 Good evening and welcome, everybody. It's really amazing to see so many familiar faces and also, actually, some unfamiliar ones here tonight to help us celebrate Marina Otero in her 2022 Wheelwright Fellowship, or prize. Marina's Wheelwright Research Project is entitled Future Storage, Architectures to Host the Metaverse, aspects of which we'll be hearing about tonight under the title Data Morning. But I'm going to let Marina introduce her work. That part of her work. So thinking about how to introduce Marina early today, I wasn't really sure where to start. There's just so many important aspects of her work and her contributions to architecture and design, curatorial, pedagogical, scholarly, institution, building, critical, all the facets of a disciplinary apparatus that we care about and care about transforming in CCCP. So I'll start here at GISA. Marina graduated from the CCCP program in 2013 with an award for High Academic Achievement, I should add, and went on to be the director of Global Network Planning at GSEP Studio X from 2013 to 2015. The network of research laboratories launched by Dean Mark Weigli around 2008, I believe. In 2016, Marina received her PhD in the theory of architectural design from ETSAM in Madrid with a remarkable thesis entitled Revenecent Institutions, Political Implications of Itinerant Architecture, soon to come out as a book. That same year, as part of the after-belonging agency, a collective of GSEP graduates, she co-curated the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale after belonging, the objects, spaces, and territories of the ways we stay in transit, of the same catalog title, going on two years later to curate the Dutch national pavilion, their exhibition for the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale, with an incredible project titled Work Body Leisure. Clearly, Marina doesn't actually practice too much leisure, I should add, at least not in person. For these major research-based exhibitions are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg of her resume of curatorial work, which also includes Biennales and Triennales in Istanbul, in Sao Paulo, in Vienna, in Shenzhen, in Shanghai, and much more between 2014 and 2021. Even Marseille, actually. And she often acts not only as a curator, but also as an exhibition designer. Moreover, these major achievements were on top of her primary day jobs, we might call them, and her teaching. From 2015 to the beginning of 2022, Marina was director of research at the Het Neu Institute, HNI, my Dutch is not so good, in the Netherlands, where, in addition to launching a series of important research and exhibition projects, like automated landscapes on automated labor, architecture of appropriation on squatting as a spatial practice, burnout exhaustion on a planetary scale, and architectures of security, she launched an international open call for fellows and a reading room conference series, among so many other initiatives. And this, too, is far from a comprehensive list of initiatives, seeking to send the questions of social environmental justice, of feminist and queer perspectives, and the coexistence of human and non-human bodies, and to expand modes of collective practice and engagements with colonial legacies, among so much more. Many of these research projects and collaborations have ended up as published volumes, like Lithium, seems to be, yeah, States of Exhaustion, with fellow CCCP graduate, Francisco Diaz and Anastasia Kubrak, More Than Human, with Dean Andres Hake, Retreat, Unmanned, Architecture and Security, a series with Ethel Barayona and Melkit Shoshan. Her sole authored book, as I mentioned earlier, Evanescent Institutions, will also, it's not out yet, is it? It's on its way. Yeah, it's in, yeah, on its way, I understand that. And again, even all of this, is really the tip of the iceberg of her publication practice. Finally, Marina is currently head of the Masters in Social Design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, having previously taught at the Royal College of Art in London, in Geneva, here at GESAP, at ETSAM, and more. So this impressive list of achievements is certainly testament to Marina's professionalism, to her conceptual and intellectual brilliance, to her commitment to teaching and collaboration, and to rethinking the manifold sites, formats and actors of architecture. So it offers a glimpse of her contribution to making architecture a more interesting field to be part of, fortunately, thank you. But such a list is hardly an effective means of describing her incredible generosity to those around her, or her qualities as a trusted friend, and a much admired transformative activist in the field. Indeed, her unceasing commitment to her own work is matched only by the energy and support to which she brings to the work of those around her, and this was amply evident yesterday in your remarks to the CCCP students during thesis reviews. And so, hello, I could go on and on and on about Marina's achievements and her wonderful person. I think it's probably time to invite her to the podium for her lecture. So please join me in welcoming Marina. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you so much. Well, it's such a presentation. Thank you so much, Felicity. So beautiful to be here with so many friends and feeling at home, so thank you so much for being here. Thank you to Dean Hake, and to Mark, and Felicity for the invitation. And yes, I'm gonna share a little bit of the work I'm doing for the Wheelwright Prize. So it's our work in progress. So that means, well, there are still initial arguments and findings. And I'm very happy to engage in forms of public research through which I can share those initial ideas and have feedback and conversations around them. For me, it's very important to, as the research progresses, to have these instances in which you can have moments of public scrutiny and public discussions. So, yeah, today I decided to call it Data Morning because it's connected to part of the intuitions that I'm having in relation to where this project could eventually end. The MCHAP07A0 is the largest kipu on display at the Museo Chileno de Arte Pre-Colombino in Santiago, Chile. Dating from 1500, this kipu, not in Kekwa, is one of the systems for recording information used by the INCA. It is composed of 586 chameleed fiber-noted cords organized into eight sections of 10 sets, each with up to 13 sub-levels of information holding 15, 22 items of data. The state officials, O'Kipu Kamayoks, made and kept these devices to store census records, accounts, genealogies, poems, songs, and the deeds and exploits of prominent figures. Each string is capable of reflecting millions of different combinations of color, fiber type, not duration, to hold an enormous variety and quantity of knowledge. Together, these sequences create a binary code. A binary coded system whose mathematical organization anticipates the operations of the computer. The kipus, as part of an extensive infrastructure, allowed for the transfer of information throughout the INCAMPIRE. They coalesced the politics economy and the storage system, facilitating the coordination of crop harvesting, cotton and wool production, raw material availability, and the management of stocks across geographies, climatic regions, and astronomical cycles. Throughout history, empires have relied on communication networks to circulate products, information, and knowledge to manage resources under complex societal organizations. The INCAMPIRE trail is not an exception, and its remands across the Chilean territory have been occupied and repurposed by colonial, modern, and neoliberal infrastructures. Paths transitioned by chaskeys, runners, or messengers who carried kipus and lambas, moving materials and products turned into an intricate global communication system dependent on the exploitation, management, and supply of natural resources. To the INCAMPIRE, the kipu was what data infrastructure is to contemporary global markets. In this age, when data centers encode and process immense amounts of information, kipus remind largely undecipherable. If their long kept stories were to be read, the kipus will transform the understanding of the INCAMPIRE and its social organization, whose history, due to the lack of written records, has been told primarily by Spanish colonizers, my ancestors. As with today's digital networks, disentangling the kipus' cords involves decoding their knots, a task comparable to comprehending the workings of contemporary digital infrastructures. Yet the intricacy of digital infrastructure is not the only challenge. The climate catastrophe makes it necessary to reinvent the data, how