ServerGarden

“ServerGarden takes its starting point from recordings of the spinning and buzzing sounds from a data center, which sound artist Morten Poulsen has assembled into a root network of cables and speakers that grows out of Fraktal’s exhibition space.

Data infrastructure plays an increasingly important role in modern society. These structures, mostly consisting of cables of all sizes, are buried in the ground, on the bottom of the sea, hanging high in towers or locked off in the data centers; like a gigantic root net whose materiality is inaccessible to the individual. Therefore, there is a tendency to understand the “web” as something intangible and distant in the “cloud”, but which nevertheless enables the connections between us and which vital societal functions increasingly depend on to function.

In 2022, sound artist Morten Poulsen sought out one of these “clouds”. With specialized microphones that picks up electromagnetic waves, he listened to the data center’s almost endless rows of servers spinning and beeping around the clock, all interconnected.

At the exhibition in Fraktal, these sound recordings are presented in a sculpture that takes its inspiration from Solarpunk; a sci-fi genre that unfolds in a post-climate disaster future where human-made technologies enter into close, intricate and sustainable relationships with nature, rather than dominating and suppressing it. The exhibition is therefore presented as a poetic utopia; a future where local communities are data gardeners in their own low-tech network systems, inspired by and in interaction with natural systems.” – press release, March 2023

Title: ServerGarden

Production year: 2022/23

Exhibited on 03.03 to 18.05 2023 at Fraktal – Ventesal for samtidskunst, lyd og poesi (Skørping DK) 

Supported by Danish Arts Council, KODA, Den Obelisk Familiefond & Rebild Kommune

Thanks to Per Henriksen & Mette Lucca Jensen

Photos by Katrine Møbius