The CSTMS Special Project on the Cloud and the Crowd was awarded funding to launch a Multicampus Research Group by the UC Humanities Network and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The MRG brings together a range of humanistic scholars from throughout the system to examine the ways that innovations in media platforms, data collection, and digital labor are redefining the ways that collectives are imagined and produced. The Group will study the historical and aesthetic entailments of the 21st Century cloud and its reformatted utopian crowds; the implications for artistic creativity and labor implied in these transformations; and the political atmospheres emerging both around and through clouds and crowds.