data is managed, produced, circulated, and stored if the industry is to deliver the promise of artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and the metaverse without causing planetary meltdown. Interestingly, when it seems that we have reached the limit of our shared world, its resources, and we are aware of the perils of equating progress to infinite growth, then we take refuge in the digital world where the promise of infinite possibilities is still present, a world that is generally imagined as a space without limits, the cloud where everything is possible. The metaverse, for example, promises a space in which to inhabit worlds and bodies, to have experiences to which we will not have access in our daily lives. It is a place in which to try out other ways of living and organizing society, other forms of coexistence. But this rehearsal space has important material repercussions and it's not infinite, it has real limits. It is made up of cables that transmit information across oceans, extraction sites, servers, and data centers where our information is stored, emails, images, selfies, TikTok videos. Data centers with servers, these ones, work all day long, every day of the year, consuming vast amounts of information, water, and emitting CO2. So, but we have to stay connected here. This is the sound of our emails. Not far from the MCHAP-0780 Kipu, a new infrastructure connecting data centers and mining sites across the Pacific Ocean is about to make, yet again, the Andean region a communication hub. The Hubble cable, the first submarine cable connecting Valparaiso and Sydney will turn Chile into a preferred data center location. And an epicenter of the struggles around green, connected, digital futures. Chile is also the second largest producer of lithium, a critical elements for phones, electric vehicles, solar panels, and data center batteries. Present in only a few places on Earth in high concentration. The Salares in the Atacama Desert are one of them. Ancestral cosmologies and the prospects of the planet's futures collapse in the Salare de Atacama. The territory, once part of the Inca Trail, is occupied by one of the largest brine-based lithium mines in the world. Site of human, animal, vegetable, and microbial aqua existence for thousands of years, the Salare is endangered by lithium extraction processes, processes involving the evaporations of millions of liters of water in the world's driest desert. Processes aimed at producing the batteries that power the continuous supply of information on our screens and the data centers where this information is stored. Whereas mineral extraction has been an ongoing activity in Atacama, it was what attracted the incase to the territory and instigated the domination of the existing Atacamanian communities. The scale of today's operation is putting the entire ecosystem at risk of disappearance. Our low-latency futures are granted at the expense of the Salares environmental destruction and dispossession of the indigenous communities who have been their stewards for generations. This is the disaster and the mining concessions in Atacama is quite packed. Atacama, despite its hyper-biodiversity, is instrumentally portrayed as a lifeless space. Mining companies treat the landscape as one of the biggest repositories of resources and therefore a major economic asset. Managers and engineers impose their abstract logistical models on the land following cravings for productivity and corporate profit. Extending over the Salares, the Cartesian grid specialized their ambitions. The grid creates a blueprint for the ground's exploration. It also dominates the aerial perspective of the colorful brimed ponds whose beautiful shots smoothly circulate in media and whose aesthetic experience eclipses the social and environmental destruction that tales them. Regardless of the grids that Atacamanian know that their ground is alive, they know that the minerals exported from the Atacama to other territories around the world are not lifeless matter. They are not commodities, a designation that has been used to justify the destruction, but microorganisms native to the desert and an intrinsic part of a living ecosystem. Indigenous leaders such as Rolando Jumire are also aware of the rapid degradation of the Salares, their inhabitants and the symbiotic relations between them. Drought, contamination and death resulting from the extraction of lithium and other minerals in the region are a byproduct of the global dependence on energy and data and the predictions that assume they need inevitability of its growth. Yet it will be naive to consider that the landscapes of resource extraction are restricted to a Cartesian grid laid over the desert. Atacama's ground is entangled as Akipu's knots with the technologies we use, cars we drive, architectures we inhabit, public officials we elect. There are plenty of examples of these measurements. Early in 2022, Chile's Ministry of Mining awarded through an international tender process two lithium extraction contracts to China-based Build Your Dreams and Chile-based Servicios y Operaciones Mineras del Norte to extract up to 80,000 metric tons of metallic lithium. The tender was aimed, according to Chile's right-wing government, at increasing lithium production in Chile to meet the growing global demand generated by development in areas such as digital infrastructure and electromobility. Many societal sectors opposed the tender which was carried out controversially right before the new administration, led by left-wing politician Gabriel Boric, took power last March. Nevertheless, the lithium tender process had been long planned by those with interests in the business like Build Your Dreams, China's leading manufacturers of lithium batteries and battery-powered electric vehicles. Controlling lithium extraction will mean controlled entire markets, from mine to end product. The introduction of autonomous transportation in cities will demand the construction of data centers able to support the constant real-time transfer required to relay information to users via smartphone applications powered by lithium batteries. Companies like Build Your Dreams sell products that generate that demand for more of their products. Their automated factories run at the rhythm of always-anticipated growth, a rhythm that connects the smart city promises with the processes of natural resource extraction that are destroying ecosystem such as the Takama as a reminder of what it takes to build our dreams. Today's data infrastructures are interwind across geographies, policies, mines, fiber optic cables, switch points, mobile telephone towers, automated ports, and factories, and by extension, the spaces of everyday life. Contemporary data-driven society embodies what I call Cartesian enclosure, a spatial and epistemic system that extends beyond the more visible grid. They're not squalesting in seemingly unassuming architectures such as the data centers. Despite their apparent banality, these architectures are critical for current and future political, cultural, and socioeconomic activities. Their functioning depends on extractive practices and increasing land, water, and energy consumption. Data centers sustained and presidential digital data production aimed at creating alternative future worlds. And it's not only outpacing the scalability of today's storage solutions, but actually putting the only world we all inhabit at risk. Governments pressured by local communities, environmental movements, and rising energy prices have started to impose controls. Several data center hubs, including countries such as Singapore, and the Netherlands, or cities like Dublin, are implementing temporary bans on data center construction due to their excessive land energy consumption at the detriment of nearby residents. In June 2022, Chile also took measures affecting the lithium supply chain and consequently the extraction of a main component of digital infrastructures. Following a series of appeals filed by the Atacameño indigenous communities of Camar and Coyo against the violation of the right to live in a pollution-free environment, the third chamber of the Chilean Supreme Court cancelled the results of the tender process for lithium exploitation. With this decision, the Supreme Court confirmed that any intervention on ancestral territories or that might affect indigenous communities requires consultation in accordance with the current Chilean constitution. Another episode demonstrated the importance of demanding new paradigms for procuring, consuming, and storing energy and data. They stressed the need for another ecosystem models for digital infrastructures. Forecast, however, continue