DATA CENTERS GRAND TOUR (THIS DATA BELONGS HERE), commissioned by e-PERMANENT, is a virtual tour into the materiality of data.
From the description on e-PERMANENT: «ʻData Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here)ʼ by Silvio Lorusso is the second e-PERMANENT artist commission for an online work. ʻData Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here)ʼ starts here and will be an ongoing project for which Silvio Lorusso will be purchasing domain names and hosting in each country across the globe. For each domain a single web page will be hosted showing a satellite view of the geographical site at which that particular domainʼs data is stored. The tour will start by clicking at a destination, one click will take you to the next domain in a different country where you will again be able to view where that domainʼs data is stored, and so on until all of the countries in the world are covered. Start the tour above.
ONE CLICK DESTINATIONS AND THE FREEWHEELING FLOW OF INFORMATION
Being accustomed to the freewheeling flow of information on the Internet and the immaterial quality of the digital age there is a tendency to overlook the physical embodiment of data. Silvio Lorussoʼs work seeks to demonstrate that data has a material reality. When Google published images of its numerous data centres last year they revealed that it is a vast physical network that allows for 20 billion web pages to be indexed per day by its search engine. By creating websites which refer only to the site at which the data of the image you are looking at is stored Lorusso brings a transparency to the experience of being online. He also draws our attention to the implications of these storage sites in terms of the vulnerability of private documents and files and their hidden impact in terms of energy consumption. ʻData Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here)ʼ creates a direct connection between the physicality of data and its digital representation.»