Single Review on past events

Abstract: 

Digital media have for long been imagined as ephemeral, immaterial, and cold, all adjectives which are given even more impulse through the metaphors often used to explain outsourced, synchronous networked computing–"the cloud"–. Nonetheless, a more comprehensive observation of the technical infrastructure supporting online entertainment platforms can help grasping how media are always already entangling technical and natural systems. In this talk I will look into data centres, the physical facilities that organisations employ to house data and critical digital applications, as cultural techniques which are used, among numerous other things, to store and process data for emerging, energy-intensive streaming services, such as cloud gaming. A number of examples will be provided to discuss how infrastructure providers geoengineer natural resources into utilities able to keep server farms running 24/7, triggering existing conflicts and contradictions and posing new challenges to the claims of environmental sustainability which are often raised by this same industry. As an introductory talk, this presentation will seek to sketch an initial framework to discuss how the technical management of temperature in these strategic facilities sets the conditions for the seemingly continuous circulation of media through service-based models increasingly adapted to the principles of the platform economy.

Chair: Peter Krapp (University of California - Irvine, Senior Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg) - via Zoom.