to say otherwise. According to them, data generated globally is expected to grow at 23% annually from 2020 to 2025. Garner, in its report, how much is not enough, refers to a coming zone of potential insufficiency and estimates that data storage demand will potentially soar to 50% from 2020 throughout 2030. Growth, according to these estimates, seems inevitable. And grow incentivizes markets. As a result, data-centered architecture becomes not only a site of struggle, but a critical site of investment. It is not a coincidence that the largest commercial real estate services company globally recently launched a data-centered division. Architecture and engineer firms such as Corgan, Hensler, Acom, Arup are also expanding their data-centered divisions. Companies, universities, governments are joining forces to develop alternative models that will consume less energy and emit less CO2. Underwater data centers refrigerated directly by ocean waves. Decentralized edge computing and micro-centers that could be managed at the individual or neighborhood level. Hologram, fluorescent dye, crystal, and DNA data storage systems and quantum technologies are also some of the proposals making the news. None of them, however, account for data production and consumption behaviors that reduce the dependence on growth. They all assume the inevitability of increasing data production. And in turn, they fuel destruction of more resources, the placement of new submarine cables, the construction of more data centers, the production of more batteries, often to the detriment of local communities across the world. The industry has built more than eight million data centers in the last 10 years, which together consume 3% of the global electricity and emit the same amount of greenhouse gas as the aviation industry and growing. These numbers and the struggles that follow them have instigated the creation of a new European code of conduct for energy efficiency in data centers. However, these are other attempts to make data centers more efficient, have failed so far. In areas in London, it is not possible to build new homes because they will not have access to electricity. The grid is already stretched by data center consumption. In the Nordic countries, the development of digital infrastructures and green energy futures also comes at the expense of local and indigenous peoples. The expansions of wind farms is having a dramatic effect on the environment and culture of the Sámi. As with lithium mines, wind farms are part of the carbonization effort essential to tackle the worst impacts of climate change. Yet, by invading the reindeer pastures and displacing the animals for their usual racing lands, the wind farms are endangering a cultural practice essential to Sámi identity. The existence and functioning of these farms is an essential element of the booming data center industry in the Nordic country region. This data center industry has been enabled by favorable tax conditions called climate and the expansion of renewable energy infrastructures that provide data centers with the opportunity to attain a green energy level. Along with data centers come other data related activities. This is a cryptocurrency mine in Bowdoin, Sweden. The sound of the energy consumed by crypto mining. The surplus heat generated by crypto mining operations is redirected to a neighborhood, a neighborhood next door greenhouse where it is used to foster the growth of plants and vegetables. The energy consumption, however, reminds excessive and insufficient to justify the entire operation. This is rice. It's a research center in Luleå in Sweden that works on prototypes for future data centers. They also use surplus heat in greenhouses they design. But also they grow worms, fish in fish farms and dry wood that is later used as biomass. Worms were the most successful of the three applications. Worms are fed to chickens, which would otherwise eat imported dry food. The chickens are, according to Rice, very happy. And the process respond to a circular economy in the region. Our digital files generate heat. The heat generates worms. The worms feed the chickens and the humans feed the chickens to send more emails. This is a data center in downtown Stockholm. Part of the energy generated by the servers is transferred to the city's heating network. Our emails could also heat homes. And besides, some of these data centers include civic functions. This is a cafe during the day and disco bar at night, part of the data center. Still, most of them run on hydroelectric energy from dams and wind farms whose functioning effects again indigenous and local communities. In what many have described as green colonialism, the projects often ignore the harm caused by these infrastructures and communities in the name of sustainability, treating them as externalities. Some judges still make a difference. In October 21, the Norwegian Supreme Court wrote that part of the largest onshore wind farm in Europe violated Article 27 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Norwegian, the Chilean, even the Dutch ruling demonstrates importance on consultation and collaboration with local communities in ensuring climate justice. Steps that government and companies usually don't follow. As a result, some communities develop their own programs. Steward Stacy, managing director of binary security, made the news by starting the world's first indigenous-operated data center in Charl Darwin University in Australia. This initiative instigates indigenous governance or the creation of collection, ownership, stewardship, analysis, and application of data. Binary security is not alone. Kalinda IT services and indigenous-owned business has recently partnered with Trifalga DC to develop a network of hyperscale and edge data centers across Australia. Designers like Yvie Kamp also contribute to this shift. As a cultural, economic, and strategic asset, data is according to Kamp generally mobilized against vulnerable populations, yet it could also be, she claims, a vehicle for restitution. In her work, Kamp explores how data materializes in Western Africa landscape. The African continent has a shortage of data centers, partially due to power outages and the reliance on diesel generators. As a result, most of Africa's data is stored in Marseille in France. Still, various countries, including Nigeria, the larger hub of data centers in West Africa, is obtaining significant investment from overseas organizations. This development, Kamp shows, disregard the realities of the inhabitants and lack ethical processes around Western companies' policies for data collection, management, and control. In this prevailed environment, Kamp argues for the incompleteness of data and the unintentional disruptions in digital technology as a form of resistance to counteract the multinational control over the city and its inhabitants. The MCHAP 0780 Kipu, found in an incant cemetery in Arica, Chile, a meticulous study of its notes allowed for the tabulating of 15, 22 units in different categories, whose meaning are still unknown. In the early moments of colonization, Hispanic writing was prioritized over the Kipu system of strings, which was largely illegible to the colonizers. Later, around 1570s, the Kipus will achieve colonial recognition as records and will start to be admitted in legal and administrative contexts. And then litigants could then read the strings in lawsuits concerning issues such as tribute restitution. Granting legitimacy, however, was part of the policy adopted by Francisco de Toledo, the new by Roy, who sought the establishment of order in the Andes to optimize the extraction of resources on a national scale. For that purpose, he ordered forced relocation of Andean population to Hispanic-type settlements and the establishment of the system of cabildos, municipal councils, were official who transcribed the information of each community's Kipus. During that time, Kipus will also provide the strategies for daily resistance against colonial rule, subverting the Catholic imposition of confession or facilitating the planning of uprisings through Kipu messages, illegible to colonial officials. Similar episodes trigger what has been described as the colonizers fear for the noted rogue, which ultimately resulted in the prohibition of the Kipu by the Catholic Church in 1583, during the third session of the Limense Provincial Council. Not many Kipus survived. And despite the occasional transcription of accounting Kipus by the colonial administration, these records were not kept together with the Kipus or the illustrations, therefore rendering the relations between lasting material evidence and its meaning