^{Fig. 1. Installation of concrete models from Data Tactics: Information Control and Colonization Strategies in the Data Center Technocene. Installation by Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán, Bibliowicz Family Gallery, Milstein Hall, Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, March 11–22, 2024.}

Data relies on subscriptions. We are deeply entangled with devices, accounts, applications, and screens governed by millions of algorithms. Yet the knowledge of how digital information actually circulates—where it is stored, how it is processed, and who controls it—dissolves into a dense, opaque cloud of interfaces, artifacts, and items. Most of us can roughly understand how a car works without formal training. However, if we apply the same expectation to our video calls, our credit histories, or our messaging archives—where they are stored, on which jurisdiction, and ultimately in whose hands—most users would find the question impossible to answer. This opacity is not accidental. The social acceptance of “the cloud” as a vague, almost mythical,¹ space distances the infrastructure of information from everyday understanding, transforming it into something we believe in rather than something over which we exercise factual control. And while this conversation happens, the digital becomes more physical. Now, there are more data centers than Walmart stores.² And they increase every month, in size, numbers, and capacity. 

The majority of the world’s population is online³—more than five and a half billion—and we have reached a point where cloud infrastructures manage our most sensitive personal data, without alternatives. Questions surrounding the co-existence of human and artificial intelligence are accelerating. These predictions unfold in parallel with the transformation of logistic warehouses into robotic fulfillment centers, the normalization of co-living with autonomous digital avatars, and the growing reliance on artificial intelligence to mediate even the most ordinary decisions. We are part of the Technocene.⁴ The more our lives are delegated to opaque digital systems, the more urgently we must interrogate how these infrastructures inhabit our ecosystems—and what are those consequences. The following installation work reflects on how the cloud enacts resistance by generating spatial forms that evade tracing, documentation, and surveillance. Data resists collective oversight through dispersion and abstraction.

In Data Tactics: Information Control and Colonization Strategies in the Data Center Technocene, the spatial politics of information infrastructure are interrogated through nine visual case studies. Each work operates both as a diagram of occupation and as an architectural representation of a broader implementation logic. These nine visual pieces each correspond to a specific strategy: Infiltrate (SubTropolis, Kansas City, Missouri), Fortify (Portugal Telecom headquarters, Lisbon), Parasite (Western Union Building, New York City), Mimicry (Portable Modular Data Centers), Switch (Cayuga Power Station, on Cayuga Lake, Lansing, New York), Inhabit (Marenostrum, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Torre Girona chapel, Barcelona), Extract (NSA Utah Data Center, Camp Williams, Utah, Salt Lake City metro area), Camouflage (DataBank DFW1, Dallas, Texas), and Occupy (Highlander underwater data center, Hainan, China). In pairing each architectural instance with a tactic, the project maps a taxonomy of data colonialism, situating the data center not only as a technical site but as an instrument of spatial domination. 

Even the wording “data center” might be outdated. It is a hub, a connector—a point in a highway of information. And it is shaped in creative ways to eliminate resistance. Under the naming of “critical infrastructure,” data centers have become sacred bodies with little questioning in their operations. They are more than instruments for information, which are necessary. They also arise as political artifacts—the US hosts at least the 54% of the data traffic in the world⁵—and they are reasons for nations, corporations, and developers to transform vast areas of the world into sources for the digital. With a hidden strategy to release numbers, they constitute non-spaces inside a tactical language, where the building typology flows and adapts.

The NSA Data Center in Utah—embedded inside the Camp Williams military complex, a federal facility for communication security (or surveillance)—has been evading clear reports on water and energy consumption. Recent investigations indicated a total energy capacity of 65 megawatts—enough to power 65,000 households—and the consumption in June of 2022 of 23,532,000 gallons of water⁶ (which equals nearly 9% of the volume of New York, the Empire State). Still, the large warehouse-style facility, built in 2013, publicly anticipated other projects by benefitting from a large land area. The data center industry parasites—locating space for servers where others only see vacant offices, while the Western Union Building hides itself as just another tower within the dense urbanity of Manhattan. Mechanical elements replace former ornaments to ensure the necessary infrastructure for racks of servers to operate. DataBank—a world host provider located in the downtown of Dallas—found the opportunity to mimic critical vessels with a frozen architecture. Data resists the public light and can adapt to any opportunity. 

The resistance is also physical. SubTropolis—which is one of the largest underground facilities in the US—organized a monumental matrix of limestone chambers to allocate space for federal archives, data centers, and other businesses that prefer the camouflage of inhabiting a mine in Missouri. Data centers are continuing the protocols of militarized infrastructures started during the Cold War. The Highlander Facility, a Chinese commercial data center, is submerged in classified locations off the shores of China to ensure satellite-resistant espionage and to test seawater cooling.

If Data Tactics questioned the data center itself, Post—Lands followed by exploring the relationship of this infrastructure to its immediate context—and to the human scale. What comes after non-space? Perhaps, there is no-land. We are only at the beginning of that question. It remains uncertain whether server infrastructure will one day be seen as obsolete vessels or the cathedrals of a lost digital faith. What is clear, however, is that the growth of digital processes will compromise critical parts of our shared world for decades to come, and the countryside is where the digital power is stored.⁷ The loss of land required to build dedicated power infrastructure—alongside the extensive soil occupation that sustainable energy sources demand—may lead to a fragmentation of territory, initiating a kind of digital feudalism.⁸ In this scenario, the data center becomes the new castle: a seat of extractive infrastructure whose role is absolute and whose legitimacy is seldom questioned.

Post—Lands dwells in the “after”—it speculates on a future not yet understood. Three black-timber structures arise as openings to uncertain futures. Their shapes adapt to the gallery’s visual centers and boundaries, turning the space into a succession of indeterminate architectures—similar to black server racks. The installation was conceived as a nighttime performance, when the normal pace of Sibley Hall (at Cornell University) stops and another dimension opens. Infrared lighting directs visitors through these three chambers, each questioning the boundaries of nonhuman space, where fictional landscapes are simulated through models, stones, and dry plants, as dying territories. Wearing protective lenses, the observer navigates the data spectacle in a suspended state between fascination and interrogation—much like we gaze into our smartphones each day.

After the data spectacle has fulfilled all its expectations, what remains is a geography of wired ghosts and territories transformed.

_{1. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), 35–39.}

_{2. In the United States alone, there are 5,426 reported data centers. While exact figures on their total physical footprint remain unverified, data centers now outnumber Walmart retail locations, which total 4,600.}

_{3. International Telecommunication Union, Measuring Digital Development: Facts and Figures 2024 (ITU, 2024), https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2024/. For specific information about internet use, see https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/.}

_{4. Hermínio Martins, The Technocene: Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Markets, ed. S. Ravi Rajan and Danielle Crawford (Anthem Press, 2018), 1–3.}

_{5. Richardson, Aris, Haley Yi, Michelle Nie, Simon Wisdom, Casey Price, Ruben Weijers, Steven Veld, and Mauricio Baker. “How Sovereign Is Sovereign Compute? A Review of 775 Non-US Data Centers.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.00932 (2025): 8, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.00932.}

_{6. Aspen Policy Academy, “Reducing Data Centers’ Water Consumption in the Great Salt Lake,” (Aspen Policy Academy, 2024), https://aspenpolicyacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/Utah-Water-Executive-Summary-2024.pdf.}

_{7. Rem Koolhaas, “Museum in the Countryside: Aesthetics of the Data Centre,” Architectural Design 89, no. 1 (2019): 63.}

_{8. Niklas Maak, Server Manifesto: Data Center Architecture and the Future of Democracy (Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG, 2022), 17–18.}