Peering (2024)
Peering is a short article submitted for the Liminal Excavations zine, made to acocompany the ICT4S 2024 conference in Stockholm, and which partially documents an ongoing project to map the physical location and material support of a single accidental photo stored in my Google account.
Where do the traces of our digital lives come from, and where do they reside? We’ve all likely experienced a moment when we’ve encountered an accidental photograph, a screenshot, or other fragment of media, residing on our phone camera-roll, or in a cloud account, nominally ‘ours’ but with no memory of how it came to be there. This graphical essay explores treats the existence of this digital detritus as a mystery to be solved, and one which, in the solving, can reveal to us not just the extent of the unintentional digital that we leave, but the enormity of the underlying infrastructures which support our day-to-day digital lives and their interdependency with broader ecologies of energy, water, and data - as well as the way in which our own use of digital devices is implicated in them. Starting from a single ‘accidental selfie’, discovered in my Google Photos account, I attempt to answer the questions “Where is this photo, how did it come to be there, and what does it rely on for its continued existence?”. Using a combination of digital methods, literature review (drawing on the work of Anne Pasek, Mél Hogan, Tung-Hui Hu, and others from the fields of Environmental Media Studies and STS), open-source investigation and shoe-leather fieldwork, I map out the history and ecological entanglements of my photo and the data centre in which it resides (a Google / Telefónica facility in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid). This process allows me to consider both the extent of the infrastructures underlying such every day interactions with digital platforms, but also the epistemic challenges which we face in coming to know them from an outside perspective, and allows me to meditate on my own role as a user of digital technology in its environmental and ecological consequences and draw conclusions on how, as end-users, we might play a part in ameliorating and resisting the polluting effects of digital technology.
You can download the full article as a PDF, or find it alongside all the other contributions in the zine.