Colocation (2021-2022)

Photographic Series and book.

Data centers are as crucial to the maintenance of contemporary life as running water and energy. They process emails, websites, banking systems, healthcare databases, video streaming, SMS and must be powered 24/7 to maintain our lives led ‘on demand’. Data centers are incredibly hard places to gain access to, often removed from Google Maps, or listed with fake or approximate addresses to dissuade vistors. I was searching for ‘render farms’ - places where rows of computer processors and graphic cards transform file data into the polished 3D renderings we see on screen in animation, TV and cinema. This search led me back to ‘colos’ or ‘colocation data centers’ - data centers that provide other companies server space and data processing in a secure location, with the promise of uninterrupted 24/7 access. The hardware rendering of computer generated images is happening alongside a number of other quotidian data processing tasks.

This series of images, shot at a geothermal power plant and unnamed data centers in the UK and Iceland aim to make visible the hidden spaces that host the maintenance of our incessant digital lives.

Limited number of first press books available for sale via the shop page.