The poetry of the Cloud

It's not every day that you find yourself with an artist and writer delivering a performative reading in your data centre but we had that experience at one of our eight data centres recently and it proved an incredibly interesting and unique way of understanding the differing perceptions of technology and the cloud.

In the IT industry I think we’re all pretty comfortable with what the Cloud is today – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, delivering online services like storage, backup and mail via the internet - and that it is in our data centres that it resides. Step outside our domain though and the Cloud is still a term whose meaning is hotly debated and in some instances, plain ethereal.

For instance where once William Wordsworth’s famous line, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” could only be read in physical hardcopy, today it is online and at the time of writing, that single sentence is responsible for 4.7 million results when Googled. The Cloud and art really have collided.

Our literary moment came about when iomart was challenged to explore the nature of the Cloud by New York artist Tyler Coburn. Tyler asked us if he could perform a reading of his book ‘I’m that angel’, which analyses the Cloud, its concepts, and its role in our daily computer work. It’s narrated from the perspective of a “content farmer,” which Tyler characterises as “an emergent type of online journalist contracted to generate articles based on words peaking in Google Trends.”

Tyler is a Yale University literature graduate and contributing editor to ArtReview. He researched the concept of the Cloud for his Masters degree in fine art at the University of Southern California, creating a literary performance that he is bringing to data centres across Europe for the first time this summer. His performance at our Glasgow data centre was the first of the UK leg of his tour.

“I began work on ‘I’m that angel’ when the ‘Cloud’ was entering colloquial use,” says Tyler. “Friends and colleagues began employing the term, though no one seemed to understand whether it denoted a new form of information storage or just served as the grand metaphor of our Internet age.”

The intention of his book, Tyler says, is to “tie down ‘the Cloud.’” He explains, “In learning about data centres, I came to realise how greatly this term misrepresents the concreteness of the Internet, for our ‘Cloud’ is actually tethered to various sites throughout the world.  My project thus facilitates access to the physical locations of the Internet, in part, to stimulate discussion about the political, architectural, environmental and business issues at hand in information storage.”

Tyler performed his reading in front of some of the leading lights of Scotland’s artistic community who, after listening to his view of ‘the Cloud’, were then taken on a tour of our 1000 square metre datacentre.

The reaction was quite incredible. For many of the audience it was the first time they had stepped foot inside a data centre or even paused to consider how the internet is delivered to them.

There was palpable shock at both the scale of the world’s data centre industry and the levels of complexity involved in ensuring a single data centre remains fully operational. The guests had never before stopped to consider the amount of power consumed globally to keep the Internet working, and the sheer volume of web transactions that take place every second. On reflection, when you do step back and think about it, a statistic which states that it will take over 6 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2016, is pretty jaw dropping!

Every member of the audience carried a smartphone or utilised a notebook/tablet, underlining the fact that the world we now inhabit is mobile, and that we access, process and interact with the cloud whilst on the move. This fragmentation of how the audience currently consumes the Cloud for both work and pleasure led to a discussion about borderless access which highlighted that the only way to deliver these services securely and efficiently is through central points such as our data centre.

As Tyler explains, “The tour is a crucial part of the event, as it provides an opportunity to personalise data centres by introducing the audience to the people who manage them.  Members of the hosting company always conduct the tours, lending their technical expertise to topics that many audience members are unfamiliar with.”

Tyler’s first reading was at Digital Realty in California last year and he’s since performed at the Google Building in New York. His first European tour takes in the EvoSwitch data centre in Amsterdam, e-shelter in Berlin, Volta in London, and others.

First stop was a performance by Tyler at Bahnhof’s Pionen data centre in Stockholm.  Built into a former nuclear bunker, the facility once housed WikiLeaks. “No two events are alike,” Tyler explains,” as the architecture and operations of a given centre – and its employees – shape the tour and resulting discussion. At Pionen, for example, the conversation focused on security, client privacy, and intellectual property.”

As Tyler has highlighted, the Internet is designed by people, used by people and consumed by people and it’s something we should all have in our minds when we are explaining what our industry is all about.