between the digital cloud and privacy. To our mind, a more accessible visualization is a key remedy for counteracting that elusiveness of privacy which leaves users open to abuse.&#160;Thresholds“When we talk about privacy in today’s society, it’s your eye that is looking. It’s your eye that is doing the invasion of privacy,” says Trevor Hughes, President and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals that is devoted to digital privacy related education and regulation. This quote is indicative of the visual vocabulary that permeates digital culture. Delving into the visual representation not of invasion of privacy but of the actual concept itself, Koerner explored the profuse use of the padlock as its visual icon online, in a former blog entry.In line with the accessible and inaccessible realms suggested by the padlock, at the Centre for Privacy Studies we usually approximate the fluid concept of privacy by thinking with a series of heuristic zones or thresholds that can be crossed and upheld in relation to privacy (Figure 2). These heuristic zones are not a theoretical model, but a research tool. They help us to gain common discursive ground in our interdisciplinary approach to a shared set of historical sources. And while these thresholds between the zones at first glance suggest definitive boundaries, they are in fact constantly renegotiated and they shift with moving bodies, activities, political and social circumstances, seasons, and time. Thus, these constantly changing shapes and conditions of the protean[3] concept of privacy resist the visual vocabulary that often accompanies it. In this reflection, we shall pursue a different spatial trope. What happens if we conceptualize privacy as an atmosphere – an affective atmosphere?[4][caption id="attachment_1139" align="alignnone" width="500"] Figure 2: Centre for Privacy Studies, Work Method, Heuristic Zones[/caption]The notion of atmospheres has become increasingly popular over the past three decades, championed in particular by philosopher Gernot Böhme. The concept is especially interesting in relation to privacy as it describes a subjective, environmental condition: “atmospheres are always something spatial, and atmospheres are always something emotional.”[5] Atmospheres can be consciously “produced”[6] and they can overwhelm: “Atmospheres fill spaces; they emanate from things, constellations of things, and persons. The individual as a recipient can happen upon them, be assailed by them.”[7] Let us then consider privacy as a matter of atmosphere rather than solid materiality. Let us ponder the hazy atmosphere of privacy. And let us ponder invasion of privacy as a matter of gusts that can dissolve or alter this atmosphere at any moment. A shift from a solid material to an aerial register comes with representational challenges akin to the challenges encountered by artists who want to represent the meeting of the secular and the divine – as it is the case in the visualization of the Annunciation.&#160;Private Space and the AnnunciationThe Annunciation is a key liturgical feast in the Christian tradition. The representation of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will bear the son of God, which is at the same time a representation of the immaculate conception of Christ, became a popular pictorial motif from the late Middle Ages onwards.[8] This motif gathers several important – and complex – aspects, and offers a possibility to ponder issues such as God’s agency in the world through the Holy Spirit; the very foundation of the mystery of the Incarnation; as well as Mary as a model believer who is absorbed in withdrawn pious reading or prayer when the angel accosts her, and responds to his surprising message with docile humility. The motif also invites pondering from a privacy angle. Firstly, the scene is set in Mary’s chamber and depictions often abound in thresholds, marked by walls, curtains, windows and doorways (ex: Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciation (1485-92), Figure 3), which establish layered zones of privacy. Secondly, the scene depicts an act of communication that disturbs Mary’s private reading or prayer while establishing a different kind of privacy between woman and angel in a vicarious representation of the vital meeting of Mary and God. Thirdly, the motif hints at a third form of private space – that of the virgin’s womb where the incarnation is about to be initiated. Portrayals of the event prioritize these different dimensions and temporalities in different measures.[caption id="attachment_1136" align="alignnone" width="500"] Figure 3 Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciation (1485-92). Public Domain.[/caption]Late medieval Annunciations such as those by Robert Campin (1428), Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1440) and Joos van Cleve (1525) engage intensely with Mary’s chamber, detailing her furniture, as well as the paraphernalia of piety.[9] Dealing with specific artworks, some scholars have associated this interior with female domesticity[10] while others read the furnishing as signifiers of spiritual elements belonging to contemporary devotional literature.[11] As a via media between these two readings we suggest that the key spatial signifier here is not the home, but the chamber. Mary has withdrawn to her closet to pray (cf Matthew 6.6). This may be represented as a physical space, but connotations of interiority loom large.After the late medieval Italian taste for architectural perspective and the more northern predilection for richly furnished rooms, early modern Annunciations seem to have become more focused on the communicative act. This is the case not least in the Annunciations painted by Philippe de Champaigne (1602-74). Perhaps he painted as many as seventeen different versions of the motif, ten of which still exist.[12] In the article ‘A Private Mystery: Looking at Ph. De Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny’ Bruun has looked at the three Annunciations that have been associated with the Hôtel de Chavigny in Paris, and they will serve us well in this context too (Figures 1, 5, 6).[13] The three paintings all show Mary and Gabriel in an indoor space with enough furnishing to indicate the privacy of Mary’s chamber (respectively a bed, a fireplace and a prie-dieu: reading desk and kneeling cushion in one). They represent the communication between Gabriel and Mary by way of gestures and the communication between heaven and earth by a ray of light emanating from the dove of the Holy Spirit with clouds and angels supporting the celestial message.