The Cloud in the Sea (2020) video excerpt from live simulation, HD video, stereo sound.
The Cloud in the Sea (2020) is a computer simulation of an underwater Microsoft data centre that was temporarily submerged off the coast of the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Using computer modelling, real time simulation tools and underwater audio recordings, the work aims to bring attention to the materiality of “The Cloud” and its geographic locations.
The title of the work references a rearrangement of the precipitation/water cycle to include networked computational infrastructure, pointing towards the ways in which nature and technology are bound within complex material entanglements.
The underwater placement of a data centre solved two problems for Microsoft- it placed the technology closer to people who use it - and it used the low temperatures of the ocean to cool the metal structure and computer hardware inside – referred to as “free cooling” within data centre parlance. The Cloud in the Sea aims to question how deep the logics of capitalism run within our conceptions of nature and technology.
With thanks to James Davoll for the underwater sound recordings.
Paul Dolan (b.1982) is an artist and Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University. His simulated moving image works use computer-generated imagery and programming to explore themes of nature, media, materiality and time. Recent activity includes published chapter Recalcitrant Temporalities: Heterogenous Time and the Simulated Image (2020) in Machinic Assemblages of Desire, (Leuven University Press, 2020).