The question of visibility has long been part of the conversation about digital data, often imagined as either invisible (see Parks; Starosielski) or hypervisible (see Holt and Vonderau).\u00a0The risk when data is invisible is of a failure of collective citizen engagement in decision-making regarding the conceptualization, meaning, emplacement, management, and maintenance of these infrastructures. Similarly, hypervisibility, such as the high-gloss curation and self-representation of data centres online (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) reinforces the imaginary of a clean, controlled, and secure data infrastructure; people need neither physical access nor deep understanding of their policies and impacts. The pieces in this volume question this binary by re-embedding the visual aspects of digital infrastructure in their social, political, and environmental context. In keeping with the concept of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies<\/em>, the following articles open up the question of visuality, in both their content and their form.<\/p>\n

Asta Vonderau, in \u201cTechnologies of Imagination: Locating the Cloud in Sweden\u2019s North,\u201d offers an ethnographic exploration of Facebook\u2019s first European data center in Lule\u00e5. Her contribution shows how the Node Pole project picks up on longstanding tropes of Swedish character while promising specifically regional empowerment in the form of a \u201cpost-extractive modernity.\u201d Yet such developments, Vonderau argues, are enabled by the industry giant\u2019s infamous secrecy: strictly limited information about this effort heightens its imaginative potential while obscuring less welcome environmental effects.<\/p>\n

Like Vonderau, Graham Pickren charts future-making efforts in \u201cThe Factories of the Past are Turning Into the Data Centres of the Future.\u201d Examining the conversion of Chicago\u2019s industrial-building stock into server farms, he traces the shape of material infrastructure as \u201ca bridge that connects our digital present to our industrial past.\u201d In doing so, Pickren maps continuities and transformations in uneven urban capitalist development. While the decline of manufacturing in Chicago has created the conditions for data storage to take its place, this new industry offers quite different configurations of investment and community impact. If data centres are the so-called \u201cfactories of the 21^{st<\/sup> century,\u201d Pickren asks, \u201cwhither the working class?\u201d<\/p>\n}

While Vonderau and Pickren demonstrate the political and analytic potential of \u201cvisibilizing\u201d data infrastructure, Kristen Veel and Alexander Taylor\u2019s contributions complicate that imperative in their attention to data centre space. Veel\u2019s \u201cUncertain Architectures: Performing Shelter and Vulnerability\u201d critically reads the design plans of two data centers: the underground bunker, Pionen,<\/em> and the prominent modular skyscraper, Data Tower<\/em>. Her visual analysis contrasts two modes of relating to data: \u201cenclosure and containment\u201d on the one hand and \u201cflexibility, flow, and modulation\u201d on the other. Ultimately, Veel shows that these designs are performative, more representative of what we imagine about data than what it is. Taylor, too, takes up data centre architecture in \u201cThe Technoaesthetics of Data Centre \u2018White Space\u2019.\u201d Critiquing the politics of exposure that characterize many popular and academic accounts, Taylor uses the \u201cwhite space\u201d of the data centre as a heuristic to explore the unresolved interplay between transparency and opacity in industry design. Whiteness sometimes illuminates, sometimes projects, and sometimes reflects back in dynamics more complicated than mere concealment. Making visible, he argues, is not the same as making known.<\/p>\n

Evan Light, Jutta Lauth Bacas, Jeff Deutch, Daphne Dragona, Katrin M. K\u00e4mpf, Marta Peirano Valentina Pellizzer, Christina Rogers, Florian Sprenger, Jaron Rowan, and Abiol Lual Deng push the question of seeing and knowing in their Story Map of data flows across borders in the route from central Africa to Northern Europe. \u201cInfrastructures of Dis\/Connection: Of Drones, Migration, and Digital Care\u201d analyzes migration as a process of connection and disconnection, in which access to communication infrastructures also exposes migrants to the threat of state surveillance. The movement of data, then, both facilitates and impedes the movement of people (many of whom are displaced by drone warfare, itself linked to some of the same infrastructures). Michael Audette-Longo takes up another mode of mobility in \u201cHear the World\u2019s Sounds: Locality as Metadata in Two Music Platforms.\u201d Tracking the feature of location tagging across the applications Bandcamp and Soundcloud, Audette-Longo shows how regional meta-data works to create a \u201csense of place\u201d for consumers in a new media economy. While tagging organizes a particular experience of connection, he argues that it is naturalized as the feature blends into each application\u2019s interface.<\/p>\n

The final essay in this volume, \u201cDrones Caught in the Net,\u201d offers an experimental exploration of information infrastructures from the perspective of the unmanned drone. Adam Fish, Bradley Garrett, and Oliver Case document their mapping of fibre-optic cables, landing stations, and data centres in the North Atlantic. They argue that the potential of drone imagery inheres not in some fresh perspective made possible by new technology, but in the \u201crelative parallelism\u201d at play between their aerial information infrastructures and those on land and underground. They conclude with a call to media theorists to \u201cfold ourselves back into the stratigraphy of place.\u201d<\/p>\n

As part of the Elicitations component of our issue, Rafico Ruiz remembers Alberto Behar, a robotics engineer and polar researcher who was instrumental in generating early evidence of climate change. Ruiz explores Behar\u2019s work posthumously through his archive of readings and images. Antonia Hern\u00e1ndez offers another visual exploration of networks in the context of domestic space. Through a series of art experiments called The Moldy Strategy<\/em>, Hern\u00e1ndez invites the viewer to navigate mold, exposing microscopic entanglements of bodies and media.<\/p>\n

As Shannon Mattern noted in her cogent essay, \u201cCloud and Field,\u201d it has recently become a popular pastime to map the new infrastructures of our digital age (2016). Field trips and field guides now chart the nodes and networks that make up \u201cthe cloud,\u201d often reproducing a colonial ethos of exploration and faith in the making of encyclopedic knowledge\u2014faith that making visible is making clear. With this issue of Imaginations<\/em>, we aim to do something different. By staging a conversation about place and data through a wide variety of engagements with both, we offer a range of experiments and explorations that tackle rather than take for granted the question of the visual; model the potential of local perspective on global networks; and emphasize points of encounter and engagement between the cloud and the ground.<\/p>\n

We would like to thank the authors and practitioners who have contributed to this issue, whose works mark an important moment of interdisciplinary scholarly interests and interventions. Thank you also to the peer reviewers for their invaluable intellectual labour in this process. Finally, we would like to thank the staff at Imaginations<\/em> for helping us put the issue together: Sheena Wilson (Editor-in-Chief), Brent Bellamy (Managing Editor), Tara Milbrandt (Elicitations Reviews Editor), Shama Rangwala (Copy Editor) and \u00c8ve\u00a0Robidoux-Descary and Aur\u00e9lie Lesueur (Translators).<\/p>\n

We hope you enjoy the issue and look forward to your feedback.<\/p>\n