Location: Kibel Gallery, Architecture Building
This event is open to the public
Join us for the Kibel Gallery Opening for Spring Show: "In the Shadow of the Cloud"
With an opening lecture by Ali Fard, Assistant Professor, Architecture, UVA
About the exhibit
The modern spatial history of Northern Virginia is inextricably tangled with the development and growth of digital technologies and their networks of dissemination. As the most significant data center market in the world, the rapid expansion of data infrastructure in Northern Virginia has produced a highly fragmented urban territory that caters to the needs of technology corporations while consistently ignoring the adverse environmental impacts and the challenging socio-spatial conditions that data centers leave in their wake.
In the Shadow of the Cloud presents multimedia narratives and speculative design interventions that recount the region’s emergence as a global technopole and reconsider its intertwined relationship with data infrastructure. At the center of the installation, a 1:20,000 scale model of Northern Virginia forms a multimedia palimpsest that captures the tangled histories, forces, and actors that have contributed to the region’s development and continue to inform its future trajectory. Projected maps, drawings, videos, and images interact with the topographic surface of the model to create a complex and multifaceted reading of the infrastructural landscapes that lie hidden in plain sight. A textural soundscape accompanies the unfolding narrative of the project while emulating the experience of living in proximity to data centers.
Complementing the central model, speculative design interventions reimagine three prominent spatial typologies—data centers, highway interchanges, and quarries—along the Washington and Old Dominion Trail, which forms the infrastructural spine of the region. Paired with an evocative series of photographs by Stephen Voss, which capture the creeping of data centers ever closer to spaces of everyday life, the design provocations reveal moments of failure and triumph, efficiency and struggle, degradation and repair, and respite and rebirth in the technical landscapes of contemporary urbanization. These interventions ultimately envision alternative forms of data infrastructures and strategies for the afterlife of data centers in NOVA and beyond.
Project Lead:
Ali Fard
Design and Research Team:
Leo Wehner, Sarah O’Donnell, Dorothy Philip, Treston Yetso, Ari Bell
Collaborator:
Stephen Voss (Photography and Videography)
Fabrication Support:
Trevor Kemp and Melissa Goldman (UVA)
Exhibition Coordination:
Lindsey May (UMD)
Support:
- UVA School of Architecture
- National Center for Smart Growth (NCSG) at UMD
- UMD School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation