This year, we’ll be looking at the energy consumption of AI, amongst other things. Over the past year, Microsoft for example has been implementing their Copilot AI in their software products, and tech companies’ carbon emissions as a whole have increased in order to keep up with the AI boom. After all, Shrimp Jesuses have to be processed somehow, somewhere.
For this very special field trip, we will take a tour bus from Amsterdam to the industrial park Agriport in the Wieringermeerpolder, home to Google’s and Microsoft’s hyperscale data centres. Data centres are a crucial part of our internet infrastructure, yet they remain black boxes in the landscape—highly invisible structures we don’t think about often enough.
During our hike along these huge constructions, we will take a look at how they came into existence, their infrastructures, and contemplate our relationship with data centres and the possible alternatives we could imagine taking place in these landscapes.
How do these data centres impact the places in which they are built and the communities that live there? What impact are data centres already having on the global environment? And what resources are necessary for our online infrastructures, and who gets to decide how they are implemented?
This event is co-organised with Marloes de Valk, a software artist, writer, and PhD researcher. She is a long-time follower of the development of the data centres in the Wieringermeerpolder.
More speakers will be announced soon!
🗓 Date: Saturday 9 November 2024
🕗 Program starts: 13.00 CET
🕗 Approximate return time: 17.00 CET
📍 Bus pick-up and drop-off location: NDSM-plein, Amsterdam
🎟 Tickets: standard €35 / student discount €25
♿️ Accessibility Note
The live closed captioning that we usually offer for those with hearing impairments, is unfortunately not available for this event. It will be included in the audio report that will be uploaded to our livestream platform afterwards.
The walk along the data centre is approximately 2,5 km and takes about 45 minutes. The rest of the program is seated, on the bus, and in a lunchroom. We can offer a car to ride along the length of the data centre for those not able to do the walk. Please reach out to us if you’d like to make use of this.
Marloes de Valk is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the climate emergency and being spied on the devices surrounding her. She is a PhD researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, looking into the material and social impact of the networked image on the climate emergency, focusing on the entanglements between greenwashing and increasing energy and resource consumption of circulating networked images. Link
Leo Scarin
Leo Scarin is an artist and educator working with code. Based in The Hague, he researches the social, political, and increasingly ecological impact of digital culture, by means of interactive and performative media. As half of RGBdog—creative studio for convivial technology—Leo produces experimental publications, community-based events, and educational contexts. During the tour Leo will give a participatory demo that provides insight into the energy consumption of training a large language model. Link
Lars Ruiter
Lars Ruiter is a councillor in the Dutch municipality of Hollands Kroon since 2018. He was involved in a flawed and non-transparent political process of attracting over 200 hectares of hyperscale data centres to his municipality. By more deeply investigating the societal disadvantages and environmental side effects, he was able—together with many others—to start a more realistic public debate about data centres on a national scale. His ultimate goal is to create more room for civic political participation when considering whether or not to attract data centres. Link
anna andrejew
anna andrejew is an artist-researcher, writer, and permaculturalist based in The Hague. As a former humanitarian aid worker, she transitioned fully to her artistic practice in 2019. Her work, grounded in ecofeminism, explores the memory of matter and the traces humans leave on landscapes, aiming to create a fluid, embodied understanding of ecology. Her practice spans both material and immaterial forms, including installations, photography, performances, writing, and conversations, often incorporating unstable organic matter and participatory elements. Currently, she is researching themes such as the agency of non-human materials—like soil and water- and the physicality of digital infrastructures.
Ola Bonati
Ola Bonati is a researcher, designer and storyteller working on topics exploring the implications of various technologies in our culture. In her work, she investigates the consequences of Web 3.0 hype, politics of design, digital monopolies, platform labor, and personal digital habits. She frequently turns to writing (ranting) about technology but remains hopeful and playful by creating critical new media pieces. Her latest focus is on digital hoarding, asking: how to crawl our way out of tech dystopia and step into more kind practices both; for ourselves and the planet?
