The Cloud in the Sea (2020)
18 minutes 20 seconds HD video loop, with sound. Excerpt from live simulation, HD video, stereo sound.
Currently screening via www.cosmotechnics.net
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.