unreadable. Paradoxically, today's digital infrastructure is seen as a key to unlock the Kipus secrets and protect them from decay and the passing of time. Developments in artificial intelligence and other digital tools are too many scholars, crucial in the efforts to decipher Kipus and their iteration of colors and notes. The more than 850 digitalized Kipus around the world are a de facto database that could be studied resorting to trained computer algorithms and microanalysis. Large-scale patterns and similarities could emerge from studying these digital reproductions and simulations by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, and mathematicians. The attraction to the enigmatic nature of Kipus and the desire to unpack those chronicles of the Andean past embodied in their notes, resorts, I will argue, to the same logic that puts at risk the very landscapes and communities where Kipus were once born. Academic and scientific efforts in collecting, archiving, cataloguing, digitizing, analyzing, and ultimately deciphering Kipus are part of a historical lineage that connects with the European colonial order and its material, cultural, and epistemic genocide. Transforming the Kipus in digital assets and databases implies subjecting once more indigenous knowledge and cosmovision. Their notes link the bodies, ecosystems, knowledges erased by colonization with those at risk of disappearing by contemporary extractivist violence. Against the compulsion to decode the Kipus information and render it transparent, the acceptance of their opacity stands as a colonial practice. Only by accepting their inscrutability, we could recognize that what was destroyed by colonization was not only the knowledge to code and decode Kipus, but the situated social, cultural relations organized around them. Leaving the surviving courts as empty figures, empty signifiers, and evidence of the violence of erasure deployed by colonialism, or as glissom, beautiful puts it, we should accept the inanity legibility that often characterized cross-cultural communication as opposed to the transparency as epistemological modality of colonial power. By reconsidering the relevance of data-driven society and the search for limitless production, consumption, and storage of data, we could perhaps undo the knots that tie up the mining industry and extractivist economies with logistical and communication networks, the knots that tie up human dreams with the logic of growth, and perhaps then embrace a different way of being in the world. In any case, as this image shows, over time, digital data as Kipus turn indecipherable. What you see is a folder of photographs taken in 2007 and that remain on a storage device for nine years. The code did not change over time, but the computer's perception of this code shifted, making it unreadable. Data corruption and disappearance demonstrates the interconnectedness between digital and physical realms. Over time, our millions of files will face the same fate that those ecosystems affected by their storage. Those communities affected those territories in Portugal that are fighting new lithium mines, or in the Netherlands that are fighting data centers that are consuming far too much energy, water, and emitting CO2, or in Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina fighting lithium extraction in Los Alares. Data is, after all, a finite resource. The inevitability of its decay is a reminder of the fragility of the digital and physical world, our environments, bodies, and histories. In this context, instead of a race for new systems of data storage plagued with externalities, I argue for a practice of letting go of digital data, individual and collective. Just as we mourn the loss of physical objects, places, and people, letting data go also requires a mourning process. Wander recognized digital data's emotional and cultural significance. Instead of accepting the inevitability of growth and aiming for frictionless storage medium that will allow for limitless accumulation, even beyond the human, I say let's embrace the need for new practices for letting data go. Driven by a fear of extinction and loss, most of scientific market-driven data storage remedies hold an empty promise of keeping information unaffected by the passing of time. But they fail to acknowledge that any archival holding is continually renew to practices of maintenance that meanings are transformed as they are continually performed and are remembering simultaneously concerns knowledge generation and its loss. Data storage, as archives, are immersed in the states of proliferation and decay. Memory is not what is contained and stored by the dynamic practice that involves acts of remembering and forgetting. Through states of gradual decomposition and recomposition, future meanings emerge that exceed the intention and interpretations of those who deposited and stored them. Thank you. Joining Marina briefly at the podium to thank her and maybe ask a question or two before we field what I'm sure are many great questions from the audience after that incredible lecture. It's like so beautiful to hear where the research is going and this sort of incredible set of connections that you're drawing from Chile back again, like through such a complicated framework that, so I was actually gonna hand the podium straight over to Mark, but since I'm on a roll, I'm not really on a roll, but I'll go a little bit here. I mean, I think that the complicated sort of diagrams and circuits and reprisals of geographies of colonial violence and indigenous genocide and environmental destruction was entirely extraordinary. And I hadn't exactly understood how the project was going to connect these pieces and the role of the lithium. And so again, it was like incredibly helpful for me to watch that. If I have a question, I'm gonna ask a really dumb question and it maybe takes off from when you ended around the question of mourning and this process of mourning or letting go. And I've written earlier, you had a slide that asked the question to save or not save data and it was affiliated with a classic sort of capitalist graph going up into the right, marking the sort of necessary exponential growth of capitalist development that, of course, was precisely the impetus for colonial expansion. And I wrote down like, how is data disposed of? And I know that's not entirely your question, your question is how is data let go? But I started to think, what is the energy output or the sort of material afterlife of even a process of data destruction or of data letting? I mean, I understand that if the project is to temper the sort of expectation of exponential growth, yeah, of ever more need for manufacturing data centers powered by lithium batteries that drive this process of extraction. Is there, I mean, this is a stupid question, but is there a footprint on the ground of letting data go beyond the psychological, like how is data shared? Does that make sense? Like, how do you destroy data? You just cease to fuel it? Or, no, I mean, I know it's a sort of a dumb question, but if it's a process, it would seem potentially to tie into, yeah, other factors. And just one other, I sort of struck, listening to, I remember this moment in the pandemic when everybody was turning to fully online lives or more or less fully online lives where the statistic of energy consumption, I mean, prior to that, I'm trying to remember their names, Dutch scholars who had acknowledged that even by 2021, the fuel consumption of managing data would outpace that produced by, the environmental destruction produced by airline travel and struck me all of a sudden, this sort of horrible paradox of the massive sort of exponential increase in data use. I mean, no, that's a different question, but I was thinking with that sort of idealism that we were no longer burning fuel to fly around the world, but I mean, I'm just, it's sort of that paradox. How is data, like, yeah, so I mean, the project, the idea was very naive in terms of studying data centers and trying to not to have a pre-judgment. So I still want to do all the fieldwork because I think it's important to visit all these places. And I selected a range of data centers that were well known because of their ecological practices. So not even the most horrible ones, the ones that are supposed to reuse energy and consume less. But what I do is also trace, follow the pipelines, like the tubes, the pipes that go from the data centers to some other places that are wind farms or hydroelectric dams, or interestingly enough, you'll find so many externalities connected to these data centers. Most of the time, these externalities are the same type of populations, local