Datascapes

Datascapes is a research project exploring the soundscape of data centers. They form an environment that is both omnipresent and yet mostly invisible and inaccessible. They are the immersed part of the monumental iceberg of our relationship with information and communication, the daily reality of which, for many of us, is essentially visual and concentrated in our relationship with the screens of personal computers and smartphones. For this vast majority of users, network infrastructure remains a grey area, an unthought-of area on which the imaginary of a supposed “dematerialization” of information and communication media is comfortably built. The already hackneyed image of long corridors of blinking servers is nevertheless very present in people's minds, but ultimately it has little material reality and remains a high-tech exoticism rarely embodied in a single place, a distant sign of an already ordinary futurism.

The idea of ​​recording the sound environment of data centers is thus a poetic way of offering a concrete and sensitive experience of the immediate, material reality of this invisible dimension of daily life: making it audible, palpable. From a musical perspective, it also involves examining a particular acoustic reality: if the machine world profoundly influenced 20th-century music, from the futuristic avant-garde to today's electronic music, what will become of the electrical hums and ventilations of the computer age? Rather than postulating the sonic uniformity of the contemporary technological landscape, the Datascapes project seeks to make its nuances, varieties, and sonic singularities audible, to convey an acoustic experience of these places whose vibration never ceases.

Now dormant, the Datascapes project was conceived in collaboration with the label Artkillart, with a view to releasing a vinyl record bringing together sounds from various locations.