A session of lectures and presentations about the current uncontrolled rise of data centres across the globe. Impact on the environment, current project explorations, local examples like Kronstorf, but also in the Netherlands. We'll also discuss current resistance modes against datacenter construction, how to oppose such projects, learn from other experiences, and plan to be effective at scale.
Moderation by: Davide Bevilaqua
Transgressive infrastructuring with the critical infrastructure lab
by Maxigas
The critical infrastructure lab promotes principles for the good governance and proper design of infrastructures. According to these principles, infrastructures that serve the public interest should be *visible*, *contestable*, and *reconfigurable* by their users. As panellists show today, practices such as *infrastructures walks* make data centres visible, a precondition for civil society to mount contestation of hyperscaler data centre developments at various scales. But what about reconfiguration?
Users, excommunicated from the infrastructures that mediate their everyday lives, have little say in how infrastructures are produced, configured, maintained and disposed of. In order to go beyond critique towards new paradigms of computing and networking that centre people and the planet, the Critical Infrastructures Lab cultivates experiments with alternative technological trajectories. From the organic data centre powered by mud batteries to community compute and low-profile, low-energy networking, these ventures into transgressive infrastructuring make tangible the otherwise hidden decisions that govern infrastructures, and demonstrate escape routes.
Cloud Factories
by Papertrail / Livio Liechti
‘Cloud Factories’ is an ongoing research project that investigates the growing entanglement of our professional and social lives with the ‘Cloud’ and the material, environmental and socio-political consequences of this relationship.
The project gives form to the multilayered histories, presents and futures inscribed to the land that has been selected to host the ‘Cloud’. What is destroyed when (supposedly) ‘empty’ territories are transformed into the physical structures enabling our digital culture? What promises do these ‘Cloud Factories‘ hold for local communities? And which regenerative publishing practices can emerge in dialogue with this land?
The starting point for our research is the story of a hyperscale data centre project by Meta: When their plans to built a data centre near Zeewolde (NL) became public in 2022, a coalition of farmers, activists and residents mobilised to stop the project. Soon after, authorities in Talavera de la Reina (ES), located in a drought-affected and economically deprived area, unveiled that Meta is planning build a large data centre on the outskirts of the city. Construction is due to start soon.
Rather than documenting existing manifestations of the ‘Cloud’, the project is situated in a different temporality, specifically the moment before the ‘Cloud’ lands on the ground. On the sites examined by the project, the materiality of the ‘Cloud’ remains hidden – either because it has been successfully resisted or because it has not yet been built.
Papertrail / Livio Liechti is having a poster workshop, Down with the Data Centre!
A Tale of Two Datacenter
by Marloes de Valk
A Tale of Two Datacenters recounts the arrival of two hyperscale data centers in the North of the Netherlands. It is a story of secrecy and political spin in a municipality that became known as rule-shy because of the greed of local entrepreneurs and starstruck aldermen. It's a tale of aggressive national lobbying for multinationals to settle in the Netherlands, without any plans on how to accommodate their energy demands; using the Climate Agreement to try and fix this mistake; hastening the expansion of electricity infrastructure and locking the country on a course of rapidly increasing energy consumption. This story, a reconstruction of a process of ruin, also holds sparks that can ignite resistance, jump-start public debate, and trigger political change.
A tale of Two Datacenters picture credit by Marloes de Valk.
Action on Extraction
by Christopher Csikszentmihalyi
When computers were introduced in the mid to late 20th Century, they were often described as a new, clean form of industry. The (mad) rush to build data centres has put the lie to these utopian visions, as exponentially growing numbers of massive data centres create noise pollution and heat, consume tremendous amounts of energy, and burn through our remaining carbon budget. For local communities, the environmental and health impacts are intolerable. Our international research group in rural New York State is working to understand local impacts, using a combination of techniques that blend art, engineering, and activism. Through it, we are working on novel ways to understand data centres using acoustic monitoring and other forms of surveillance. Through our work with communities, we try to make the process of polluting more expensive, and to prevent global flows of capital from successfully extracting value while externalising harms and avoiding local accountability. In this lecture, we will describe three directions of our work: 1) sensing damage through environmental monitoring, with specific attention to 2) covert unmanned surface drones, and 3) passive acoustic monitoring and new forms of machine listening we call "industrial music."
Christina Gruber's artwork Vaping Vampire and Christopher Csikszentmihalyi's I C (GP)U are on view in "From the Ashes of the Burnout Machines" at Galerie MAERZ.
