This project is still in making!
The Clouds have to be grounded!
Everything that you touch in the digital space leaves a trace. Everything that you store online requires energy. Yet, people believe that interaction with the digital “clouds” bears no consequences, especially not for the environment. ‘Grounding the Clouds’ is there to get people in touch with the responsibilities they have in the digital space, as well as the opportunities. The main idea is to help decentralise data centres by empowering people to get involved with building and managing data centres on a local scale. ‘Cloud Grounder’ is a concept for a digital tool which would bridge people who have little coding knowledge with server or data centre management. Aside from the digital tool, the project also deals with the question of ethics of digital data ownership.
Images of ‘Grounding the Clouds’ exhibit at Southern Sweden Design Days show a person pulling down (grounding) balloons filled with helium to read the most important file from someone’s cloud storage. Eventually helium expired and all the clouds were grounded.
Sneak peak into the Clouds
I asked mostly people close to me to share the most important files they had stored on their digital clouds. Most of them shared photos, but some shared documents related to their work or entertainment. The idea is to allow spectators to emotionally relate to their fellow humans, other users of digital cloud services and also question:
what happens if these files are gone?
or confiscated?
or misused?
made public?
violated?
sold?
do we actually have the ownership of our most personal digital artefacts?
