slowinternet

“Before ‘the cloud’ unified global storage imaginaries, we largely thought of it in terms of third party services—a nomenclature too explicitly corporate to be good marketing. In those early days, artists were key in exposing the data center as massive data storage warehouses, which would eventually be generally understood as ‘the cloud.’”

Mél Hogan, “’Environmental Media’ in the Cloud: the making of critical data centre art,” 387.

Tim Exile, RemixIT, (2016).

John Gerrard, Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma), (2015).

The server takes up physical space and uses a large amount of water to cool its
servers. In the American West newly
installed data servers have been connected to megadroughts in Arizona, and The Oregonian reported in 2023 that Google’s data centres in the city of The Dalles consume over a quarter of the water used in the city.

The cooling towers in The Dalles Google data centres release water vapour, creating a mist at dusk each night.

The materiality of digital infrastructure is electronic waste, otherwise known as e-waste, as well as, the energy extraction involved in powering digital technology, and the physical site of the data centre.

E-waste in Agbogbloshie, Guana, 2019.

In many cases, the ‘recycling’ technology is shipped from North America to East Asia and Africa, I’ve sharing an example here of a waste site in Agbogbloshie area in Accra, Ghana.

At these sites workers pull apart old computers, mining them to reuse copper wiring and precious metals, and this practice can cause health issues due to the hazardous environment and toxic air pollution.

Elias Sime, The Earth (ምድር) V (detail), 2023–24. Photo by Matthew Herrmann, sourced from Frieze.com.

Photo from Elias Sime’s studio, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2023. Photo by Alice Hendy, sourced from Frieze.com.

"we [Sime and their collaborator Meskerem Assegued] have been speaking about the mysteries and the stories contained within computers, specifically the variety of materials that power them and their functions... For instance, in one of our casual conversations, she asked me, “Do you know about the precious metals hidden on the motherboards and how they are extracted from deep inside the belly of the earth?” This filled my mind with so many new and exciting ideas relating to precious metals and the insatiable appetite of humans to own the latest technology regardless of the danger it poses to our survival."

Elias Sime interviewed by Livia Russell for Frieze Magazine.

"I am interested in finding the strains of media materialism outside the usual definitions of media: [...] I prefer to think what components and materials enable such technologies: instead of networking, we need to remember the importance of copper or optical fiber for such forms of communication; instead of a blunt discussion of 'the digital,' we need to pick it apart and remember that also mineral durations are essential"

Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, 4.

"Kara says the mining industry has ravaged the landscape of the DRC. Millions of trees have been cut down, the air around mines is hazy with dust and grit, and the water has been contaminated with toxic effluents from the mining processing. What's more, he says, 'Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust.'"

Researcher Siddharth Kara interviewed by NPR, Fresh Air, . February 2023.

Image of a Shabara mine in the DRC, Junior Kannah/AFP via Getty Images. Image sourced from NPR.org.

Tahir Karmali is a Nairobi-born artist currently based in Brooklyn, who creates sculptures, installation work and photography and is interested in themes of migration, the extraction of landscapes through mining practices, labour and belonging.

His Strata series is particularly affecting, in its formation of new relations with cobalt as medium. Each sculpture includes Congoese raffia that has been stained with cobalt that the artist sources from old cellphone purchased on e-bay.

Tahir Karmali, Strata I, 2017.

“Cloud platforms will overwhelm state control on such flows, or whether states will continue to evolve into Cloud platforms, absorbing the displaced functions back into themselves, or whether both will split or rotate diagonally to one another, or how deeply what we may now recognize as the surveillance state (US, China, and so forth) will become a universal solvent of compulsory transparency and/or a cosmically opaque megastructure of absolute paranoia, or all of the above, or none of the above.”

Benjamin Bratton, “The Black Stack,” e-flux journal.

Trevor Paglen, NSA-Tapped Undersea Cables,North Pacific Ocean, 2016. Image from Paglen's artist website.

Trevor Paglen, Paglen in Guam, 2016. Image from Paglen's artist website.

"Overall, I was able to track 1,307 different requests to all sort of scripts and documents, totaling 8, 724 A4 pages worth of printed code, adding up to 87.33MB of information. The amount of energy needed to load each of the twelve web interfaces, along with one’s endless fragments of code, was approximately 30wh."

"The Hidden Life of an Amazon User aims to shed light on Amazon’s often unacknowledged but aggressive exploitation of their users, which is embedded at the core of the so-called internet companies’ business strategies. Such strategies rely on apparently neutral, personalized user experiences afforded by attractive interfaces. These interfaces obfuscate sophisticated business models embedded in endless pages of indecipherable code, all of which are activated by user labor. In turn, these strategies have a significant energy cost, part of which is involuntarily assumed by the user. To put it bluntly, the user is not just exploited by means of their free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation."

Joana Moll, The Hidden Life of an Amazon User artist statement, 2019.

Joana Moll, screenshot from The Hidden Life of an Amazon User, 2019.

Screenshot from the Small File Media Festival 2025 trailer.

"Our festival challenges media makers to intervene in the 4K dystopia of bandwidth imperialism by creating original small-file movies of any length, proving once again that small files are the sustainable cinematic avant-garde.

Small File Media Festival, "About" page, https://smallfile.ca/about/.

Screenshot from the Solar Protocol website.

Kara Stone, still image from the Known Mysteries, trailer. Image captured from the solarserver website.

" My goal with this project is to not only represent environmentalist themes and have people think about the future of the planet and what needs to change, but also put principles of sustainability into actual practice. Because I am an artist I want people to see and interact with my work, yet my previous work demands you interact with fossil fuels in order to engage with it— on Steam’s servers, Apple’s, Androids, and itch.io’s. Accessing Solar Server, consuming fossil fuels is no longer a necessity when playing my work."

Kara Stone writing about Known Mysteries, https://2024.amaze-berlin.de/.

Environmental Impacts of the Digital Infrastructure

Necropolitics of Hardware

Underwater Data Stream

Last year, China enters the first stage in developing undersea data centres, powered by wind energy.

"Light and heat come freely to Earth. They are the basis for planetary life. The conversion of the sun’s rays into chemical energy is the initial food source, the basis for the trophic cascade that weaves together complex chains of abundance, on gifting, on interconnection, on multi species flourishing. This is an economy of cycles, diurnal and seasonal. It is a dynamic economy of constant circulation, constant redistribution of life force and energy: upwellings of ocean currents, the jet stream flowing thousands of miles, birds on their winged migrations connecting the Arctic to Africa. Yes, there is scarcity (hunger when the caribou do not come; parched soils in seasons without rain). Yes, there is competition (light-seeking saplings below the forest canopy; algal blooms blanketing waterways, obscuring access to oxygen and sky). But at its core, the solar economy is one of abundance and renewal, of plenty.”

After Oil Collective, “Decolonial and Feminist Solarities,” 40.

Can we Slow the Internet?

The Solar Protocol Network is a distributed solar powered website powered and hosted by six servers across the globe. The website and collaborative network was founded by Tega Brain, Benedetta Piantella and Alex Nathanson.

In their manifesto, the Solar Protocol collective states that the intelligence of their network is controlled by “earthy dynamics,” just as our daily lives are impacted by “weather, seasons, tides and atmospheric conditions” in many ways, from behavioural shifts, how we move through our environments, food production etc. Their model can be classified as “naturally intelligent” because the network’s signal is reliant on the sun’s rays.

Piantella and Brain, the creators of Solar Protocol stress the importance of digital networks which engage with the natural instead of existing outside of it.