Server Room
2024Server Room is a site-specific installation. A spatial transformation through colour and distant, eerie sound that takes inspiration from the current evolution of small server rooms to hyperscale data centers. The work tries to highlight the overwhelming sound environment and the effect of noise that workers have to endure daily.
Traditionally, many organizations hosted and managed their own servers, often in a dedicated room within the workplace. The accelerating rate of cloud computing has shifted local on-premises servers to globally shared servers in distant data centers. The exponential growth of the industry has created an enormous invisible factory, an enclosed environment, with no consideration of the humans working in it. Workers continuously build more racks in inhuman noise environments which leave many with hearing loss and concentration problems.
Server Room turns the gallery into a unnatural space. Using only daylight as a light source, all entry points of light are covered with a filter gel. The space morphs into an synthetic atmosphere of hyped up green with a certain feeling of suspense. The haunting but soothing sound of Server Room comes from a room next door, rather than from within the open room. From far away the low bass frequency echoes through the space and is paired with a single female voice, adding to the ghostly environment. The sound has been recorded from within a real server room and has been adapted to a calmer tone to provoke empathy towards the workers' shared experiences.
4 channel audio installation, lighting gels
Photography: Mischa Haller (Dresden) Frank Kleinbach (Sindelfingen)