In this presentation, I will examine the discursive space where the underlying materialities of data centers are performed. Since large-scale data centers are typically not accessible to the public, images of what happens "under the hood" are mostly based on eyewitness accounts and photographs by few privileged visitors. The different performances of materiality have manifold ethico-political implications: they can do justice to the formidable agency of the technologies sustaining our digital landscape, but they might as well raise concerns of the deepening dependence of ICT on scarce natural resources. Presented at New Materialism Conference 2016: "Performing Situated Knowledges: Space, Time, Vulnerability", Warsaw, Poland, Sept 21-23 2016.

1. Juhana Venäläinen
PhD, post-doc researcher
University of Eastern Finland
juhana.venalainen@uef.fi
New Materialism Conference 2016 / Stream 4 / Panel 3: Earthy objects as companions / Warsaw, 22 Sep 2016

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCSt5kerv1k

4. ”I have always believed that
technology should do the
hard work […] so users can
do what makes them
happiest: living and loving,
not messing with annoying
computers!”
GOOGLE’S CEO AND CO-FOUNDED LARRY
PAGE, IN GOOGLE’S ANNUAL REPORT 2011

5. After the long hype of ”immaterial” production
the ”digitalized” economy,
and the ”weightless” world (Coyle 1998)
why are the materialities of data
now being foregrounded?

6. “Data centers are the
factories of the 21st century.”
AXELLE LEMAIRE, FRENCH MINISTER FOR DIGITAL AFFAIRS, IN WSJDLIVE, 2014
https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/19

7. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/finnish_data_center_start/
”Mayorof Hamina, Finland: Google
creates confidence in the future”

8. Cook, Gary (2012) How Clean is Your Cloud? Greenpeace
International, Amsterdam, p. 5.
”The growth and scale of investment in
the cloud is truly mind-blowing, with
estimates of a 50-fold increase in the
amount of digital information by 2020
and nearly half a trillion in investment
in the coming year […] [D]espite the
tremendous innovation they contain
and the clean-energy potential they
possess, most IT companies are rapidly
expanding without considering how
their choice of energy could impact
society."

9. Cook, Gary (2014) Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating
the Green Internet. Greenpeace International, Amsterdam, p. 5.
”Unfortunately, despite the leadership
and innovation demonstrated by green
internet pioneers [e.g. Google,
Facebook and Apple], other companies
lag far behind, with little sense of
urgency, choosing to paper over their
growing dirty energy footprints […]”

10. — Composed of servers, storage and
network devices; supported by
power and cooling equipment
— The backbone, or the ”central
nervous system”, of the networked
ICT infrastructure
— Varying in scale from single server
”closets” to huge ”farms” with
floor areas of 150,000 m2
— Fastest growing CO2 footprint
across the whole ICT sector
(Whitehead et al. 2014)

11. B. Whitehead et al. / Building and Environment 82 (2014), p. 155, based on Koomey 2011
(370 TWh/y = 110 % UK’s annual energy consumption = 2 % of global consumption)

12. Growing concern on the environmental impacts of
the global ICT infrastructure
à
Growing efforts from the industry to prove its
environmental friendliness

13. https://www.google.com/green/bigpicture/#/
”1 Google search= driving a Prius for 56
meters”
”1 Google Search= using a 11W energy-
saving lamp forone hour”
”2 Google searches = boiling a cup of water
in a kettle”
…

14. — Environmental entanglements of the digitally
networked economy (2016–)
— Purpose: to study the transforming bond between
“the economic” and “the ecological” by analyzing
the environmental underpinnings of digitally
networked production

15. Data centers as “emblems” / paradigmatic figures
of the digital economy:
1) interfaces between the binary oppositions of the
immaterial/material, natural/cultural, and
economic/ecological
2) intermediaries that link together the three pivotal
aspects of the post-industrial production process:
data, energy, and economic value

16. How are the materialities of data centers
voiced and “performed” in
technology journalism?

17. — Google hired the
photographer Connie Zhou
to shoot eight of their data
centers in 2012
— Photos were published on
Google’s dedicated data
center website (”Where the
internet lives”)
— … as well as featured
throughout the technology-
oriented online & print
media
http://www.popphoto.com/photos/2012/10/interview-connie-zhou -being -first-p hotographer-i nside-goog les-massive-data-ce nters

19. How does the materiality of data “vibrate” through
photography and photojournalism?

20. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/4

21. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/4
“It's not surprising that so many of the images released by Google would
highlight efficiency and environmental friendliness--water vapor means
"our cooling towers are at their most efficient […]” (Lecher 2012)

22. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/4
“Hundreds of fans can be seen taking hot air up and away from the
racks, cooling it, and recycling the air back through.” (Storm 2014)

23. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/4
• Unveiling the materiality of data for
making an argumentin the debate
about the ICT’s environmental
footprint
• Data center photography harnessed
for giving a positive image of the
industry; or criticized as a ”PR push”
• Materialities voiced in terms of CO2
(carbon reductionism)

24. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/12

25. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/12
"But now we enter the floor. Big doesn’t begin to describe it. Row
after row of server racks seem to stretch to eternity. Joe Montana in
his prime could not throw a football the length of it.” (Levy 2012)

26. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/12
"Google says when you're on its website, you're accessing one of
the most powerful server networks in the known universe. Looking
at these images, it's hard to disagree.” (Storm 2014)

27. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/12
• Unveiling the materiality of data for
demonstrating the huge scale of
physical infrastructures behind ”the
cloud”
• Celebrates technological progress
• Materialities voiced in terms of
rapidly transforming, machine-
mediated human experience
(technological reductionism)

28. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/10

29. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/10
"It would have been disappointing if Google’s tech centres had been grey and
uninspiring.But fortunately for us all they are actually multi-coloured data
wonderlands with a carefully created sense of fun and whimsy
which reflects the company’s values.” (Alderson 2012)

30. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/10
”Data centres have to be efficient.
That doesn’t stop them being beautiful.”
(TechWeekEurope Staff 2014)

31. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/10
• Unveiling the materiality of data for
aesthetic celebration
• Serves to highlight the beauty of
huge human-made structures, but
also to depoliticize them and
dampen the critical voices
• Materialities voiced in terms of
aesthetic play (aesthetic
reductionism)

32. — How does the matter of data come to matter in
Google’s data centre photography and its mediations
through technology journalism?
1. As matters of fact in the environmental
debate
2. As matters of grandeur illustrating the
technological infrastructures that are
intensivelyreshaping the human experience
3. As matters of art where the ”geekiness of the
kingdom of bits” (Levy 2012) gets an aesthetic
manifestation

33. — Could the visual accounts of data centers serve to
release more ”thing-power” (Bennett 2010) of their
materialities – to open up their agentic capacities
(Coole 2013) – , or are they more likely to narrow down the
understandings of the data’s vibrant materialities,
leading to over-simplified reductions?
— à not either/or but both/and?
— data center photojournalism as ”performances” that can be turned into
platforms of politicization/ depoliticization
— unresolved ambiguityabout whether the ”stuff” behind data is ”only” a
backdrop (an INFRA-structure) or somethingmore/else

34. Thank you!
juhana.venalainen@uef.fi
http://juhanavenalainen.net
Twitter: @juhana_

35. — Sources
— Alderson, Rob (2012) Connie Zhou’s photos of the Google data centres are satisfyingly Wonka-ish. It’s Nice That. http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/connie-zhou-where-the-
internet-lives (Accessed 18 Sep 2016).
— Bridgwater, Adrian (2015) Forget Nokia: Finland’s promising future is to be server central. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/finnish_data_center_start/ (Accessed 21 January
2016)
— Lecher, Colin (2012) 12 Beautiful Photos Of Google’s (Problematic) Data Centers. Popular Science. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-10/12-beautiful-photos-googles-
problematic-data-centers (Accessed 13 Jan 2016)
— Levy, Steven (2012) Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center | WIRED. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/ (Accessed 18 Sep
2016).
— Storm, Christian (2014) Take a Rare Peek Inside the Massive Data Centers That Power Google. Slate.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/10/23/behind_the_scenes_look_at_google_data_centers.html (Accessed 13 Jan 2016)
— TechWeekEurope Staff (2014) Inside The World’s Most Interesting Data Centres. TechWeekEurope UK. http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/workspace/google-facebook-equinix-
data-centres-135238 (Accessed 22 Jan 2016).
— Images: Connie Zhou / Google (https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/); Wikimedia Commons
— Literature:
— Bennett, Jane (2010) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press, Durham.
— Cook, Gary (2012) How Clean is Your Cloud? Greenpeace International, Amsterdam.
— Cook, Gary (2014) Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet. April 2014. Greenpeace International, Washington, D.C.
— Coole, Diana (2013) Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences. Millennium - Journal of International
Studies 41:3, 451–469.
— Coyle, Diane (1997) The weightless world: strategies for managing the digital economy. Capstone, Oxford.
— Koomey, Jonathan G. (2011) Growth in data center electricity use 2005 to 2010. Analytics Press, Oakland, CA.
— Whitehead, Beth, Andrews, Deborah, Shah, Amip & Maidment, Graeme (2014) Assessing the environmental impact of data centres part 1: background, energy use and metrics.
Building and Environment 82, 151–159.