Floating Points of Reference. Trust, Enchantment and The Shifting Visibilities of Digital Infrastructures

Författare

Robert Willim

Summary, in English

In 2012 Google started a campaign to make parts of its infrastructure visible. Up until that year the company’s data centers had been highly secret facilities hidden from the public eye. The visualization campaign was mainly based on stories and images distributed via the Internet. The images were often suggestive, invoking both enchantment and trust.

The text starts by pointing out and discussing how digital infrastructures have been surprisingly invisible since the 1990’ies. It then positions Google’s campaign in a longer history of infrastructure visualizations. It relates the images of data centers and technology to David E. Nye’s concept technological and industrial sublime, as well as to the author’s earlier studies of Industrial Cool and aestheticizations of manufacturing industries. At the end of the text notions of trust are discussed in relation to Google’s campaign as well as to some related endeavors to visualize corporate digital infrastructures.

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