indigenous populations. So I went to the Nordic countries where it's one of the most important location for data centers. And you know, that's what happens that the booming industry, many, many data centers are located there because they can have the green energy label. And generally you have the information into data centers. So you can locate one in the Nordic countries and the other in Nevada. But it's still because you have one in the Nordic countries who have green energy label. But having all this green energy infrastructure has an important effect on many other ecosystems and environment. So that's how suddenly this question about even the most efficient data centers actually have a very dramatic effect. Or the indigenous data center. I mean, I think that was a really point. It's also integrated indigenous people into the cycle of destruction of their environment. I mean, I thought that was a particular case. Yeah, I mean, in the case of that particular one, I think it's a long standing struggle against the surveillance of the Australian government on indigenous populations. So it makes sense to have your own data center and manage your organization. But in terms of data images and so on, even the ones that we have here that we don't use, they are consuming energy continuously. So even the ones that are corrupted and are decayed, we cannot even access, they still consume energy. So eventually, even if we are not actively disposing of data, we'll also consume energy, but we'll be a moment of consumption. So maybe what I have in mind, but maybe this is a more artistic practice, is like there are rituals in which moments that also society have around letting go things. And there is something we have to acknowledge about the digital that there should be certain practices around that. I'm not necessarily positioning it in the individual, but I find it interesting that most of the relation we have today is about creating and producing more, keeping more. All the interactions we have with companies is like Google, Gmail telling you that you can have more storage capacity. Dropbox telling you you have more storage capacity. Each iPhone that goes into the market has more storage capacity. So it's everything projected towards the idea that more storage capacity is never about why we need so much information. And most of the science information, even if it's redundant, it's not extremely interesting, is potentially could be an economic asset in the future because we'll be part of a database or for training algorithms or something that we don't know yet. So we are just keeping accumulating data for certain companies to make profit in the future, betting on the possibility of profit and putting at risk the very present that we all share. So for me, that's just a provocation to say data morning because I don't want to propose only that we can all now collectively delete some of the images we have, but I think there is a process, like a ritual collective practice of understanding, having a different relation with that. That's what I would like to. Hard to know how to follow up on that incredibly beautiful talk, but also your very careful articulation of our complex relationship to data historically, technically, effectively, but I was also struck by that diagram and I think it's the same one. And if I read it correctly, it was labeled zone of insufficiency. And I was thinking when you're talking, like every now and again, architects dip into the world of data storage and I thought, this is a familiar story, but then as you kept going, it becomes so much stranger. And it's like coming back to this narrative, again, we realize things have happened. We haven't been paying attention and you've brought, you've signaled our own, let's call it kind of cognitive zone of insufficiency when it comes to this issue. And I thought it was just incredible to see where this is going and the proliferation not of only environmental degradation, but of different forms of investment, but also different forms of refusal because I guess my question would be what the relationship is for you between mourning and refusal and whether it'd be such a thing as data refusal in your story. Because it also seems like the way you've linked the possibility of mourning a refusal to problematics of environmental justice or other forms of justice, it seems like there could be through that refusal something like an emerging data justice at stake. And so I also followed your thinking of the relationship between the informational and the physical and through that diagram of the cable. But I also just started to think about where else we could see that problematic of data justice. And this is going to be, sorry to talk about my own work here, but just because it so touches the thing that we just did, so touches on your project that we interviewed a bunch of immigrants in Greece recently and what we learned is that the proliferation of informational systems on places like the European border, especially through Frontex, continues along the same kind of growth path as you've shown here. And these are forms of overlapping jurisdiction of informational extraction. And what happens is that in that proliferation, in that overlap, in that informational accumulation, once you enter those data banks, Interpol, a Frontex data bank, your information gets repeated in other data banks and other data banks. And this is how your movement as a non-documented immigrant gets controlled and constrained and resisted. So there's something about those forms of accumulation, the territories of information extraction that they're related to also provoke slightly different questions of data justice and what that would mean to refuse and who has the capacity to refuse in cases like that. And so it just seems like it's not so much extraction, it's just like a kind of proliferation of recording of identity that you can't control but that is used against you. And so how to think refusal in those contexts as well? And I'm just wondering if that touches on your project at all. Yeah, I think there's a part of acknowledgement of the renation as a process that we have to have impacted towards in the ecological sense. So understanding mourning as a, I think, as a practice that has become more and more important to acknowledge the many ways in which we have to live differently. And there are ways to let go of data or many other forms in which we are used to live that require processes of mourning and celebration. So when I say mourning is not only necessarily crying for data, but there is like, and I'm relying on a Latin American activist and artist like Naomi Rencon Gallardo and others like the question of desire connected to life and death but not a compulsive desire of capitalism or individual desire but a collective desire for life and erotic desire that has to do with these processes that involve proliferation, decay, and, you know, disappearance as well. So I think that for me is beautiful and that's why I think mourning in relation to data will be, you know, productive. Obviously there is different layers that are at play. Like some of them, for instance, will be commercial enterprises. I didn't mention that Marie Kondo is not in the business of, you know, asking you to do, you know, to order things and throw them away in your houses. Actually, she has partnered with Google and is now advising all of us on how to tidy up our, you know, email inbox. So, soon, there will be, I mean, this, this is something, I mean, this is something there is this zone of potentially sufficiency is real. And the data center bands that are happening in many places only show the difficulty. And if you talk with any provider of data centers, there is a problem there in terms of resources, space, energy availability. So I'm not gonna do a black mirror thing now here, but many people in investment banks and are speculating on the probability that the access to data will be much more restricted than it is now. So also the possibility of accumulating data as we are doing now is not something that is gonna continue. And things that I always imagine that I really don't understand why they are for, like NFTs. Suddenly have another meaning because the fact that you have that file, that you are the owner of that file of the basketball player, you know, that you are gonna be the only one because the rest of us will not be affording, will not be able to afford to have storing data. So there are many different layers about this potentially sufficiency that point to forms of inequality. And now we are living in this moment where this proliferation of data is pervasive and we are used to it. Many people are