The “cloud” feels weightless – a soft promise of infinite storage and connection. But who owns the dense network of data centers and labor that keeps our digital lives afloat?
Server rooms and cables might seem harmless, but they form an invisible cage – omnipresent and all-enclosing, a planetary-scale machine built to harvest our data.
There are other ways of preserving digital knowledge. Data could flow like seeds, shared, cared for, and tended by many: a distributed cloud built on reciprocity instead of control.
WHY THIS PROJECT
What is “digital infrastructure”?
If you are reading these lines, you are already interacting with a piece of it: smartphones and computers are terminals of a vast, planet-wide communication network that includes servers, data centers, submarine cables, power plants and much more. Here, we will analyze digital infrastructure through six “realms”, each representing a specific aspect of planetary digital networks: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.
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THE CLOUD REALM
In the infrastructure realm called “Cloud,” we encounter the vast network of data centers, servers, and platforms that store, process, and manage the world’s digital information.
As more and more programs operate on access rather than ownership, a new and powerful rentier class emerges, leading some critics to warn of an impending “digital feudalism.” Yet, resistance persists: countless grassroots initiatives, hackers, and activists never stopped working toward the creation of a “digital commons” – a system in which information is shared, cultivated, and collectively maintained. Here you are invited to explore an atlas of allegorical symbols, each representing a specific aspect of this realm and its competing models.
Above - Digital Feudalism
Gatekeeping
Ezekiel’s Chariot Throne
Once a celestial machine regulating who might approach the sacred, now a symbol for the custodians of the digital heavens.
Those who sit atop the cloud do not simply store data; they determine the thresholds of access. Gatekeeping has become a form of governance: opaque, automated, and draped in the myth of neutrality. Wrapped in benevolent branding, the cloud’s guardians shape not only what can be seen or said, but also what can be imagined.
Hypocrisy
Server Rack
Behind the cloud’s vaporous metaphor stands the server rack: the skeletal, material truth of a world that insists on presenting itself as weightless.
Every image, query, and message is routed through water-thirsty cooling systems and fossil-fueled grids. Marketing promises purity – infinite scalability, frictionless connectivity – but reality drips with extraction and exhaustion. The hypocrisy is structural: the more “virtual” our lives become, the more physical destruction they require.
Voracity
Crocodile
Ancient, silent, the crocodile waits with patience for its prey. Just beneath the surface, its stillness conceals an insatiable appetite.
Big Tech feeds on our personal data: our habits, desires, anxieties, biometrics are its prey. Every tap feeds the beast, every scroll fattens it. This is not malfunction but design. Voracity is capitalism’s oldest instinct, reborn in algorithmic form: a predator camouflaged as service, lurking beneath our reflections.
Lock-In
Embellished Cage
The digital cage is not iron but interface: smooth icons, pastel palettes, seamless sync. It seduces with convenience, promising freedom.
Step inside, and the doors close softly. Your photos, messages, playlists, documents – everything that constitutes your digital life – becomes hostage to the platform’s architecture. Leaving means losing. Staying means obeying. Lock-in is the cloud’s golden rule: make the prison delightful, and the prisoners will decorate their own bars.
Disguise
Chameleon
The cloud shifts shape as needed – transparent one moment, opaque the next. It brands itself as neutral infrastructure, benevolent assistant, invisible helper.
Like a chameleon, digital technology adapts to survive: blending into homes, habits, governments, and economies. Surveillance is recast as personalization; extraction appears as efficiency. What we see is convenience. What it hides is control. The power of Big Tech thrives in mutability. Disguise is not deception – it is strategy.
Sovereignty
Crown
Once, crowns were forged from metal and myth. Today, they are minted in data centers and worn by platforms that dwarf nation-states.
Tech empires legislate through terms of service, enforce order through moderation, and redraw borders of access with a line of code. They hold citizenries without passports, economies without banks, and territories without land. Their sovereignty is infrastructural, algorithmic, and largely unaccountable. The crown has migrated from monarchs to machines.
Below - Digital Commons
Preserve
Owl
The owl sees what others overlook. In myth, it guards knowledge; in libraries, it marks ownership; in philosophy, it spreads its wings only at dusk.
Platforms reorder memory according to profit, burying what does not generate engagement, rewriting archives with recommender systems. Collective stewardship counters this amnesia, creating shared infrastructures that protect knowledge from corporate obsolescence. The owl reminds us that preservation is not about hoarding, but about care.
Share
Mycelium
Beneath forests, mycelium forms a vast, decentralised, and intricate network: an ecology of connection predating any human-made internet.
Mycelium operates through reciprocity. Its intelligence is collective, its growth cooperative. To share in such a network means dissolving the boundaries between self and system, allowing value to flow toward need rather than profit. Mycelial thinking offers a countermodel to digital monopolies, building technologies that nourish rather than extract.
