Center of Doubt

»Center of Doubt«
2012–2015, Arts-based research project, 3-channel video installation including:

»Crystal Computing« (Google Inc., St. Ghislain)
HD video, 9:20 min.

»Patent Application Data«
HD video, 8:06 min.

»The Formation of Clouds«
HD video, 7:24 min.

At the exhibition from October 20, 2017 to August 5, 2018

»Center of Doubt« is a long-term arts-based research project, which aims to explore and visualize the appearance of the infrastructure of planetary-scale computation.

Two different approaches provide insight into the opaque nature of data centers and (tele-) communication technologies: on the one hand, it is an investigation about the materiality and the local circumstances of the infrastructure; and on the other hand it is an attempt to offer an alternative visual representation of the issues connected with information technology. The latter are mainly presented in »cloudy« rhetoric and visuals in advertisements, in science fiction images, or the jargon of the military.

The appearance of commercial »cloud computing« and its materialization in data centers and their supporting infrastructure is a turning point of a new era, the era of centralized Internet in which big corporations compete to gain fundamental status for their software and hardware on the market.

According to Benjamin H. Bratton's recent theory the worldwide network of software and hardware, named »the Stack«, will reshape our geopolitical reality and could redefine the way we understand national sovereignty. Data centers could be essentially important hubs of the Stack, which is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture.