Composing Relations with the Data Cloud: The Art of Cosmopolitical Knowledge Production

In her book Cloud Ethics, Louise Amoore provides two paradigms to address the expansive geography of the ineffable ‘cloud’ of cloud computing. Cloud I is concerned with the spatiality of data stored in physical cloud architectures while Cloud II expresses the analytic regime of the cloud; how cloud computing transforms the world into calculable data. Data technologies and remote sensors roam the landscape and transform our understanding of environmental processes, yet by operating at microtemporal scales, they often defy human sense perception. Since we have no direct access to the machinic realm of data processing, how do we compose relations between technical circuits and humans? I propose the exhibition ‘ENTANGLEMENT’, curated by art and design collective ANNEX, to sensorially and critically articulate these very relations, rendering the cloud more intelligible in the process. The curators aimed to construct the cloud as their entry for the Irish Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture, using data centres as a typological reference point. Through exposing the gritty materiality of data infrastructure, they sought to de-mystify the frictionless veneer of digital technologies and undo any assumptions of an ethereal, transcendent cloud space. This performative multi-media installation in tandem with the curator's extensive urban research gave participants the opportunity to bear witness to diverse strata of the omnipresent cloud at once. I argue that the project succeeds in highlighting the invisibilised spatial presence of Cloud I and experiencifies the imperceptible cloud analytic of Amoore's Cloud II. In accounting for our implication in global networked infrastructure, the Irish context is prescient given Ireland's historical evolution from colonial outpost to neoliberal tech hub of western Europe. Finally, I contend that this project aligns with Isabelle Stengers’ concept of ‘cosmopolitics’, a space where multi-scalar relations between knowledges can coexist, owing to art's unique capacity to hold multiple experiential realms in tension without compromising on complexity.