[14] These three Annunciations reveal a spatial constellation in which Mary’s chamber meets with heaven. Clouds, populated by cherubim and opening up towards rays of divine light, are literally superimposed onto the domestic setting.&#160;Cloud machinery: atmosphere as performative deviceWhile the floor of the room is detailed realistically with varying tile patterns (Figures 1 &#38; 5), instead of a ceiling, the gaze encounters a seemingly infinite upward extension, beyond the domestic realm, into the heavenly. Especially since the quattrocento, the metaphorically vertical movement of saints and angels between the realm of the mortals and of the divine has been conceptualized as facilitated by clouds. In religious theatre productions, particularly in Florence, co-called cloud machinery that developed out of a simple plinth—“a flat pedestal, camouflaged as a cloud”[15]—into a complex, technologically ingenious illusionary system that could be lifted and suspended, thus creating the illusion of flight or ascension from ground to sky. These props were known generally as “cloud” or nughola/nuvola (Italian), nuée (French) or nube (Spanish).[16] The sturdy iron or wood structure and pulley system were hidden by wadding, feathers and painted fabric to create the imitation of a cloud. In art historian Alessandra Buccheri’s words, the props “were used mainly for the representation of the episodes which involved some communication between heaven and earth”.[17] Actors who represented saints, were able to navigate this interface between the worldly and the heavenly—an elusive border of two realms that meet but do not mix—with the help of the cloud machinery: it quite literally lifted them from one realm into the other.[caption id="attachment_1140" align="alignnone" width="500"] Figure 4: Andrea Mantegna, Tryptich, ca 1463-1464, 86 x 161.5 cm, Uffizi. Public Domain.[/caption]The cloud machinery influenced quattrocento painters. The relationship between the cloud as performative device and mediating environment can be seen in Andrea Mantegna’s (1431–1506) triptych of The Ascension of Christ, The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision (1460-1464). Both the Ascension and the Adoration feature cloud machinery (Figure 4), which supports Jesus in the former, and Mary with the Christ child in the latter. The cherub-embellished, mandorla-shaped, blue ascension clouds differ starkly from the meteorological clouds in the distance: these are white, their consistency is less dense, and their sizes and shapes are more irregular than the machinery’s wadding. Philosopher Hubert Damisch draws attention to the close connection between these painted “ascension tools” and religious theatre: “with all the precision of an ethnographer, Mantegna carefully represented the vertical metal rod, the tip of which upheld a star and a foursome of angels in a cloud of wadding”.[18]It is intriguing that Mantegna depicted the prop rather than a “real” meteorological cloud. The cloud as performative prop—and as symbol—can here be understood as a veil that discloses information in the very act of obscuring it, as it mediates an otherwise impossible exchange of bodies and of information, between earth and heaven. Böhme’s understanding of atmospheres can be extended to the cloud as connective device: “atmosphere is what is in between, what mediates the two sides.”[19] Like the digital cloud metaphor for digital data, the theatrical cloud machinery enables mobility and communication while partly blurring the hardware that enables the exchange. Both mimic the meteorological cloud that is transcendentally mobile, borderless and locationless, that conceals and reveals.[20]When we link the concept of the digital cloud as a data transfer medium to the theatricality of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we arrive at an intriguing set of figurations of an invisible and inaccessible space. In the Early Modern Annunciation paintings discussed above, the clouds are still imbued with a mediating agency, despite no longer being quite so explicitly performative. By creating an intermediate space, the cloud apparatus in Renaissance theatre and in Champaigne’s paintings pre-empted any enquiries into the how of the ascension or message transmission. These historical precedents help us to situate the metaphorical, pseudo-meteorological digital cloud, which so omnisciently umbrellas remote computing and archiving, in a long tradition of clouds enabling communication between two bordering but ultimately distinct realms. The cloud is thus a connective device, or rather a mediating environment, as its responsive nature defies clearly defined boundaries.[21][caption id="attachment_1135" align="alignnone" width="388"] Figure 5: Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1643. Oil on canvas, 215 x 170 cm. Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montrésor. Photograph by Alain Crozemarie (2015). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.[/caption]&#160;Atmospheric MediumNot only does the cloud have a history of representing physically inaccessible regions, but it also has a history of mediating. In media historian John Durham Peters’ words, “the idea that media are message-bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history”.[22] Media scholar Jochen Hörisch also emphasizes that “well into the nineteenth century, when one spoke of media, one typically meant the natural elements such as water and earth, fire and air”.[23] In Durham Peters’ understanding, media “are vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible”.[24] As ‘bodies without surface’[25] clouds are exemplary of spatial entities that have no clear outlines, no beginning and end, making them dynamic media for information transmittal. Rather than as particular messages per se, media can also be understood as data environments that can be tapped into as they invade or permeate our private spaces.Despite the joyous aspect, Mary’s portrayal in the Annunciation paintings also evokes John Berger’s – possibly a little crude – differentiation between the perception of women and men in paintings. While man conjures agency – “the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others”, he finds that “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.” Although the immaculate conception is miraculous, according to the Gospel of Luke, Mary was at first “greatly troubled” but succumbs and says to Gabriel, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Berger’s stereotyping thus resonates strongly with Mary’s role and depiction. She is in her private chambers, this is where she sleeps behind curtains, this is where she reads and prays, her outer piety presenting her inner sincerity – and yet, put simply: the ceiling opens up, amidst clouds and holy light an unexpected guest penetrates her space and nestles a fetus in her womb. If there is privacy in the relation with God through prayer (as she was engaging in just moments before), this moment is different. The affective atmosphere has completely transformed: The heuristic zones of Mary’s self, her body, and her chamber have all been permeated by an atmospheric shift visualized by the clouds and light that question her self-determination and privacy through the revelation of a message.