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Sensing Elementality
  • ISSN: 2632-2463
  • E-ISSN: 2632-2471

Abstract

In this photo essay, we mobilize digital media to sense elemental phenomena at the same time as we ask what ‘elements’ – what constitutive, material and fundamental substrates – enable digitally mediated sensations. Taking an infrastructural perspective, we focus on data centres as core elements that condition digital systems. We describe data centres as where globally distributed material compositions are concentrated, transduced and crystallized. Drawing from fieldwork across the Midwestern United States, we reflect on ‘haze’ as a material trace of these zones as well as an aesthetic sense of the terraforming undertaken to develop infrastructures of computation.

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/content/journals/10.1386/jem_00126_1
2024-09-11
2026-04-13

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