(Re)code
Nazca Lines
Etched into the Peruvian desert for millennia, the Nazca Lines form geographies of meaning legible only from the sky: an ancient planetary interface.
Nazca Lines encode myth, ritual, and cosmology directly onto the land. Their messages are inscribed in dust, not pixels. To (re)code in this spirit is to ground abstraction, to write systems in relation to earth rather than above it. It means programming without erasing the texture of place, creating meaning that is situated, embodied, and durable.
De-digitize
Books
A book persists. It absorbs sweat from hands, fades in the sun, bends under time, each mark a record of an encounter.
In an age of frictionless screens and infinite feeds, the physical page restores resistance. It requires attention, occupies space, and refuses instant deletion. To de-digitize is not to reject technology, but to reclaim pace and presence. The more ephemeral our digital lives become, the more radical the weight of a book feels in the hand.
Reclaim
Guillotine
In a time of rampant capital accumulation and rising social inequalities, the guillotine reminds us that excess, once concentrated, invites rupture.
Today’s wealth hides not in palaces but in encrypted vaults and cloud infrastructures, yet the logic of accumulation remains unchanged. To reclaim in the digital age means confronting the asymmetries embedded in platforms, infrastructures, and economies. The guillotine stands not for violence, but for redistribution: a recalibration of power.
Grow
Seed
Every seed is a compact future, a quiet archive of potential waiting for the right conditions to awaken. Growth begins in darkness, in soil that shelters.
From the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to permacomputing’s visions of frugal, regenerative systems, seeds inspire technological imaginaries that prioritize resilience over speed.
Each sprout carries a counter-algorithm that doesn’t exhaust its environment; it nourishes it. To grow means to align with rhythms slower than markets, deeper than metrics.
THE (W)HOLE REPOSITORY
Congratulations on making it this far!
In the section below, you will find a carefully curated list of online resources that aim to study, critique, and improve the vast world of digital infrastructures, with a special focus on the topics presented in this realm. If you like this section, please make sure to visit the main page of our repository, where you will find many more links from all the other realms of the (W)HOLE project.
Art
Gathering Softly – A Digital Gallery for Care and Connection
Care
Community
Accessibility
Summary
An online exhibition exploring intimacy and relational care through digital artworks, inviting viewers into gentle, participatory encounters that reimagine how we gather and connect online.
Phantom Islands is a sound atlas of imagined islands plotted on maps. Mixing field recordings, archives, and synthesis, it explores how fiction and data blur the line between place and imagination.
A Warm Database by Ganesh and Ghani explores disappearance, visibility, and representation, imagining a living archive of resistance that challenges bureaucratic and state-driven data regimes.
Antimundo is an artistic platform that explores the intersections of ecology, technology, and resistance. It investigates alternative worldviews and infrastructures that challenge extractivist and colonial paradigms.
A global offline file-sharing project embedding USB drives in public spaces, creating anonymous, peer-to-peer micro-infrastructures that challenge centralized networks and data exchange norms.
Imperfect Archiving: Archiving as Practice for a Love of Softness - Center for Book Arts
Care
Commons
Knowledge
Summary
A zine exploring archiving as a tender and political act, embracing imperfection, emotional memory, and softness as tools for feminist and collective preservation.
ARECACEAE is a poetic web experiment intertwining botany, computation, and digital aesthetics. Through algorithmic imagery of palm trees, it reflects on the artificial reproduction of nature and the ecological implications of digital simulation.
A digital art project that turns the idea of a computer virus into a poetic metaphor for resistance, contamination, and creative disruption within algorithmic culture.
Earth by Warp – A Portal for Creative and Planetary Futures
Sustainability
Community
Subversion
Summary
Earth by Warp is an experimental digital space merging art, music, and ecology. Created by Warp Records, it showcases projects that explore the entanglement between creativity, environmental awareness, and collective futures through multimedia storytelling.
A living publication connecting mycology, art, and technology. Fungal Page embraces the metaphor of networks and decay as an alternative to extractive growth models, inviting ecological and collective modes of being.
A visual essay on the internet’s hidden geography-cables, hubs, borders, flows. Clear diagrams and short texts show how online space has politics, power, and real-world limits.
An ongoing art project by Mimi Onuoha that documents and visualizes datasets that don’t exist-topics systematically ignored or uncollected by governments and corporations. The work exposes how power operates through omission, making invisibility itself a site of critique.
Google Faces – Finding faces in Earth’s landscapes
Open Knowledge
Transparency
Summary
Onformative’s bot scans Google Maps with face-tracking to simulate pareidolia-spotting face-like shapes in mountains, deserts, and coasts. An art experiment in perception and machine vision.
PLANT is an experimental web project that visualizes the internet as a living ecosystem. Through interactive design and generative visuals, it reveals the organic and unstable nature of digital networks while proposing a more ecological, symbiotic view of computation.
