thepeoplescloud

[thepeoplescloud]

Data Centre used to heat public swimming pool. Is this forward thinking? When the UKs swimming pools are at risk of closure due to energy costs, could the data centre industry offer a mutual benefit?

[thepeoplescloud]

West London faces new homes ban as electricity grid hits capacity due to data centres

Financial Times

George Hammond and Stephen Morris

 https://www.ft.com/content/519f701f-6a05-4cf4-bc46-22cf10c7c2c0

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Steven Gonzalez Monserrat

Ethnography of data centre workers.

[thepeoplescloud]

A project by Joana Moll commissioned by Aksioma in collaboration with Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and in partnership with The Weizenbaum Insitute + Sónar +D

Carbolytics is a project at the intersection of art and research that aims to raise awareness and call for action on the environmental impact of pervasive surveillance within the advertising technology ecosystem (AdTech), as well as to provide a new perspective to address the social and environmental costs of opaque data collection practices. Online tracking is the act of collecting data from online user activity, such as reading the news, purchasing items, interacting on social media or simply doing an online search. It is known that tracking and recording users’ behaviour has become a major business model in the last decade. However, even though the societal and ethical consequences of abusive online surveillance practices have been a subject of public debate at least since  Snowden’s revelations in 2013, the energy and environmental costs of such processes have been kept away from the public eye. The global data collection apparatus is a complex techno maze that needs vast amounts of resources to exist and operate, yet companies rarely disclose information on the environmental footprint of such operations. Moreover, part of the energy costs of data collection practices is inflicted upon the user, who also involuntarily assumes a portion of its environmental footprint. Although this is a critical aspect of surveillance, there’s an alarming lack of social, political, corporate and governmental will for accountability, thus a call for action is urgent. AdTech is the primary business model of the data economy ecosystem or, in other words, the “money-making machine that fuels the Internet”.1 In 2021, the global ad spending across platforms reached $763.2 billion, and it is expected to rise 10% in 2022.2 Moreover, in 2020, 97.9%3 of Facebook’s and 80%4 of Google’s global revenue was generated from advertising, and, excluding China, these companies, together with Amazon, will dominate 80% to 90% of the market in 2022.5 Yet, despite the extraordinary importance of AdTech within the global economy, its methods and processes are extremely opaque and thus incredibly difficult to control and regulate. In a nutshell, AdTech analyses, manages and distributes online advertising. It encompasses a wide array of players, tools and methodologies, such as ad exchanges, real-time bidding and micro-targeting, which heavily rely on user data in order to effectively target and deliver advertising. Hence, data collection is a key resource to its global supply chain. But how is user data actually being harvested? Typically, data is collected through a user’s device through cookies and other tracking technologies integrated into devices, web pages, apps and all kinds of interactive and audiovisual digital content. Despite being created and stored in the user’s device, tracking technologies are mostly undetectable to the average user, which makes extracting large amounts of user data a relatively easy task. Moreover, despite their “invisibility” and relatively small size, tracking technologies are responsible for triggering millions of algorithmic processes that ultimately facilitate trading in data on a global scale, nurturing an ever-growing ecosystem that densely relies not just on exploiting user data but also on sucking out the power of the user’s device to actually function. The research behind Carbolytics identifies and analyzes the carbon emissions of the total number of cookies belonging to the top 1 million websites. The investigation identified more than 21 million cookies per single visit to all these websites, belonging to more than 1200 different companies, which translates to an average of 197 trillion cookies per month, resulting in 11,442 monthly metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. It’s important to understand that this number reflects browser-based cookie traffic and does not include App tracking activity, so we estimate this number to be dramatically higher. [An extensive report on the research is available here] Carbolytics is an interactive web-based installation that shows the average global cookie traffic in real time, or in other words, displays how cookies are parasitizing user devices to extract personal data and feed it into a massive yet obfuscated network of organisms. Finally, by introducing this analysis on climate and collective rights, Carbolytics seeks to add an often unexplored but critical layer to the traditional individual rights-based criticism of the AdTech industry, while providing strong evidence to inform the many communities that advocate for tech and climate change accountability. 

ALL TEXT FROM THE CREATORS AT https://carbolytics.org/

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SubCom tasked with repairing broken undersea cable that is the primary Internet connection for Tonga but will take around 4 weeks to fix.

[thepeoplescloud]

Memory Line (2022)

Dir. Matt Parker

DOP Bella Riza

Memory Line is a short documentary film that reflects on the early days of computing and listens to computing veterans who remember their experiences of the memory machine, EDSAC. The work comprises interviews with three women who are veterans of EDSAC as they remember their time working with the machine and also includes interviews with a group of volunteers who are currently building a replica of EDSAC at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park. They discuss the important role of women in early computing, and what makes them tick as pioneering computer programmers.On 6 May 1949 a team of engineers led by Sir Maurice Wilkes in the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory ran the first programme on a new digital computer called the Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC).EDSAC is one of the first digital computers ever built with a programmable memory that allowed it to store data. Using tubes of mercury, the computer stored bits of data by sending ultrasonic pulses through the tubes and creating a memory feedback loop. The computer’s memories were literally soundwaves.A team of retired computer engineers are currently building a replica of EDSAC (which was decommissioned 60 years ago in 1958) at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park. The project has seen spare rooms, garden sheds, attics and kitchen tables converted into project and prototype laboratories across the region as the team build a machine which is an entire room in size, in their homes.

