Launch: Acid Clouds. Mapping Data Centre Topologies (Nieuwe Instituut)
Thursday 27 March 2025, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
How can we rethink the ownership and control of data? And in what ways do data centres influence our identities and societal norms? In this book launch we will discuss the themes addressed in Acid Clouds, which examines data centres through different lenses, from artifical intelligence to machine learning and from environmental impact to digital capitalism. How can we critically engage with the hidden yet pervasive infrastructures that shape our world?
Acid Clouds: Mapping Data Centre Topologies explores the hidden infrastructures of our digital lives, exposing the political, ecological, and social dynamics embodied by data centres. Moving beyond the sanitized image of the “cloud,” it unpacks the material and ethical complexities of these often-overlooked data storage structures. During this event we will dive deeper into the themes explored in the publication with Niels Schrader and Ramon Amaro.
With support from: Fonds 21, BPD Cultuurfonds, J.E. Jurriaanse Stichting
About the speakers
Niels Schrader is a concept-driven information designer with a fascination for numbers and data. He is founder of the Amsterdam-based design studio Mind Design and member of the AGI – Alliance Graphique Internationale. Next to his design practice Schrader writes regularly for Grafikmagazin and Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain. In his role as an educator Schrader focusses on social, political and environmental processes driven and influenced by digital technologies. In this context, he has initiated a number of large-scale research projects with partners from outside the academic environment. These institutions include governmental and non-governmental organizations like the Dutch Parliament, National Archives, Free Press Unlimited, Greenpeace, Hivos and Amnesty International.
Ramon Amaro is Senior Researcher in Digital Culture at Nieuwe Instituut, the national institute for architecture, design and digital culture in The Netherlands. An engineer and sociologist by training, Ramon’s writings, research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, digital culture, psychosocial study, and the critique of computational reason. Before joining Het Nieuwe Instituut, Ramon worked as Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at UCL (London), Engineering Program Manager for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Quality Design Engineer for General Motors. His recently published book, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (Sternberg, 2023) contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy, to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice.
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