A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
The prototypes of the “Google Navy” have been discovered on both coasts. But are they floating data centers? Or some kind of marketing facility for Google Glass? This perspective pushes further the question of the legal borders of the physical nature of data. This refers to our research in a sociological way, and makes me think of Sealand’s Datacenter HeavenCo in international waters (even if the scale of the infrastructure is in no way simmilar).
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The Creative Time Report has a piece on cloud infrastructures and the public’s right to understand it. The author interestingly describe her discoveries:
In trying to see where data lives, I hoped to better understand how we live with data and, by extension, with the myriad forms of surveillance that it enables. We live with data by pretending that we don’t. The opacity of internet infrastructure and policy—and the insistence that ideally users shouldn’t need to see or understand either—occludes data, the institutions that hold it and the power they exercise with it. Ultimately, in a geography of power, the cloud is not the territory.
“Data Center Grand Tour” by Silvio Lorusso is a project that aimed at showing the data center where the info flowing into your computer is coming from:
ʻData Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here)ʼ starts here and will be an ongoing project for which Silvio Lorusso will be purchasing domain names and hosting in each country across the globe. For each domain a single web page will be hosted showing a satellite view of the geographical site at which that particular domainʼs data is stored. The tour will start by clicking at a destination, one click will take you to the next domain in a different country where you will again be able to view where that domainʼs data is stored, and so on until all of the countries in the world are covered
Certainly another key conceptual element of cloud computing. At least on the infrastructural side. A highly secured (yet paranoid) approach of hardware and software.
As we were speculating in our I&IC – Preliminary intentions about a very versatile/mobile and distributed versions of the cloud infrastructure (datacenters), almost a physical bittorrent so to say, we are interested into the existing versions of mobile data centers.
The “classical” approach to the conception of large contemporary data centers could be exemplified by Google: it usually consist of a “shoe box” (large facility with no particular architectural expression, windowless facades), surmounted by big cooling devices. That’s mainly it for the architectural side.
... Along the design research, we are going through many different types of references that we don't necessarily post or document ...
The website presenting the downloadable results of the joint design and ethnographic research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) is now ...