Visible Data

VVisible Data Academic_Professor Constance Vale_2020 Architectural Fiction_London

Fiction: After Lloyd’s of London went through a successful transformation into a data center, it became the benchmark for urban data center design. Through other English cities, replicas started to be built to better serve the needs of the ever-increasing population size of urban areas. Being that the data centers are fully autonomous, they regularly are scanned with LiDAR technolo-gy to perform structural and visual reports. Though the world has increased its technological capacity, it has only been through the expense of the environment. Fossil fuel companies have continued to buy interest in government and land use. The cities of tomorrow may be here, but also are the landscapes. Stripped, over-worked, without life. Ironically, these data centers, that support the destruction of the landscape and the larger world, also keep the information on the levels of pollution and can run calculations on when the next air-related quarantine is – and how long it will be. The data centers are essential for the way we life, but that begs the question, is the way we live essential? Big data has been a cancerous entity that stuck its roots in our society early in the digital era, and we have yet to reckon with the formal consequences.