The Geography of Data

Data Space, CLOG, New York, May 2012. (136 pp., $15 USD)

"Over two billion people across the world use the Internet regularly. Every second, 2.8 million emails are sent, 30,000 phrases are Googled, and 600 updates are tweeted." This is the first quote you read when opening CLOG: Data Space, raising awareness to the importance of the selected topic for their third publication. This brings to mind Alison Smithson's 1972 words — "record is made for some reason, some use, some need; as yet unformulated at the time of its inception" —, as if she was anticipating this new era, when most of our work and even of our relationships have a permanent space on "the cloud", we recognize the need of recording everything, which is more and more present in our everyday life.

Another need follows the urge to record and collect: Where to store all these bytes?

This is clearly represented by Alexis Madrigal as he writes about "groups of servers clustered together like neurons, connected by electricity and organised according to some gravity-live principle, the network effect." But what physical space can hold all these servers? How do we interact with them? We can find some answers in the essays reunited in Data Space. Digital preservation has become not only an economic issue, but a response to an immanent part of our lives; in this context it's interesting to realize not only the economical implications of the architecture of data, but also the political ones.

In his essay Archipelagos, Stephen Graham points out that data is used as military means of control and surveillance, and he adds that the commercial innovations of data mining and communication tracking are mutating into new assemblages for social and political control. At the same time, Jonathan Liebenau reminds us that geography is changing fast in the current times, inasmuch as the so-called "geography of data" configures new territories, always associated with business and law.

We can also talk about scale. If data space is defined by the physicality of the storage of all the terabytes produced in the world, we can see also how fast storage facilities have changed in the past ten years. Beyond the concept of "building", we can start our reflections with storage devices, such as CDs, floppy disks, USB through the smallest microSD, all presented in an infographic by Damien Correll on the digital capacity of this devices, which brings to mind the Lost Formats Preservation Society projects or the Data Thanatology project.

From this point onwards, scale starts growing, from the inner spaces presented on the photo-essay Data and the City II to the buildings pictured on Data and the City I. Albert France-Lanord's Pionen — White Mountain project is the perfect representation of the value of data in the current times: it takes place in a former anti-atomic shelter, in an amazing location down under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm. Completed in 2008, the architects say that their references for the White Mountain project come straight from science fiction films, mostly Silent Running, where Freeman Lowell wanders adrift in the spaceship Valley Forge, part of a fleet of ships which are in essence a Garden of Eden. Each ship has attached a number of huge domes, like sophisticated greenhouses, each one housing a different flora and fauna. It's easy to relate the need of this kind of secure spaces with the obsession behind data preservation.

In The Social Network, Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell discuss different kinds of data centers, making a comparison between NYSE Euronet's Data Center and One Wilshire, a 39-storey building that was the archetype for the colocation center in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s; the last one comprehensively explained in their book Blue Monday. But if Varnelis and Sumrell focus on buildings, Keller Easterling expands the concept of scale again on her essay Broadband Urbanism. This is a term previously coined on her book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture And Its Political Masquerades, where we can read about the importance of the spatial disposition of broadband infrastructure in terms of urbanism and design. The fact that these are non-physical infrastructures affects our understanding of non-linear systems and how architects should get involved on creating new urban dispositions.

The value of CLOG: Data Space goes beyond a compendium of interesting essays. Suddenly, when your mind is wandering and absorbing all this information, there are contributions full of poetry, which use another kind of language, much needed in such kinds of publications. Ed Ogosta's An Ode to the Data Center is a music score adapted from Malvina Reynolds's Little Boxes, acompanied by lyrics that are full of irony. Simultaneously, we can smile with Obinna Elechi's graphic provocation Tip of the Databerg.

As Michel Foucault wrote in Other Spaces: Utopias and Heteritopias, "we are in the age of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and far, the side by side and the scattered." Ethel Baraona Pohl (@ethel_baraona)