Columns - Cartografies
by Lorenza Pigatti




The cloud is not a cloud. Although it is narrated as an immaterial space, it is in fact a complex network made of transoceanic cables, server farms, and data centers: architectural machines that consume enormous amounts of energy. Nobody talks about the heat, the noise, and the pollution their operation produces; on the contrary, we are constantly invited to use digital devices and to buy virtual space in which to store our digital lives… and the space is never enough.

As James Bridle writes in his book New Dark Age, computing is at once a victim and a cause of climate change. The digital devices we use and the energy required to sustain them generate a carbon footprint comparable to that of the aviation industry. This consumption is expected to triple in the coming years, both in terms of data storage and of computing power. The construction of data centers comes with the promise of unlimited storage. But that is not the case: space is not infinite, any more than rare materials are unlimited—lithium, copper, cobalt, and all the other minerals needed to build the infrastructure of communication. Overheating is not only the consequence of fossil fuel use and of the CO2 emissions produced by the many, too many wars now underway: it also stems from the pervasive use of artificial intelligence, which places us at a critical crossroads where ecological sustainability and democratic resilience are increasingly intertwined.

This is why satellite and underwater data centers are being designed, the latter tested in the United States and the United Kingdom by Microsoft with Project Natick: solutions that the Chinese provinces of Hainan and Guangdong have included in their development plans. It remains to be seen what impact they will have on marine ecosystems—potentially devastating. The government of Singapore has implemented measures to make them sustainable: floating data centers, powered by solar panels, that use seawater for cooling; techniques developed by the Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed at the National University of Singapore in collaboration with Big Data Exchange and Sembcorp Marine. To approach the material and infrastructural dimensions of the digital—to become aware of what lies concealed behind our screens—means opening the black box of our daily interactions with technology. Data centers, the physical backbone of the cloud, are not mere containers of data: they are the new seats of power, affecting the ecosystems of the local communities where they are built and put into operation, given their high consumption of water and energy.

Several artists understand the urgency of opening the “black box” of digital devices, a metaphor borrowed from Bruno Latour, when he writes of how opaque scientific and technological systems are to us: we see their results, but we do not know how they work. An opacity deliberately produced, the result of substantial economic revenues, of stabilization and of power. One need only think of the promises of optimization made for data centers, while in reality they sustain and enable the oligopoly of Big Tech.

In the context of the climate crisis, it is essential that the data industry rethink the way it produces and stores data, in order to reduce its environmental impact. The catalogue of the group show City in the Cloud – Data on the Ground, hosted at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich until this past March, investigated the ecological, social, and political costs of the relationship between technology, the planet’s resources, and models of development. A valuable text that gathered contributions from artists, architects, and photographers, along with excellent documentation of the works on display—among them the map of the first transatlantic cable, which connected Ireland with the Canadian island of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean, called in 1856 “the eighth wonder of the world.”