Museum of Data

Student

Weiqi Wang (M.Arch. '23)

Hometown

Shanghai, China

Class

ARCH 5114

Instructors

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 changed the world via data networks. It is such a powerful anthropogenic product that it produces a new relationship between the subject and the object. First, by dematerializing and translating all 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. The essential datacenter infrastructure is usually owned by companies and is buried underground far away from the city to hide its cumbersomeness and primitiveness. 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 datacenter. It stands as a counterpoint to the private ownership of the common datacenter 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.