betting on that's not the case. So on the 100 is the market trends towards like generating more information profiting from these endless databases. And there are others who are profiting from the idea that this is gonna be actually as car seat. As cars resource. Resistance, well, it's difficult in the paradox, you know. So, yeah. Yeah, maybe over here. I don't know, yeah, there's a microphone. Hi, Marina, thank you so much for your time in the talk. My name's Sam, and I have so many questions, but the one I'll ask first, you might not have any thoughts on this, but when you are doing this in research and visiting data centers, I'm curious because they're in these rural areas, does the location of data centers give any geopolitical power to these organizations or communities beyond just the fact they're private for that company itself? Because I saw, for example, the Australia example where they're hiring indigenous people to work at the data centers. Does the location of these data centers affect the political power that these communities might have in relation to government on a national scale or in relation to these companies at all? Because all the... The communities that are around the data centers. Yes, as well as the companies under which the data centers are under, the companies which own the data. Because for security reasons, if the local people have more access to these places physically, I don't know if that creates any complications. The example that I have in mind specifically is the Belt and Road Initiative in China. That's a very large-scale project with very different jurisdictional scenarios, but the give and take from some opinion pieces that I've read is just that by placing these data centers in the countries surrounding, not relying on themselves, there's a certain negotiation that happens between the traveling of the data around. So most of the data centers, how the location is chosen, most of the times it's not even following planning, coding and everything. So the companies, for instance, in the case of the Netherlands, negotiate directly with the government and they have tax breaks and many facilities with the promise that they will generate employment for a local population, which never happens because these places, they don't have a large population working within them. So generally, the local population has a very strange relation with these very unassuming and enclosed environments. There's a relation of suspicion around it. So basically also architects, what they do is design the environment around data centers to make them more acceptable by local population. Until quite recently, they were like their strange neighbor and most of the times there was not such a transfer of economies or knowledge between one and the other, but because of the energy situation that has become the more uncomfortable neighbor. So it has been energy, the reason why there has been different tensions between communities and data centers, energy on water. So the condition of these data centers is interesting because on the one hand, they are extremely local because they depend on the tax rebates, like the price of land. So many times it's the price of land what allows them climatic conditions, availability of energy, availability of water, et cetera. So they are very connected to the local environment and at the same time, they are completely disconnected. So it's a very paradoxical situation between very situated local engagement and totally disconnected globaling. So that's why there is a very dense relation between the populations. Most of the times they are not located in the city centers or they are like in rural areas, but in the city centers we don't see them that often but they are. And in these locations that I've been following actually their presence was not so much discussed until there was an issue with energy prices. And then as happens in London, there has a priority. What is the priority? Is like having data proliferates and be circulated or having electricity at home. So it's kind of very particular relations in each of the cases. Thank you Marina for a fantastic talk. I was curious and slides were very compelling and about the sonic landscapes of this. The only volume that we heard or noise was in your presentation was from the slides that the data centers were emitting and related to their relationship to the surrounding communities. I know that domestically there's been some lawsuits in Arizona from the emittance of this noise and some of those images are so kind of pastoral and they speak to silence and that tension, that dissonance, just what around sonics have you come across and thoughts on maybe the destruction of silence and accompaniment with this. It's interesting in the research to include other mediums through which to understand data. And when you visit a data center, the first thing you notice is this noise which is quite unbearable. So people working inside data centers generally has to protect their ears. So for me it was important to establish different understandings of how data circulation operates and what are the different effects that they have. These sound landscapes is something that I still want to explore more but I find it interesting to play with them a little bit. Especially for instance the crypto. Noise is a completely different landscape. So suddenly this sound landscape creates a very particular condition where this smoothness of data and the digital, this idea of the digital that we have and the cloud suddenly is disrupted. Because if I tell you that every time that you are taking a selfie, you are consuming half of the energy that a car has driving one kilometer, you get it. But probably if I just listen to the sounds of crypto, you understand what it implies, the workings of servers consuming energy and generating that kind of heat and energy surplus around them through sounds. So I think it's important to kind of understand these infrastructures in a different way. But that experiment so far. Thank you, Marina. It's so wonderful to see you back at GSAP again. But I wanted to follow up on Felicity's question because it helped me sort of think about, because especially you're interested in the kind of architectural and material existence of these data centers. And if the processors and everything have to get swapped out as the technology is changing, how is that also contributing to e-waste and where are those e-waste flowing? I had a conversation recently with geographer Simone Brown, who's very interested in where does all that e-waste go and the ways in which it gets remind exactly for the lithium, for the rare earths, for the copper, for all of these toxic materials. And I think she refers to something like the imperial landscape of algorithmic toxicity. It's like, yes, you mine it once, but then it's getting remind somewhere else, which is still linking back up to these colonial and imperial geographies. And I was just curious, have you been able to trace what happens once these things are obsolete and where it might go? Yeah, like who is managing their waste? Because there's gotta be a company sending it somewhere. No, but I was asking because I didn't know, for instance, how long, or how long do you have a server in a data center? And it's not that long. So they were telling me like, now most of the servers are, I have to be using very specific climate conditions and they are refrigerators who water systems but air mostly. And but in the rise this place in Sweden, they have developed a technique that is refrigerating servers through mineral oil. And it's very interesting because the servers are inserted in oil that refrigerates them and works very well. But the companies that provide the servers, they don't like that solution because the servers work much more, like they last longer. They don't have to be replaced every year. They can last for many years. So then for them, the kind of the economy and which every the system is organized is disrupted by this technology. But I was discussing with most of the data centers I visited that most of them are gonna make the transition towards mineral oil. But that will probably, I mean, not to speculate, but probably there will be a way in which the servers that will be submerged in the, will also have to be changed every other year. But I don't know what happens with the servers, but clearly there is a lot of waste that comes not only into the processing of data but all the data infrastructure and the servers that have to be replaced continuously. And then it's also the data centers where the servers are is a 10% of the data center. Most of the space is occupied by backup technologies that are there