Abstract
At the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, a post-industrial campfire characterized by cables, screens, speakers, and lights was erected in the middle of the Irish Pavilion. In representing a country that hosts 25% of all available European server space and where data infrastructure is expected, by 2027, to consume a third of the whole country’s electricity, this installation – titled Entanglement – explored the materiality of data and its impact on everyday life. While data are by definition invisible, their production and consumption are dramatically concrete. According to a Greenpeace report on cloud computing, the electricity consumed by cloud computing globally increased from 632 billion kilowatt-hours in 2007 to 1,963 billion kilowatt-hours in 2020. If, as stated by Jason W. Moore, the principal driver of modern environmental change is not anthropogenic but capitalogenic (made by capital), and if we should start using the word ‘Capitalocene,’ rather than ‘Anthropocene,’ to indicate the engine of extractive politics, the spaces where data are stored – the data centers – well express the evolving nature of global capitalism and its destructive character. This paper examines the role of the Cloud in the making of our environments and, more concretely, of data centers – spatial byproducts in which the human body has been replaced by CPU processors and server racks. The study describes the current design of data centers and will suggest future scenarios in which new technologies – see artificial intelligence – can help redefine their impact and their relevance.
Presenters
Stefano CorboAssistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture and The Built Environment / Department of Architecture, Delft Institute of Technology, Netherlands
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Data, Architecture, Post-Human, Space, City
Digital Media
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