data centres
extraction
power
infrastructure
memory
Materials
Street stickers
protest
graffiti
banners
landscapes
cityscapes
zines
A mysterious postcard of Lake and a shaky photo of woodland purchased for a £1 on Brick Lane, they are a reminder to include mysteries, folk tales, haunting and rituals in my understandings.
I am reminded of another book by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair : Rodinsky’s Room, about a Jewish mystic who disappeared from his locked room in nearby Princelet Street, leaving many religious texts and untranslated writings.
This is a poignant book which speaks to a cultural erasure also enacted by the shrill humming presence of data centres, both in London and Devon, the scale and lack of consent for their superimposition on communities is totalitarian. I was not surprised to see a fly poster of Elton Musk as Hitler on Brick Lane.
Every surface in Brick Lane seems to be graffitied, but there is also a sense of branding behind it and I am not convinced the edginess is ‘authentic’, more of a marketing strategy, the area begins to remind me of Cambridge, a kind of theme park with very expensive coffee. Despite the gentrification there are real signs of protest and stickers which challenge power and the hegemonic oligarchy behind AI infrastructure.
I keep thinking of the Golem of Prague and wonder if that image of monstrous material might be a useful symbol for data centres and power, another significant reference is Frankenstein, an overtly critical book in confrontation with positivist logic as I interpret it.
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