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10 kg From the New Factory

Readymade art at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin by Sebastian Schmieg and Johannes P Osterhoff, featuring a box of destructed hard drives from one of Google’s data centers:

A box of destructed hard-drives we received from Google’s data center in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium.

The origin for our interest in these objects was Google’s own documentation Datacenter’s Inside Look – depictions of spacious, cool server farms in saturated Google colors.

A photograph of this series shows destructed hard drives, the data centers’ material basis. For us, they are the fundamental elements, facilitating services and interfaces which are used for our modern communication and the organization of knowledge.

In their disassembled and dysfunctional state, as an afterglow of the data center factory, they remain loaded with meaning and provide not only a glimpse behind the shiny interface layer of Google’s applications, but also point to the actual sites of digital life.

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