Obscured by Clouds: Cloud Computing from Data Center Sound Art

This article aims to contribute to a new field called “data center studies” through the analysis of sound art pieces that address the internet’s infrastructure related to information storage and processing, based on a selection of works that is not intended to be exhaustive but rather indicative of the emergence and growth of an area of aesthetic-critical interest at the intersection of art and technology, an area that could be called “data center sound art.” By recording the sounds of the server rooms and intervening poetically in the theater of operations of big data, the artists shift the focus of attention from the journalistic or promotional to the artistic, from the visual to the sonic, to scrutinize the data center as an object of research through other means. The artistic approach taken by the analyzed sound works contributes to demystifying the rhetoric of the cloud, moving toward the perception of a series of materially and infrastructurally complex spaces, generally private, difficult to access and highly noisy,
within which value is concentrated, and large volumes of information are managed.