Museum of Data

A person wearing a green scarf and a black shirt looking off into the distance.
  • Weiqi Wang, M.Arch., 2023
  • Hometown

    Shanghai, China
  • Class

    ARCH 5114
  • Instructor

    Curt Gambetta

The museum stands as a reflection of how we live in, and with data. We are increasingly constructing and experiencing as data has dramatically the world via data networks. changed the world. It is such a powerful anthropogenic product that it produces a new relationship between the subject and the object. First, by dematerializing and translatingall the qualities into quantities, everything is homogenized and normalized in data: then, the numbers are translated again into visual images and sounds and "embodied" on screens for humans to see and hear. In the dematerialization and re-materialization process, everything appears weightless.

Yet the weightlessness does not come without a price. Datacenter. the essential infrastructure is usually owned by companies and is buried underground far away from the city to hide its cumbersomeness and primitives. Thus the materiality of data is invisible to the public, and so is the hegemony of capitalist Internet companies

The museum will bring the physical infrastructure under the spotlight by functioning as a public data centre. lt stands as a counterpoint to the private ownership of the common data center owned by the companies and becomes a starting point and a showcase for creating a decentralized internet run by institutions and organizations. And further, it allows the public to access the inaccessible data infrastructure, thus revealing the more and more complex relationship between data, humans, and concrete reality.

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