apsi

what’s past is present after interviewing clémence imbert, a design historian from https://wysiwyg.ch/ who researches the digital turn of graphic design practice, i looked at how tools (mac computers in the 1980s) and non-tools (AI chatbots in the 2020s) are represented in advertising. in addition, i experimented with van dyke prints of hyperscale data centres to make them look like relics of the past in an attempt to manifest them away. the panel also highlighted hopeful quotes from interviewees about radically different visions for future data centres.

‘the tool is controlling us as much as we are controlling it’. like other industries, and society at large, the graphic design profession is not spared from the pressure to scale and speed up. ‘having so much design knowledge embedded in the tool takes away the design intelligence’, as Joost Grootens points out here: https://youtu.be/RI7XmLCXBJo?si=hSEQL75m1PgBYLF2&t=954 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries have already been broken and yet designers contribute to the problem by designing custom typefaces for AI firms or launching projects where every single word is generated with AI. designers should find solutions to such problems, not contribute to making them even worse.

at the start of the research, we engaged with the case of zeewolde, a town in flevoland where meta had planned to build a hyperscale data centre in the early 2020s. the case became emblematic, because it was one of the first instances where people successfully stopped such a project. unfortunately, the same project was then transferred to spain, which motivated us to visit the new location.

made possible by Creative Industries Fund NL. many thanks to our advisors Aurora Gómez @CorioPsicologia@mastodon.social and Fieke Jansen and of course our interviewees: Joost Grootens, Clémence Imbert, Niels Schrader, Ana Valdivia plus local activists who generously shared their knowledge with us!

i pasted trekking by Nicolas Bernklau onto paper by hand using charcoal, which i then exposed to rain to create an interplay between fire and water.

we were invited by @waag@waag.social to present insights into our research in the context of their state of the internet lecture. the installation draws on field visits to Talavera de la Reina, ES and Zeewolde, NL, interviews with activists, researchers, artists, designers and historians, as well as experimentation with analogue printmaking methods. (special thanks to Thieu Custers and Sunke Puell)

heat heat played a major role in the field research, both as something i experienced literally and as a common topic of concern (computation basically transforms electricity into heat, which can lead to problems during both input and output, and becomes even more problematic when large data centres are built in dry regions, like spain.).

scale one of the key findings of our research was that scale is one of the main issues when it comes to the current phase of AI hype. the models used are so energy-intensive and inefficient that they require ever more and ever larger data centres to run (see also the word ‘hyperscale’ used to describe the new generation of cloud factories). at the same time, we are experiencing unprecedented climate pressures. so things are not really adding up.

our field research led us to talavera de la reina, located in a dry and economically stagnating region in central spain. the town had been chosen by meta as the site of its newest hyperscale data centre. ‘the fire has reached the stream. the green corridor is now black’. when i open the message, i am greeted by a short video showing a large plume of smoke emerging from the charred remains of the grass land I had still been wandering through only a few hours ago.

when we visited the piece of land selected to host the new data centre, we were particularly interested in challenging the colonial idea of ‘empty’ land. if we widen our gaze beyond the purely economic value of the land, a whole new world opens up. will these more-than-human lives still be granted the space to thrive once the ‘cloud’ has materialised on the ground?

producing a 3-colour zine composed of three different page sizes is no easy feat. we learned about horizontal shrinkage the hard way. but ultimately, things worked out (some degree of imperfection is part of the process). bringing back some friction into the design and production process had been my goal from the beginning.

to produce the layout, we assembled riso prints, cyanotypes and photographs physically on paper and re-photographed them. this created an intuitive and slightly wobbly layout spread.

work in progress. sifting through some data centre soil for future screenprinting experiments.

‘terra nullius’ debunking the myth that data centres being built on ‘empty’ lands by highlighting more-than-human lives encountered during my field research.

‘cloud river’ was an early exploration of that topic, trying to bring the dutch and spanish context into dialogue through a poster. this was also the start of our experiments with different colour separations. going forward, we are keen to connect with and learn from other sites of struggles, both within the field of graphic design and in the sphere of data centre expansion on the ground.

triggered by the latest wave of AI hype – and the hopes and fears it projects onto the graphic design profession and society at large – I decided to learn more about how the ‘cloud’ manifests itself in the physical world and why it has come to dominate our everyday private and professional lives. hyperscale data centres are at the core of the current AI expansion. and ‘they are growing like mushrooms’. this led me to initiate ‘cloud factories’, a research project in the context of my publishing practice @papertrail together with @livliilvil@waag.social

@MatthijsSluiter i got so annoyed that i went back to the previous version

@MathieuLommen 🙋🏻‍♀️