in case there is a blackout. Yeah, yeah. So it's like layers and layers and that's where the lithium batteries play a role. It's not that the servers use these are the backup batteries. These lithium batteries have to last X number of minutes before the diesel generations start. So if there is a problem with the electricity, the lithium batteries start, and then they give time enough for diesel generators to start providing energy again to the servers. So that is the most expensive and redundant technologies that also have to be changed very often. So it's a huge operation that's, yeah, it's quite. Yeah, that's Maraisi and Thoreau. Maya, I think you're right. I would like to follow also what happens. I've been following pipes that goes out of the data center and in, but I haven't followed other materials that are going, but that's interesting. So I think Laura and then you, and then you, yes? You still have a question, yes? Hey, Marina, what a, it was such a great lecture. So thank you. But I just want to follow up on this redundancy thing because, and also relating back to something Felicity asked about deleting data. I actually don't think we know when our data has been deleted most of the time. And the redundancy is so huge of the backup systems that you're always protecting it not only in one place, but in a few places that if you delete your own data, you don't know your data, right? So you never know that your data has been deleted, which is this whole thing in Europe about the right to forget which is not nearly as sophisticated here in the US as it is in Europe. And even in Europe, you can't, you can never prove that your data has been deleted. So I think this, the whole data morning and getting rid of your, I love that idea at the end, but it's built upon two kind of things that are impossible, right? The one to delete your data. And the other that we've, we're just collecting so much about junk. You know, that's the thing. Like all, when you remember those statistics, you know, more data has been made in the last 10 years than in the whole of human history. And it's just all our family photographs and our email and our, like things that you never thought could be useful in any way until, you know, the targeted ads. And the person who invented the targeted ads has apologized a million, you know, a million times. And it's because of the targeted ads that all of a sudden you could get the 900 points of data. And I'm just complicating this whole thing of forgetting because I think it's, it's the most, the end was just so complex and so many knots in there that it would love to untie. That's why I think it's interesting to try to say what it would mean to be able to delete or forget data because there is an impossibility. So it seems very easy. Like, oh, it's like I delete something. But as you say, first of all, yeah, most of the data centers are, they have a mirror. So yeah, our data is split. But also even like, if you think about your devices, the clouds, whatever that means and everything, like within our own devices, if you send a WhatsApp image, you know, image in WhatsApp and you don't have, and you send it to three or four people and you don't have a, yeah. So that you are storing 10 images of the same if you are not telling WhatsApp not to do it, which most of the people don't. And the same. So we are storing many times the same image that actually there is an image that maybe it's like a meme of a cat, you know? I love them. And then actually it's mirrored into data centers into different parts of the world and it would you want to delete it? Then because of certain regulations, it has to be like X number of years until actually it will act effectively deleted and you don't know if they will do it because maybe they know that you like cats and they send you the announce for, you know, cat food. So, and there's many different diagram is explaining like the amount of dark data, this is all this that is accumulated that no one knows exactly what it is and if it's any work, but it's worth it because it's what is great in data sets, data sets for the future. We don't know what it is for, but in a moment it will be helpful. So that's why it's a, this form of accumulation is a form of speculation. Yeah, so it's an impossibility, but I think there is something there that will be worth exploring. Maybe today it's more in a metaphorical artistic way, but it will be interesting to think about. I mean, my idea is to work also with different frameworks. I would like to think through experimental preservation through data because I think there are many questions connected that we know how to delete things, maintain things and not others in many other frameworks in archives, collections, built environment and so on, but with digital there is not such a conversation necessary. And at the same time working with people who knows about how to delete that. So actually a file, what it implies in the legal, in the questions, so that will be something that I would like to do in the next steps. But I think at the same time as I continue doing the field trips, because I think it's still important to give the chance to see how these things work properly. Thank you. I find this a very beautiful point about that all of our current relationship to data, even if we don't acknowledge it, it's very much not neutral. And this idea that there's so much work to be done to really rethink our relationship to data. That being said, I think there's so much work to do, partly because I think the presentation you've given has given many of these very spectacular presentations of data, but the truth is a lot of the, as we say, a lot of this information is actually even more boring than the CAT meme, even more boring than the old photographs or the emails. It's just these like no lines that are hidden behind everything we do. And in a sense, a lot of the data industry is based on this sort of monopoly on this boredom, this fact that Netflix grew up because no one was interested in this, like Mu Sigma, ZS, like Nielsen, they all grew up because none of the major consulting companies were interested in this. And so I'm curious if you ever thought, this is really focusing on the front end more so than tracing it to the source, but is there a way, without literally tracing the pipelines that we can break this monopoly on boredom, how do you see the role of this sort of generalized disinterest in the front end of like, I mean, maybe another way of phrasing this is like, what would it take for a person to actually have the discipline to look at their inbox and Marie Kondo their inbox? Labor? Yeah, I mean, who has the time to do that? But did you think about it? People have the time to be set in means of their time. And we do have it. And to take selfies, I don't have social media, I only have LinkedIn, that is the most like, you know. So I think it's a question of, yeah, class, it's a question of labor, like, it's like obviously it involves labor to engage in going to your inbox and deleting information. But it's a question also of compulsivity of accumulation, because we do the same as companies that you don't delete things just in case. Just in case it's useful for something that we project into the future. So it's not only boredom, I think it's a kind of form of compulsivity and the need for accumulation and the projecting on the future continuously about the potential usefulness of data. Yeah, I don't think it's similar to Netflix in that sense. I think it's another type of psychological state that makes it very ingrained in other forms of accumulation and consumption. So I think there's a tendency of like as consumers, what is our relation to information, not necessarily about boredom. And about your point about the images, I agree, but I mean, most of the images are the ones that exist. So like, if you find them exciting, that's great. But I mean, the data centers are quite, you know, unassuming, but maybe in the school of architecture we love unassuming stuff. I think we are also a perverted aesthetic interest. But there is a very interesting question, what is my relation with data information as I do the research because it's paradoxical. It's like, I have many files of videos and sound of all these data centers. And then I'm talking about deleting information. So it's something that is also, you know, worrying me. So I talk, I mean, just to feel a bit less guilty, I talk with someone that has a magazine that is called Low Tech Magazine and is in Barcelona and they have a website that is only dependent. I mean, it works because it has a server using solar panels. So if there is not sun, which doesn't happen that often in