I’m interested in the relationship between humanity and technology. My work examines our digital culture as pharmakon. Ireland is Europe’s largest Data Centre market. Constructed on sites that were formerly orchards, farmland, forestry, protected habitats, these ravenous beasts consumed 144% more energy in 2020 than in 2015. It’s estimated that by 2028 DC’s will consume 31% of Ireland’s electricity, complicating our ability to respond to the climate crisis. ‘Trespass’ confronts the misconception that digital is not real. Terms like ‘the cloud’ conjure images of something soft, wooly, ephemeral. But digital is real and digital costs the earth. Filmed at a fruit farm and secretly at a data centre in Dublin, the work points to the history of an orchard that once existed where this data centre now stands. The video aims to question the physical and spatial manifestations of data and the implications of data storage on the environment.