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Entanglement

ANNEX (2021)

Space Entanglement uses the prism of heat to explore the material relationship between data infrastructure and architecture through a structure that collapses local- and planetary-scale data infrastructure networks into the most primitive of socialising technologies: the campfire.

The pavilion draws from both contemporary and historical data storage artefacts as building blocks to form its structure. These artefacts are assembled in a campfire formation, referencing this primitive architectural space where early human civilisations formed alliances, built social networks, and eventually developed complex societies. The pavilion asserts that from the burning of campfire logs to the management of waste heat generated by contemporary data infrastructure, the production and distribution of information is intrinsically connected to the production and distribution of heat and fire. A software system is the performative brain of the pavilion and allows for the control and sequencing of a range of media components in the structure: screens, speakers, lights, cameras, and fans into different states that last for 15–20 minute cycles. Specific parameters control the playback of media and the activity of the physical hardware elements in each state to transform the pavilion experientially within the exhibition space. Text displayed on the screens is produced by a machine learning algorithm that has been trained on over 10 million words relating to the field of data infrastructure.

By foregrounding these thermodynamic processes as a link between the architectures of the campfire and the data centre, the pavilion speculates on the relationship between these forms and how diverse communities converge around them in the past and into the future. Highlighting the materiality of our digital age, it subverts a fundamental artefact of the network – the server cabinet – to uncloud the sleek aesthetic of an industry which is forming our realities. The pavilion invites its audience to experience this thermal logic themselves through real-time thermographic imaging technologies that juxtapose key sites associated with data infrastructure in Ireland with traces of human activity in the Arsenale. Entanglement is part pagan festival, part data infrastructure, part signal. It connects bodies, thermal flow, matter, and the environment, to expose the romantic metaphor of the cloud by looking at data infrastructure: it’s materiality, the spaces it produces, and the vast ecological footprint it creates. It argues that the digital is material.

Exhibited for Ireland at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia

ANNEX is:

Sven Anderson, Alan Butler, David Capener, Donal Lally, Clare Lister, Fiona McDermott

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Project 02 (Data Centre Fence) - 2021

Adam Diller

Project 02 spirals outward from the security fence at Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon to expand our understanding of the cultural and ecological underpinnings of the internet. The photographic, video, audio, and archival media exhibition traces the entanglements of Google’s first hyperscale data center (completed in 2006) with the process of settler colonialism in the northwestern United States. 

https://www.adamdiller.com/p/project-02.html

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The Cloud in the Sea (2020)

Paul Dolan

18 minutes 20 seconds HD video loop, with sound. Excerpt from live simulation, HD video, stereo sound.

The Cloud in the Sea (2020) is a computer simulation of an underwater Microsoft data centre that was temporarily submerged off the coast of the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Using computer modelling, real time simulation tools and underwater audio recordings, the work aims to bring attention to the materiality of "The Cloud" and its geographic locations.

The title of the work references a rearrangement of the precipitation/water cycle to include networked computational infrastructure, pointing towards the ways in which nature and technology are bound within complex material entanglements.  

The underwater placement of a data centre solved two problems for Microsoft- it placed the technology closer to people who use it - and it used the low temperatures of the ocean to cool the metal structure and computer hardware inside – referred to as “free cooling” within data centre parlance. The Cloud in the Sea aims to question how deep the logics of capitalism run within our conceptions of nature and technology.

With thanks to James Davoll for the underwater sound recordings.

Produced as part of group show Cosmotechnics with Andy Broadey, Simon Blackmore and Helen Knowles via Hanover Project Gallery, Preston.

http://paulmichaeldolan.com/the-cloud-in-the-sea-2020

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Acid Clouds (2019)

Niels Schrader

Photo by Katarina Juričić

Photos in collaboration with: Roel Backaert

Acid Clouds is a series of photographs that documents the material traces of virtual data in the Netherlands. Even though virtual by nature, data storage is currently reaching the point where digital concerns hit physical constraints. Experiencing the physicality of datacenters is one of the key aspects of the project. Night-time photography provides a certain degree of invisibility around these otherwise highly protected spaces and also removes the human actor from the image. The goal of Acid Clouds is to provide more honest alternatives to the existing visual and verbal rhetorics dictated by the tech companies. The photos are all taken from a similar points of view in order to systematically capture the spatial context of the datacenters and enable visual comparisons across different topologies. Discovering unique traits of the buildings allows to identify motives and agency hidden in today’s global cloud infrastructure. 

http://www.minddesign.info/acidclouds.html

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Giant towering Jesus Statue in Świebodzin Poland is a massive digital satellite antenna array station.

In this documentary, bizarrely the investigators find the church rector denies the existence of any such infrastructure in the crown. Is this what Jesus had in mind?

h/t Aleksandra Skowrońska

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What is a data center?

by Eaton Power (2021)

PowerPoint slides with some dubious copyright infringement. It’s aimed at kids but the references are widely of appeal to a 30+ age range.