Data Centers Grand Tour Logbook

Commissioned by e-PERMANENT.org

Silvio Lorusso

2013

Foreword

Being accustomed to the freewheeling flow of information on the Internet and the immaterial quality of the digital age there is a tendency to overlook the physical embodiment of data. Silvio Lorussoʼs work seeks to demonstrate that data has a material reality. When Google published images of its numerous data centres last year they revealed that it is a vast physical network that allows for 20 billion web pages to be indexed per day by its search engine. By creating websites which refer only to the site at which the data of the image you are looking at is stored Lorusso brings a transparency to the experience of being online. He also draws our attention to the implications of these storage sites in terms of the vulnerability of private documents and files and their hidden impact in terms of energy consumption. Data Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here) creates a direct connection between the physicality of data and its digital representation.— Laura Mousavi

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Premises

«[...] As I stared at the city’s high-rises, I realized they were not really parallel, but diverged slightly at the top because of the curve of the earth. I started thinking that the curve of the earth must be more dramatic the higher one went. I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. I imagined going farther and farther into orbit and soon realized that the sight of the entire planet, seen at once, would be quite dramatic and would make a point that Buckminster Fuller was always ranting about: that people act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite, and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing, we will never get civilization right. I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. And I figured a photograph –a color photograph– would help make that happen. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.»— Stewart Brand, Photography Changes Our Relationship to Our Planet | http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31

«For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.»— Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Ecco, 2012 | Pos. 149

«Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless. The job, then, is to make such things visible.»— James Bridle, Under the Shadow of the Drone, 11 October 2012 | http://booktwo.org/notebook/drone-shadows/

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Intro

Data Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here) is a virtual journey into the materiality of data. In this ongoing project one domain name and hosting service for each country in the globe will be purchased. For each domain a single web page is hosted showing a satellite view of the geographical site at which that particular domainʼs data is stored. The tour starts by clicking at a destination, one click takes the user to the next domain in a different country where she will again be able to view where that domainʼs data is stored, and so on until all of the countries in the world are covered.

In order to collect the current locations it was necessary, among other things, to compare geographic coordinates from ip location services, look into obscure PDFs on the hosting websites, read FAQs, try to speak spanish, match several satellite views from different services, pretend to be an IT researcher, watch corporate videos and 3d models of buildings, get lost in Google Street View.

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The adopted procedure consists of 8 steps:

1. Look for data centers in a specific country through datacentermap.com;2. Select the ones that have a precise address (many for security reasons only show the area);3. Compare Google Maps, Bing Maps, terraserver.com in order to find exactly where the DC is located;4. Check the area of the hosting service on iplocation.net5. Find confirmation of the info gathered contacting the host via telephone or email;6. Find the price and service offered;7. Repeat the operation until the best compromise between price, quality of the image, attributes of location is achieved;8. Buy domain and hosting.

In several cases, the location of the data centre is the result of a deduction, so mistakes are possible. Furthermore things are not stable on the internet: the host could change the physical displacement of files without warning the user for instance. These issues make the journey look a bit like observing distant planets: in both cases one needs to take into account the fact that the object of observation probably changed already.

Procedure

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Locations

Currently the project counts 12 locations:

data-centers-grand-tour.co.uk → Manchester, UKdata-centers-grand-tour.is → Holtsgata, Icelanddata-centers-grand-tour.gl → Nuuk, Greenlanddata-centers-grand-tour.ca → Kelowna, Canadadata-centers-grand-tour.us → Provo, Utah, USAdata-centers-grand-tour.pt → Faro, Portugaldata-centers-grand-tour.es → Cádiz, Spaindata-centers-grand-tour.fr → Villeurbanne, Francedata-centers-grand-tour.it → Bologna, Italydata-centers-grand-tour.lu → Steinsel, Luxembourgdata-centers-grand-tour.be → Lochristi, Belgiumdata-centers-grand-tour.de → Köln, Germany

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Sustainability and Growth

The project’s sustainability and growth have to do with hosting and domain registration costs. Each stage of the journey costs on average 50€.

There are currently 4 ways to support the project:

– General DonationAny amount is appreciated. Donors will be mentioned on data-centers-grand-tour.net.

– Collect a domain that is already listed on the mapCollectors may choose a domain that has already been collected. They may also decide whether they want to collect it for one year or more. Prices for the domains vary from country to country. Collectors will be mentioned in the domain page both in the title and the source code.

– Collect a domain that is not included on the mapCollectors may choose a domain that has not already been collected. They may choose any country domain that is not listed on the map. Then research is conducted to ascertain whether there is a data centre locatable in that country. If the result is positive collectors may buy the domain, otherwise they are asked to choose a different country. Prices for the domains vary from country to country. Collectors will be mentioned on the domain page both in the title and the source code.

– Offer hosting space in a country that is not included on the mapCollector may provide the exact location of their data center while they agree on keeping the domain active and public for at least one year. The only cost for the collector is in this case the domain name. Collector’s name will be added to the title of the domain page and in the source code.

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In all cases the ownership of the domain is transitory. After the agreed time span, the domain becomes available again for new collectors.

Domains

data-centers-grand-tour.co.uk → 47.1€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.is → 113.79€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.gl → 115.43€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.ca → 75.08€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.us → 62.63€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.pt → 132.12€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.es → 62.93€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.fr → 26.68€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.it → 9.9€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.lu → 49€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.be → 72.60€ x yeardata-centers-grand-tour.de → Collection of Sebastian Schmieg (until 24/01/14)

Thanks to

André CastroGiulia CilibertoCheryl GallawayAymeric MansouxLaura MousaviNicolò PignatelliSebastian SchmiegDavide Vulpio

data-centers-grand-tour.net -

data-centers-grand-tour.co.uk ↓

data-centers-grand-tour.is↓

data-centers-grand-tour.gl ↓

data-centers-grand-tour.ca↓

data-centers-grand-tour.us↓

data-centers-grand-tour.pt↓

data-centers-grand-tour.es↓

data-centers-grand-tour.fr↓

data-centers-grand-tour.it↓

data-centers-grand-tour.lu↓

data-centers-grand-tour.be↓

data-centers-grand-tour.de

6803387813009

ISBN 978-1-300-68033-890000