Barcelona, the website is not up. And if there is not enough energy accumulated, the definition of the image is low resolution. So I was talking with this person, thinking that the way in which, I mean, I can give talks on somebody I publish. I publish this as form of essays or videos and son will always be with them as a form of light that will be the place where the information will exist and in relation to that, which is not solving the issue. I still have to think through my own practice. So I appreciate your question about my own relation to images, not that much about the aesthetic, which I also think that is productive. I have to think about it more, but about its relation to the topic I'm addressing. Hi, thanks for starting this conversation, especially here in an architecture school, because I really do think it's important in two ways. One is, we're talking a lot about like individual production of data. And really you have to look at the corporations and the entertainment industry and the kind of data that I mean the level, if you just compare it, it's just million times more, but it does start in schools like here because we are training students to produce these incredible renderings or render farms or our reliance on the kind of images, the image culture. I mean, to me, it's also the kind of cultural question. So I think that the sort of I'm all with you for this letting go and kind of data mourning, but I think it perhaps it also starts at the end, like where do we, how do we produce it and who produces it and just the culture. So I sort of feel like in, okay, we should start this movement. I've just been up at reviews here and every time I see these incredible renderings and the realistic images that, so there it's also the question of software companies. I know it's a can of worms for you because you're talking about the data center, but the production end is where, to me, it's also the, of course, the role of software companies, corporations, et cetera, but also Mabel's question of e-waste. US is the only country who didn't sign the Basel Convention on e-waste. So there are things of regulations, et cetera. So I just was wondering, especially for your research with the data centers, like did you aid the role of software companies and, too, the kind of the European Union has the strict regulations around data center and what are you finding about all of that? Yeah, I mean, I think the question of where to put the emphasis it is at the end, like deleting or not producing, I think it's both, obviously, you know. For me, there is something that is much like as you point out, like the individual production of data is quite considerable, but it's nothing compared to certain industries. It's very easy, perhaps, to say that, you know, software companies, but actually the problem is that some of the industries that generate more data are ones that maybe we want them to generate data. That is the health industry. And then, obviously, we want to have databases to identify tumors quickly. You know, NASA forms of astronomical observation that I've been talking with people working in NASA and they have data centers and data centers because they are all the time collecting information. So there are industries that then, if we say, do we want to collect that data? Because then we have databases to analyze the origin of the universe or to cure an illness and then the question is like, well, I don't know. So that complicates a little bit, likes to put the blame on, obviously I put the blame on the corporations and the way in which they insist on, as I said, iPhone to bring to the market an iPhone that has even more capacity. Why we need that there? But it's true that at the end, the big majority of data is produced by companies that are other type of industries. But it's not that easy, I think, to make the choices. I think we should make the choices. But we are still trapped in this idea again of the possibility of that data that is collected with the use of data in the future. It's the same with health, it's the same with, yeah. That was great, thanks. Getting to the morning thing at the end, I suppose the question would be who's morning, right? So the assumption, I suppose, is that it's humans. So maybe the question is more, it's not to disagree, but let's say to think the question of morning. Presumably the only way to launch kind of a political action is for humans to already mourn their own demise. So that's the hence the energy argument. There's great fear in the species of being, of having kind of killed itself off. So the thought here is that a sort of, there can be a political movement launched on the basis of humans mourning the loss of humans, right? But to the extent that the human is the product of the data systems rather than user, then maybe it's a question of thinking morning, thinking kind of machine mourning. And risking the thought of how to conceive of mourning as profitable, right? So how to set up a kind of sort of viral interest in sort of machine mourning. So a kind of, for example, if I could develop a way of getting rid of data within a data farm while not interfering with my efficiency of finding patterns and data that enable me to extract money, then I could run my data center more efficiently. So in other words, mourning could be, could be a kind of software kind of project. So two levels of it, right? One, the kind of big brother theory that mourning would put mourning in the hands of the big brother. And the other one would be to maybe just to de-center the human from the picture and maybe line up the bacteria and the other species. And it was so struck by your kind of more trans species kind of reed of Atacama where one could sense, and it was the microorganisms that were like the source of the lithium and so on. So I just, I kind of, as you know, put interested in bacterial rights. So if you kind of took a bacterial rights perspective, I wonder if there might be sort of data management implications of kind of an bacterial ethics. You know what I mean? Something like this? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's, I mean, what I found it interesting in the case of the people is fascinating and we are trying even with algorithms to decode something that is not readable anymore. So to me, that is a little bit of paradox that will happen with data because finally there will be a huge agglomeration of data, perhaps beyond the human, right? So then the question of who is mourning the data, it becomes the question. And most of the times these storage systems imagine apocalypse. So all the industry is based on the idea that data can survive humanity. To the point that even one of the most sophisticated mediums that has been discussed as data storage is DNA. So the DNA, in this case artificial strings of DNA, is a very stable and dense medium for storing information. One could imagine that this information that will last for millennia, all the information of humanity will last more than humanity. So the question of mourning, as in the Kippus, is like I could imagine what it would mean to try to decode that's not information of the strings of DNA, artificial containing the history of humankind when human is not there and bacteria's trying to read through corrupted files. I love it. I think it's, you know, I don't want the apocalypse, but this is what the industry is imagining. Like that's why it's so important to keep files alive. It's not that it's more important the file that the human is more important than your data, that your self, that's why we cannot delete it. And then the other question is like, I have, sometimes I'm tempted by partnering with Google and saying let's develop a software to delete data. Why the first is that you have to choose what to delete and not that happens, you know, sometimes in Instagram stories or something that by default things disappear and it's only by choice when you ask things to stay. Yeah, maybe if I'm not making enough money in the university's and curatorial work, I bring this idea to San Francisco. I think they're ready for you. I'm making a pitch, by the way. Just to think one last moment about this, the problem of mourning, because it's so beautiful the way you've described this, that we all know we're produced as data subjects, but we willfully produce ourselves as data subjects. And so letting go mourning the data is also mourning the loss of ourselves. And it's such a complex narrative and beautifully presented and a great provocation and a great problem to launch here at the school, like Canembury and for us to think about all our own data practices and our data politics and our data refusals. Thank you so much. Thank you.