Reblog > Internet machine

Note: an interesting “documentary” project/resource for our project is this recent work by designer and researcher Timo Arnall. It was published last May on his website and on different blogs. The focus is obviously here on the data center as a (fascinating?) contemporary artifact, in which the search for technical efficiency, rationality, security, redundancy, clean air, modularity, etc. leads to a specific spatial aesthetic. It is this aesthetic that seems to become the “main character” for this movie that mixes techniques, even so the idea is to reveal/desacralize the “hidden materiality of our data”. This project is planned to be displayed as a multi-screen installation.

While I didn’t have the occasion to see the movie yet, we should keep it in mind and try to display it in the frame of our own research, in particular to the students that will take part to the different I&IC workshops.

 

Via elasticspace

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Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.

 

Film: 6 min 40 sec, digital 4K, 25fps, stereo.
Installation: Digital projection, 3 x 16:10 screens, each 4.85m x 2.8m.
Medium: Digital photography, photogrammetry and 3D animation.

Occupy.Here: build a local darknet

This system isn’t connected to the cloud. Instead, the users represent a cloud of points and this local mobile network links them together. It’s a LAN party without the cables. Anyone within range of an Occupy.here wifi router, with a web-capable smartphone or laptop, can join the network “OCCUPY.HERE,” load the locally-hosted website http://occupy.here, and use the message board to connect with other users nearby. The open source forum software offers a simple, mobile-friendly interface where users can share messages and files.

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Via Rhizome

Reblog > Floating Datacenters

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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Via DataCenterKnowloedge

“Cloud infrastructures and the public’s right to understand it.”

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

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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