DRIFTING THROUGH THE DIGITAL
Drifting Through the Digital emphasizes the materiality of the digital realm and highlights its agency within the landscape and local economies. I look toward data servers, a 21st century digital archive and storage infrastructure used to house all online interactions, and the copious amount of water and energy they consume, in order to dispel the perception that the internet lives in a place-less realm.
Why are these data-crunching, water-siphoning structures erased from conversations concerning social injustice, manifestations of power, and the depletion of natural resources, namely water? This project looks at the massive water consumption habits of the National Security Agency (NSA) data centers, located in Bluffdale, UT to accentuate the place-full-ness of information as well as situate this water-sucking panopticon into our local landscape of the mountain west.
How can looking at water usage shed light on our relationship to information consumption? To place? To the politics of access” By including the network of reivers, dams, and pipes that contribute to the cooling of these data servers, I attempt to illuminate a network of the whole psychic and social complex of the global central nervous system. This system is simultaneously both local and global, because, as Bruno Latour states, “no place is dominated enough to be global and no place is self-contained enough to be local.”