activities
←infrastructure walk Data centre walk – Sloterdijk hyperscaler March 6 March 2026
Join us on March 6th at 16.00 for a data centre walk of the to-be-built but already controversial hyperscaler on the Plimsollweg, near Sloterdijk station. Infrastructure walks are like guided tours of the city, or birdwatching expeditions – but instead of pointing out noteworthy architectural details of historical buildings or showing participants how to best observe particular species of birds, we would explore the digital public infrastructures that are deployed in public spaces. In this case, an empty piece of land.
While it doesn’t look like much, this vacant piece of land is extremely valuable, as it holds the permits to build three data centre towers. After 10 years of financial speculation, the site was purchased by British data center developer Pure DC, with Microsoft as the intended and sole tenant of a hyperscale data center consisting of three towers. In this walk, we will learn more about this piece of land and discuss the allocation of scarce land, computing power, and electricity supplies to an American hyperscale data centre, which ends up coming at the expense of residents, nature, and local businesses.
Registration is closed
exhibition Radioscapes Symposium at the Noorderlicht Biennale, Groningen August 2025
August 31, 2025 at Noorderlicht Biennale, Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen
Organisers
- Christy Westhovens
- Noorderlicht photography biennale
- critical infrastructure lab
- Kunstpunt Groningen
We constantly move through a sea of radio signals. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell towers and satellites form an invisible landscape that permeates our everyday lives. These electromagnetic waves shape how we communicate, move and live together — and yet, we never see them.
With Signals of you, her installation at the Tschumipavilion, Christy Westhovens makes this hidden network tangible. The red panels respond to Bluetooth signals emitted by our devices, revealing how we continuously broadcast digital traces. The pavilion becomes an archive of daily presence, showing how infrastructure and behaviour together shape urban space.
The Radioscape Symposium offers a deeper exploration of this work. Bringing together artists, scholars and critical voices, we will reflect on how radio signals construct public space. What role do we play in these digital environments? Who has access to these invisible layers, and who is excluded? And what does it mean to render such ubiquitous but hidden signals visible?
Programme
- 12:00—13:00 Visit: Noorderlicht Biënnale, Niemeyerfabriek, Paterswoldeweg 43, Groningen
- 13:30—14:30 Data walk and visit Signals of you, Het Tschumipaviljoen van Kunstpunt, Hereplein, Groningen
- 16:00—18:00 Symposium, Noorderlicht, Akerkhof 12, Groningen
- Introduction by Christy Westhovens
- Roundtable with artists, researchers and guests
- Discussion with Q&A
A manifesto has been released in conjunction with the event.
Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.
This program is made possible through funding of Mondrian Foundation, Fonds 21, Stimuleringsfonds voor Creative Industrie.
Lineup
- Arthur Elsenaar >> Artist and teacher at ArtScience Interfaculty,
Hogeschool der Kunsten Den Haag (KABK/KonCon)
- Christy Westhovens >> Artist and researcher, Technology, Performance and
Society research unit, University of Music and Theatre Munich (HMTM)
- David Gauthier — moderator >> Artist and Assistant Professor of
Computational Media and Arts, Utrecht University (UU)
- Gabriel Pereira >> Assistant Professor in AI & Digital Culture, University
of Amsterdam (UvA)
- Juli Laczkó >> Artist and teacher at HKU Media, Image and Media
Technology, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU)
- Maxigas >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
Assistant Professor of Computational Methods, Utrecht University (UU)
- Niels ten Oever >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
Assistant Professor, European Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA)
- Pawan Seshadri Venkatesh >> CTO, UrbanVind
Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.
infrastructure walk data center walks and infrastructure walks February 2025
Join us for amateur exploration into the visibility of wireless equipment and services dotted around the city! We collectively map, observe and measure the techno-diversity of digital infrastructure in urban spaces. Data and infrastructure walks are a creative method and a social practice, which can be used to reflect on data power through critical infrastructure studies. It serves a variety of purposes, from public engagement, education, and artistic research to empirical studies.
Data center walks
We started data center walks with a simple question about how to make the invisible visible. People tend to forget about the infrastructure that lies beneath the data. For instance, the cloud remains a concept reduced to a depiction of a cloud, stripping data from its materiality. We usually do not see data centers, nor do we think about them in a material sense. By taking groups into data centers with us, we explore the resources, politics, and human labor that sustains them. To do so, we walk around and inside the data centers, observing physical traces as well as user-generated information online.
Infrastructure walks
We hold a series of “infrastructure walks” in Amsterdam and Berlin, exploring the visibility of digital infrastructures deployed in public spaces. The experience allows us to uncover data flows and to study datafication in urban areas. By engaging with the infrastructures around us, we seek to expose reconfigurations of power relations in the city through emerging technologies and protocols. Infrastructure walks address the question of what media technologies may mean “after all”, that is in the context of the life world, lived experiences and action possibilities of end users as embodied citizens. Insights can countermap the spatial control exercised through the electromagnetic spectrum in urban spaces. Often, us and the groups find that infrastructures should be (1) noticeable, (2) observable, (3) contestable or programmable to their users.
Upcoming walks and related events: Data Walk Workshop: Sensing Digital Materiality in Urban Public Spaces
Walking the infrastructure walk and dancing the frequency dance — You only see it when you get it
infrastructure walk “Data Walk as Method” at the Data Power Conference in Graz/Bangalore September 2024
Talk in the panel BP3: Reimagining Data (in Bangalore location), Friday 09:00 CEST, 12:30 IST, room B-RM R305.
The proposed panel brings together scholars and artists for methodological reflections on data walk as an empirical method and social practice. Data walk as a method emerged recently as a creative method employed by academics and artists for a variety of purposes from public engagement and project-based education to artistic research, or as a means of data collection for straightforward empirical studies. Loitering in urban public spaces of data infrastructures as a way to check our assumptions about more abstract notions of data power is the sensitivity that may connect these approaches. Nonetheless, the sensitivities go back historically and philosophically to the works of Walter Benjamin on the flaneur, the Situationist International on psychogeography, and to hacker practices such as wardriving.
After the fervent period of experimentation that describes the last few years, does it make sense now to discuss classical methodological issues such as canonisation, normative criteria, or the affordances and limitations of the interpretative power of the data walk methodology? In other words, what is a programmatic data walk? What is a successfully performed data walk? What data walks are suitable to address what epistemological questions? Which uses are there for data walks in academic life and artistic research?
A symposium on the topic is to be held Sprint 2025 at the University of Utrecht, bringing the results of the discussion at the data power conference to dedicated practitioners.
