Episode 1 of The People’s Cloud presents the origins of the so-called accidental megastructure of the Internet through the voice and memory of two veteran engineers of the industry who think back to the moment the first transatlantic Internet connection was made, and the early days of personal computing where floppy disks were shared between friends in a garage. Visit thepeoplescloud.org for more information. Directed by Matt Parker Camera by Sebastien Dehesdin Additional Camera by Michael James Lewis Sound Design and Animation by Matt Parker Dubbing Mix by Chris Amblin What is the Cloud vs What Existed Before? is the first chapter in a six-part series containing interviews, abstractions, recordings and narratives composed in a bid to ask questions around the complexity of media infrastructure. The people interviewed have all kindly volunteered their time to meet and talk with us for many hours. The sites we visited include subsea network nodes, data centres, bitcoin facilities and super computers. This first episode follows two industry veterans as they trace their histories of the Cloud. As is the case with all of the chapters in this series, the audio and video material is almost entirely captured from the field recording trips. All musical composition or animated abstraction is a result of working with these original source materials in an attempt to rematerialize the internet through audiovisual means. We take the sound of the species as seriously as the visual spectacle and we ask that viewers do the same by listening with good speakers or headphones. The People’s Cloud is an artist documentary series that gets to the bottom of the Internet; investigating the ecology and impact of cloud computing on the lives of those who use it, the places it is physically located in and the people who work to maintain it.