Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

7H
Digital Infrastructures (Data Centres) (Chair, Ned Rossiter)
Brett Neilson
Archive, Warehouse, Cable Station, Mainframe Room → Data Centre
Otherwise known as server farms, data centres are box-like architectural facilities that accommodate
computer and network systems that store, process and transfer digital information in high volume at fast
speeds. These facilities are the core components of a rarely discussed but rapidly expanding data storage
and management industry that has become critical to global economy and society. This paper takes a
genealogical approach to data centres, examining how they evolved from infrastructural facilities such as
archives, warehouses, cable stations, and mainframe rooms. By tracing this genealogy, I argue that data
centres are not only technical infrastructures but also institutional forms that are increasingly crucial to the
making of territory and expression of power. Particular attention will be paid to how these installations
establish spatiotemporal relations according to logics of client-server networking. This provides a basis for
asking how data centres contribute to transformations of sovereignty and governance in the future-present.
Liam Magee* & Ned Rossiter* Operationalising the Data Centre: Algorithmic Platforms and the Distribution of
Computational Labour
Data centres coordinate the global traffic of data transactions on finance, populations and media. Yet their
opaque physical and technical architecture obscures much about their internal operations. Algorithmic
platforms designed for data centre “hyper-scale” computation are, however, widely known with the field of
computer science, enabling us to critically test data centres within the sandbox of standard computational
architectures. We examine the corporate lineages, discourses and operations of several Apache Foundation
projects designed for large scale parallel processing: Hadoop, Spark and Beam. The open source status of
these projects constitutes the preparatory scaffolding for the incorporation of future generations of users
offering their lives and labour as freely exploitable digital surplus. Interrogating the intersection between
parallel algorithms, data centre operations and digital economies, we are compelled to rethink critical digital
methods that might harness the political potential of digital infrastructures.
Orit Halpern
The “Smart” Mandate: Infrastructure, Responsive Environments and “Preemptive Hope”
Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned
the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards “infrastructure” as a site of value
production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and “crisis”. This talk
will interrogate the different forms of futurity and life that are currently emerging from this complex
contemporary relationship between technology and design by engaging in a genealogy of “smartness”
ranging from cybernetic ideas of machine learning in the late 1950s to early efforts to integrate computing
into design at MIT in the Architecture Machine Group in the 1970s to contemporary greenfield “smart”
developments in South Korea and Abu Dhabi and server farms in New Jersey and Stockholm. In doing so, the
talk will ask how these contemporary practices in ubiquitous computing, responsive environments, data
storage, and “resilient” planning are shaping the design of large scale infrastructures and our imaginaries of
the future of life.
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