Summer Hofford
Wild Data Park: The Figuration of Infrastructure
From the third-year graduate research studio Hot Farms: How Emails Grow Tomatoes, Spring 2021
Faculty: Clare Lyster
About the studio:
Hot Farms explores industrial symbiosis between data farms and agriculture toward the design of new spatial scenarios that combine high-intensive food production with data storage (farm + farm). It proposes to use the heat expelled from data storage facilities (incoming cold air is used to cool the servers and the warm exhaust is then released) as a resource for the production of food. The studio leverages the environmental challenges related to digital capitalism and climate change as an alibi to envision productive adjacencies between data and agriculture and to imagine the possible lifestyles that these produce.
About the project:
This project offers up a new national park type that combines the resources and scope of national government and big tech to reimagine the relationships between wilderness, renewable energy, food production, and data storage. On a site blanketed by wind turbines and rewilded land, Wild Data Park consists of a distributed network of small buildings hosting unique combinations of data storage and public programming.