Farm: John Gerrard
Sometimes the relationship between drawing and reality is itself a metaphor. In John Gerrard's virtual reality renderings there is a seamless dissolve between real life footage and virtual reconstructions which asks us questions as to what we know and assume and what is the reality we work with.
In 'Farm' Gerrard has confronted one of the most obvious but somehow almost ignored issues of current life. Where are those 'clouds' of data that we so happily save to when we are building our online presence or saving our precious images.
John Gerrard
Gerrard asked Google if he could film their data storage farm in Oklahoma but he was refused permission. However Google don't yet own the airspace above their facility, so he hired a helicopter and had the building filmed from the air. He then had the entire facility rendered as a virtual reality construct using the filmed information. Using game engine software, he was able to construct a world that is eerily like our own. The camera pans slowly across the Oklahoma plains, its movement revealing the uncomfortable fact that all our data ends up somewhere in the USA lodged within a gigantic data server. It will be kept cool using huge air conditioning systems eating up energy and creating a sustainability conundrum.
Gerrard has also made virtual reality films of mega sized animal farms and often exhibits both these types of farming building complexes alongside each other. Industrial farming of both data and animals suggests that we think in a similar way about both. We don't really want to know about either. If we really knew about the conditions that the cow had to endure before it was processed, we probably wouldn't eat beef and if we really thought about what is happening to our data, we probably wouldn't be using media so thoughtlessly and be consigning so much of our lives to these anonymous data stores.
The anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate has made a very interesting case study entitled, “The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage,” He reminds us that the invisible cloud of data that we all work with has a very material presence. He asks us to 'unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fibre optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more.' He asks us to 'attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives.' The Cloud' he states, 'is not only material, but is also an ecological force.' I would hope you will go on to read his original article, where he reminds us that, 'Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilisation. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.' I'm sure you are already becoming aware of what this means in terms of energy use.
All we are seeing in Gerrard's computer model is a skinned wireframe image, but it is so detailed that we tend to forget what we are seeing, which is itself a metaphor for much of our lives today; we tend to forget to remember that every time we save an image, somewhere the heat rises.
See also:
Cross contour drawing and computer realisations
Making models to work from
Computer generated art and coding
Fine art and computer animation
Artificial Intelligence
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