Data Prototypes: Visual Narratives

Data Prototypes: Visual Narratives showcases nine projects developed during the fall 2023 elective course Infrastructural Seeds: Data Centers in the Era of Ultrareal (ARCH 3308/6308/6509) taught by Design Teaching Fellow Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán. The work explores frameworks on the juxtaposition between data centers and architectural bodies, combining theory-driven scenarios and visual languages. Data storage becomes an embodied critical object to keep institutions, companies, and all layers of information-exchange elements operatable, fluctuating and modifying the mirror between our digital and physical entities. The question here leads to a series of tactics and strategies positioning data prototypes as hyper-technological objects in a variety of contexts, addressing multiple scales on territorial relationships, resource sharing, automatization, and labor. From the understanding of a dependence system — between technology and society — the works investigate the opportunities of data centers to appear, to operate, and to survive alongside technological aesthetics and architectural atmospheres using rendering tools. Data Prototypes opens a conversation on how data centers are changing the built scenario and what the formulas are in which they become new monumentalities of our near future, with a step in between fiction-making and critical thinking.