Open House: Project r00ts – help connect our internet use to data centers
Join us for a community sense-making session where we'll introduce Project r00ts.
What we'll bring
The project team – Ploipailin Flynn and Arran Lyon – will open their research notes and project plan to you.
What you can bring
Feedback on the research + our project approach.
Share how this research could be helpful in your own practice.
About this research
"The cloud" makes the internet sound weightless, ephemeral, inconsequential. But we know this isn’t true. Our video streams and AI queries run through physical data centers that drain local water supply, stress power grids, threaten land rights. There's a ton of great work happening by researchers, journalists, and community organisers documenting the impact of these data centers on local people and ecologies. We’ve listed some of our favorites below.
But this conversation feels disconnected from our everyday internet use. How can we connect the two?
r00ts is our attempt to figure that out. Building on our Small AI research, we think* we’ll make a browser tool that traces your internet use to specific data centers from around the world and the news about them.
*We’re just at the beginning of our research so who knows what we’ll find! but this is what we’re starting with.
Work we’re inspired by
Getting Into Fights with Data Centers, Dr Anne Pasek, EMM Lab
NYC Live: Let Them Eat Compute, Computer Says Maybe Podcast
The Backyard of AI, Pablo Jiménez Arandia, Muriel Alarcón, Daniela Dib
+ add to the collection on the r00ts arena board
This research is generously funded by Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industries: Grounding the Cloud.