Static Beauty of Cloud Infrastructure Across Three Screens

As cloud computing permeates more and more of our lives, artists increasingly attempt to understand it and reflect it in their work.

Earlier this month we highlighted a musical work by composer Matt Parker based on recordings of ambient noise he had collected inside a data center at Birmingham City University in Birmingham, England.

Another artist, Timo Arnal, has been fascinated with the visual aspects of data centers. He has produced a three-screen video installation, using material shot at Telefonica’s facility in Alcalá de Henares, Spain (just outside of Madrid). The installation is on display at Big Bang Data, an art exhibition that opened this month in Barcelona.

Called Internet machine, the film is “about the invisible infrastructures of the Internet,” Arnal writes. “In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the Internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them.”