[caption id="attachment_1134" align="alignnone" width="492"] Figure 6: Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1639. Oil on wood, 260 x 210 cm. Notre-Dame-du-Port de Clermont-Ferrand. Photograph by Quentineo (2018). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.[/caption]Inscribed in the conception of privacy as an atmosphere is the notion of energy or agency. This agency is a contextual and performative freedom to reveal and to conceal at will, at any given moment. On the one hand, there is the freedom to adjust the contextual parameters in order to withdraw from others’ presence; on the other hand, there is the power inscribed in dynamic, external agents that can affect our ability to do so.The powerful image of the Annunciation can help us conceptualize the digital cloud and its traversal of many privacy thresholds. Privacy as an ever-shifting affective atmosphere transforms with information flow, activities, spatial and temporal markers. In terms of privacy, the digital cloud can then be understood as a portal into our bodies through health data; into our souls through documentation of intimate conversations, thoughts, and images; into our finances through bank data; into our political mind through Facebook (Cambridge Analytica); into our homes through the internet of things, etc. The digital cloud permeates our private lives quite literally, as do the divine clouds in Champaigne’s annunciation paintings, as they override the affective atmosphere of privacy in Mary’s chamber.&#160;&#160;Endnotes[1] Natalie P. Koerner, “The Digital Cloud and the Great Outdoors,” The Site Magazine 37, no. Future Legacies (2017): 116–22.[2] Daniel Solove. Understanding Privacy (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008).[3] Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2.[4] While some voices emphasis that all atmospheres are affective (Mikkel Bille, “Review: Gernot Böhme, 2017, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. Edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud. London, Routledge,” Ambiances. Environnement Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain, February 20, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/1065.), other focus on the affective aspects in relation to affect theory. For example, in his work on affective atmospheres, Ben Anderson takes a point of departure in Marx’s reconfiguration of the epicurean distinction of air, liquid and earth, and his interest in the affective agency that can be developed with the metaphorical deployment of atmosphere as something that ‘presses’ and ‘envelopes’. The metaphorical potency of the notion of atmosphere rests with its slightly ambiguous, indeed airy, implications when it comes to agency/energy and materiality. See also Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres.,” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77–81.[5] Gernot Böhme, An Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud (New York: Routledge, 2016).[6] Böhme.[7] Böhme.[8] David M. Robb, “The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”, The Art Bulletin 18.4 (1936) 480–526; see also Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996): Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009);  Gary Waller, A Cultural Study of Mary and the Annunciation: From Luke to the Enlightenment (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).[9] These works contrast Antonello de Messina’s Virgin Annunciate (1476) which draws the viewer into Mary’s inner life solely by means of her gestures and facial expression.[10] Annette LeZotte, “Defining Domestic: An Examination of the Characteristics and Function of the Home Setting in Early Netherlandish Paintings”, The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space 6.1 (2009) 5–17 Jeanne Nuechterlein, “The Domesticity of Sacred space in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands”, in S. Hamilton and A. Spicer  (eds.), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006) 49–79[11] Reindert Falkenburg, “The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the Merode Triptych”, in M. Ainsworth (ed.), Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current Methodologies (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001) 2–17.[12] Bernard Dorival, “Les oeuvres de Philippe de Champaigne sur le subjet de l’Annonciation”, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’Art Français (1970; publ. 1972) 45–71 (50).[13] Mette Birkedal Bruun, “A Private Mystery: Looking at Philippe de Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny” in Quid est sacra­mentum?: Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700, ed. Walter Melion, Elizabeth Pastan, Lee Palmer Wandel (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 606–55 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004408944_021[14] Mette Birkedal Bruun, “A Private Mystery: Looking at Philippe de Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny,” n.d., 632.[15] Alessandra Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 2.[16] Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre.[17] Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre, 14.[18] Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 71.[19] Gernot Böhme. “The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Spaces).” Apple Books.[20] Parts of the discussion on the digital cloud and the cloud prop developed out of Natalie P. Koerner, “Towards the Meteorological: The Architecture of Data Centres and the Cloud” (PhD diss., KADK, 2019).[21] Koerner, “The Digital Cloud and the Great Outdoors.”[22] John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2.[23] Jochen Hörisch, Ende Der Vorstellung: Die Poesie Der Medien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 134, 140.[24] Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, 2.[25] From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, cited in Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 218, 124, 141, 218, and in John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 256.