The Internet is Fun! is a playful web-based artwork that critiques the commercialization of online joy. Through interactive design and nostalgic aesthetics, it reclaims the internet’s early spirit of experimentation, humor, and collective play.
MacPictures revisits early digital image-making through the lens of artificial intelligence. By blending obsolete computing aesthetics with generative algorithms, the work questions the fetishization of “intelligent” systems and the myth of technological progress.
A digital art organisation supporting born-digital cultural practices through exhibitions, research, preservation tools, and community programs that nurture experimental, accessible digital creativity.
1-Star Review Tour – The Weight of Data (Chronus Art Center)
Exploitation
Subversion
Counter Datasets
Summary
1-Star Review Tour is an online art project that visualizes and performs the hidden labor behind digital ratings and data extraction. It transforms algorithmic reviews into an act of resistance, questioning the affective and economic infrastructures of platform economies.
Hallucinations is an experimental art project exploring the blurred boundary between human imagination and AI-generated imagery. By visualizing algorithmic “dreams,” it questions authorship, perception, and the seductive power of machine hallucinations.
Ex Libris by Halisten Studio is a visual and conceptual project exploring how libraries and archives can act as living systems rather than static repositories. Through graphic experimentation, it reimagines reading, knowledge, and ownership in the digital age.
MercuryOS is a conceptual design project that reimagines the operating system as an artistic and critical medium. Its Art Direction section reflects on aesthetics, control, and resistance in digital interfaces, challenging the ideology of seamless technology.
A speculative design project imagining a physical gateway to the Internet. Ted Hunt translates invisible digital protocols into tangible rituals, prompting reflection on access, control, and infrastructure.
The personal website and portfolio of artist YH Song, presenting poetic, intimate digital works that explore relationships, vulnerability, and the gentle social dynamics of online and offline interaction.
A collaboration between disabled artists framing alt-text as poetry, offering workshops and a workbook to promote accessible, creative image description across digital spaces.
An artistic web project exploring extraction, land, and digital colonialism, connecting ecological degradation with the invisible infrastructures powering global computation.
An artist-led publishing project exploring the intersection of print and the web, collecting works that remix online material into physical forms of networked art.
An experimental online space hosting collaborative art, code, and text projects that question authorship, participation, and the social dynamics of digital creation.
An online gallery platform hosting experimental digital exhibitions that explore remote togetherness, offering artists and audiences shared spaces for connection, interaction, and gentle collective encounters.
An art intervention that used a botnet to auto-click climate news ads, revealing how digital advertising, computation, and platform infrastructures shape environmental impact and attention economies.
An art project that turns public traffic cameras into playful photobooths, repurposing surveillance infrastructures to reveal their absurdity and challenge how automated systems watch and categorize people.
A poetic web artwork that renders desert landscapes through generative code, inviting reflection on ecological fragility, digital materiality, and the intertwined futures of natural and computational environments.
A large-scale web collage built from GeoCities fragments, celebrating early web folk aesthetics and highlighting a decentralized, user-made internet culture outside today’s platform structures.
A photographic project documenting fire hydrants as overlooked urban markers, reframing mundane infrastructure into a playful, alternative dataset that resists normative ways of seeing and classifying cities.
An interactive web artwork inviting visitors to place digital offerings, creating a shared ritual space that blends spirituality, care practices, and communal reflection within an intimate online environment.
Essay reframing social media as an ecological system, linking digital excess, attention economies, and planetary exhaustion through an ecofeminist lens.
I’ve Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy – Rottenwheel Blog
Privacy
Surveillance
Self-defense
Summary
An accessible critique of the “nothing to hide” argument, explaining why privacy is a collective right and not a personal preference in the age of mass surveillance.
An online magazine exploring how technology intersects with climate justice, publishing accessible articles, research, and community-led reflections on sustainable, equitable digital futures.
A collection of stories, essays, and experiments exploring unconventional programming practices, highlighting how creative code can challenge norms, reveal hidden systems, and expand digital imagination.
An independent online magazine highlighting creators, communities, and projects that imagine a healthier, more humane internet culture beyond platform capitalism and extractive digital norms.
Essay and artist-portfolio text that explores hacktivist practices in art-code as critique, tactical détournement, and creative refusal of platform logics.
A sharp critique of the modern web’s decline into ad-driven, bloated platforms, calling for a return to simplicity, autonomy, and user-owned spaces online.
Carbon Efficiency in Software – Interconnected Blog (Matt Webb)
Energy
Sustainability
Accountability
Summary
Reflection on how software design choices directly affect carbon emissions, advocating for efficiency, awareness, and ecological responsibility in code.
An overview of “digital gardens” as a slower, more personal way to publish and share ideas online, emphasizing learning, transparency, and interconnected thinking.
