critical infrastructure lab

Join us for amateur exploration into the visibility of wireless equipment and services dotted around the city! We collectively map, observe and measure the techno-diversity of digital infrastructure in urban spaces. Data and infrastructure walks are a creative method and a social practice, which can be used to reflect on data power through critical infrastructure studies. It serves a variety of purposes, from public engagement, education, and artistic research to empirical studies. 

Data center walks

We started data center walks with a simple question about how to make the invisible visible. People tend to forget about the infrastructure that lies beneath the data. For instance, the cloud remains a concept reduced to a depiction of a cloud, stripping data from its materiality.  We usually do not see data centers, nor do we think about them in a material sense. By taking groups into data centers with us, we explore the resources, politics, and human labor that sustains them. To do so, we walk around and inside the data centers, observing physical traces as well as user-generated information online. 

Infrastructure walks

We hold a series of “infrastructure walks” in Amsterdam and Berlin, exploring the visibility of digital infrastructures deployed in public spaces. The experience allows us to uncover data flows and to study datafication in urban areas. By engaging with the infrastructures around us, we seek to expose reconfigurations of power relations in the city through emerging technologies and protocols. Infrastructure walks address the question of what media technologies may mean “after all”, that is in the context of the life world, lived experiences and action possibilities of end users as embodied citizens. Insights can countermap the spatial control exercised through the electromagnetic spectrum in urban spaces. Often, us and the groups find that infrastructures should be (1) noticeable, (2) observable, (3) contestable or programmable to their users.

Upcoming walks and related events: https://www.uu.nl/en/events/data-walk-workshop-sensing-digital-materiality-in-urban-public-spaces