The Internet is an ethereal thing. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Sure, it’s “on” your computer (or your phone), but it came from somewhere and there’s an art installation that shows you where. Exactly.
The Data centres Grand Tour, by Silvio Lorusso, an e-Permanent exhibition with one, simple goal: to show you the data centre where the info flowing into your computer is coming from. Essentially a slideshow, the tour project pushes you through a series of domains, each time showing you a eye-in-the-sky Google Maps view of the very building in which that domain resides.
There’s not much more to it than that, and you can exhaust the whole line-up in a matter of minutes, but it provides an interesting angle on what the web actually is, one you probably don’t think about often. There is a very real series of tendrils reaching out around the globe — across land and sea — to bring you your Harlem Shake or whatever. And every journey, no matter how instantaneous it may seem, begins with but a single nondescript building. [E-Permanent via Co.Design]