In this episode of Data Materiality, we speak with Vicki Mayer, Professor of Communication at Tulane University, New Orleans, USA. Vicki’s research on media production and consumption – and its relationships with economic and political transformations in the media and creative industries – is well known. In our chat we speak about her field research on the arrival of Google to a remote corner of the Netherlands, where the tech giant is building Western Europe’s largest data centre. Not only does Vicki provide a compelling peek into the peculiar places that data centres are, but also how they (particularly Google data centres) might be seen as sites of aura as well. This gives rise to questions about power in the contemporary era, not to mention whether data centres really provide the economic benefits they so often promise.

The interview for this episode was recorded in June 2018

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Clean Soul" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

About the podcast: Data Materiality is a podcast series about the ways in which digital data depends on physical forms and infrastructures, and comes to matter in practice and imagination. The impetus for this podcast is a three-year research project by the same name – Data Materiality – co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology. The series is co-hosted by Joel McKim and Scott Rodgers.

For more information: www.bbk.ac.uk/vasari

To listen or subscribe via Apple Podcasts, visit: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/data-materiality-episode-1-vicki-mayer-on-data-centres/id1494065021?i=1000461854331

To listen or subscribe via Spotify, visit:

https://open.spotify.com/show/6JnV9RJc4QS50kMDKBBFHm