Investigates how data production and consumption territorialize the
physical landscape filtered through Ireland's role in global
communications and, as told by the Irish Pavilion at the 2021 Venice
Architecture Biennale, features an installation that focuses on the
materiality of data infrastructure in space.
As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data
technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the
Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the
physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment
under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data
production and highlight the myth that information technologies are
hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape.
The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical
role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure.
In 1866, the world's first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the
West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo
Marconi transmitted some of the world's first wireless radio messages
from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today, Dublin
has overtaken London as the data centre hub of Europe, hosting 25% of
all available European server space. And by the year 2027, data centres
are forecast to consume a third of Ireland's total electricity demand.
The book aims to raise awareness around the hardware of the global
internet and Cloud services, which is interwoven with the Irish
landscape--made manifest through the vast constellation of data centres,
fibre optic cable networks, and energy grids that have come to populate
its cities and suburbs over recent decades.
The publication accompanies and supports Entanglement, the Irish
Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale by archiving the
production of the pavilion filtered through a series of poetic excerpts
that describe the form, components, content and furniture that make up
the installation. At the same time the book is conceived as more than
just a catalog by positioning some of the cultural and spatial
implications of data technologies in Ireland within a more universal
context through contributions by ANNEX, the team selected to produce the
pavilion, as well as invited contributors from the disciplines of Media
Theory; Journalism; Computer Science, Geography; History and
Architecture.
