Today in Terraforms
Wed May 11 2022
A good read
Elisabeth Nicula on land art and NFTs: “I think voids, including those made by the violent activities of one’s cultural forbearers, cannot be made whole by art. Art can’t fill the damage done by extraction and enshrining a site of extraction through installation, reframing it as a cultural space, is a softened blow rather than an elucidation. When art fills a void, it justifies the void. When art’s sole purpose is to transact capitalist accumulation, the void is the point.”
I’m at the data center, I’m at the methadone clinic, I’m at the combination data center methadone clinic
Today I attended the final presentations of an architecture studio taught by Jesse LeCavalier, focused on alternative approaches to data centers. There were a lot of very earnest propositions to make data centers into “civic” spaces without a clear definition of what constitues “civic.” Part of this seems to be an issue in the fact architects aren’t really traine
One of the students was interested in the idea of pseudonymity in digital spaces and translating that to design. One of the guest critics observed that the loud, heat-emitting, windowless environment of the data center and the notion of pseudonymity might be more readily aligned with than some abstract, sanitized form of civic engagement.
I don’t know if the student is going to follow that thread but it got me thinking about repurposing the data center specifically as a site of harm reduction. Windowless, anonymous architecture would be a pretty good place for a safe injection site, no? Maybe if we’re getting idealistic here the data center could address harm reduction in a more expansive sense of the term–they could also host digital clinics for helping the shadowbanned or teaching people how to install adblockers. So many of those activities for tending to one’s digital risk are problematically framed as “detox” programs already, why not lean all the way in and make it part of a holistic, less judgmental approach to addiction?