The Hmm’s Data Centre Tour

After last year’s Data Centre Tour, that quickly sold out and was a lot fun, we’ve decided to head back to Agriport this year to revisit the data centres with an updated program.

Data centres are a crucial part of our internet infrastructure, and yet they remain black boxes in the landscape and highly invisible structures we don’t think about often enough. But how do these data centres impact the places in which they are built and the communities that live there? And what impact are data centres already having on the global environment? What resources are necessary for our online infrastructures, and who gets to decide how they are implemented?

During this very special field trip we will take a tourbus from Amsterdam to the industrial park Agriport in the Wieringermeerpolder, which houses Google’s and Microsoft’s hyperscale data centres. During our hike along these huge constructions, we will take a look at how they came into existence, their infrastructure, and contemplate our relationship with data centres and what possible alternatives we could imagine taking place in these landscapes.

We are proud to introduce  Marloes de Valk, a software artist, writer, and PhD researcher, who co-organised this event with us. She has been following the development of the data centres in the Wieringermeerpolder for a long time.

The full line-up of speakers will be announced soon!