Tributary

Tributary is an experimental ethnographic film that traces the movement and harnessing of natural resources within the Icelandic landscape to support our digital lives. Tributary explores covert, 'black-boxed' data centres (remote and highly secure sites) by tracking water and geothermal s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: James Davoll, Paul Dolan, Pete Howson
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doaj.org/article/9d47966f86a449bd8d036af8dccce946
Description
Summary:Tributary is an experimental ethnographic film that traces the movement and harnessing of natural resources within the Icelandic landscape to support our digital lives. Tributary explores covert, 'black-boxed' data centres (remote and highly secure sites) by tracking water and geothermal sources to the infrastructure required to power and house these physical locations of intensive computational processing. Created from a combination of traditional and experimental field recording techniques made within Iceland and the UK, Tributary aims to problematise the notion of 'green' data centres. It showcases the intensive energy requirements required to prop up the digital infrastructure of contemporary life. These include cryptocurrency mining, cloud storage, digital image production and media streaming.