Server Room
Server Room is a site-specific installation. A spatial transformation through colour and distant, eerie sound that takes inspiration from data centre infrastructures and the abnormal work environments within the Server Room. The work attempts to highlight the overwhelming noise, heat and humidity that workers have to endure daily.
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 environments which leave many with hearing loss and concentration problems. Server Room turns the gallery into an emotional space, making the architecture feel other-worldly and alien: a constructed world from which nature is strangely absent.
Every entry point of daylight in the space is covered with a coloured gel filter. The gallery morphs into a synthetic atmosphere of hyped up green creating a feeling of anticipation. Haunting but soothing sounds come from a room next door. Low bass frequencies echo through the space and are paired with a single female voice, adding to the ghostly environment. The recording is from within a real server room and has been edited to create a calmer tone in an empathetic nod to the data centre employees. The work in this way creates a shared experience in which to question the relationship between human, machine and nature.
4 channel audio installation, lighting gels
Photography: Mischa Haller (Dresden) Frank Kleinbach (Sindelfingen)