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The hardware infrastructure needed to support the contemporary media ecologies has a vast material impact on our environment. These material manifestations can be seen in various stages in the lifecycle of digital technology: from extraction of raw materials, transportation and production, to energy needed to operate networks and data centres, to disposal and e-waste. Data centres are essential infrastructures enabling media ecologies, and often owned by tech companies. They are used platform economies that use data to extract value from local markets. They are often housed in anonymous architectural structures isolated from their direct surroundings and the communities that live there. The reclaiming data centres project proposes a more beneficial relationship data centres, local urban environments and communities. We looked at three platform economy services – uber drivers, food production and delivery, online dating and sex workers - and envisioned how these communities would reclaim three data centres within Los Angeles. The project was designed through web scraping, ripping models of exiting data centres and their environments and remixing them through mixing different models together (kitbashing).
Contemporary media ecologies are enabled through vast material infrastructures: the production, maintenance and disposal of this hardware layer have a substantial and long lasting environmental impact.
We chose three sites in LA: Evocative Data Centre; Coresite Data Center; Equinix Data Center to match three communities: driver; virtual lovers and delivery people.
We identified three possible scenarios of working in a highly automated future: jobs that are replaced, transformed by automation and new emerging jobs.
We propose specific design methods which are based on our research into Visual Cultures of Compression: Shanzhai culture, kitbashing, filesharing, facking, and D.I.Y.
We conducted an extensive number of experiments, including: point cloud scanning, image cloud processing, spatial prototype research, style transfer and model bashing.
The searching platform shows the sources communities could use to create a common keyword database.
The operation, zoning and materiality of or design project was inspired from data collected on communities through web scraping and object detection.
We regard the three designed data centres as experimental prototypes for alternative future data infrastructures, where local communities will be linked in a decentralised networks.
Includes several additions: heat exchange facilities, gathering place of delivery man and robots, urban farm and urban ranch.
This data centre is reclaimed by adding: a car restaurant, living areas, car parts manufacturing, server infrastructure and automobile culture exhibition and show rooms.
This data centre is reclaimed by adding physical and simulated dating places.