Theodor Reinhardt
Borders & Territories
Office for Digital Oblivion: On Material and Operational Complexities of Contemporary Data Infrastructures
The Office for Digital Oblivion has grown to become a fully-fledged hybrid that blurs the boundaries between natural or cultural, ecological or anthropocentric and aims to re-ground discourse on digital material and territorial implications of information technologies. Through a series of interventions, it aims to challenge supposed banalities on perceived de-territorialisation of information infrastructures, tracing systems through scales, aiming to spatialise and thus problematise operational complexities which largely remain illegible. It consists of the Archive, an underground offline repository for fragile digital data; the Exchange Point that facilitates data/rock fluxes from excavation and preservation; the Binary Gardens that revitalise and inscribe digital patterns in landscapes with extracted rock; and the Space Cemetery that addresses celestial frontiers of data preservation. With that, it transgresses technocratic dogmas and puts forward new approaches to conceive of infrastructural systems - new ways of thinking, worlding and becoming together in the Anthropocene.