The Times pays attention to something that’s intrigued me for a while — the aesthetics of data centers (here too). Having visited such places in my duties to commerce, I noticed how a standard rack of servers has the same sort of monumental minimalism of a Judd, but with lots of blinking lights and white fan noise thrown in for good measure.

MTAA has envisioned a sculpture that would comprise a standard 19” rack holding multiple computers running a small website hosting service. This rack would be installed in a ‘heroic’ manner in the center of a gallery raised on computer flooring above the normal floor. I think we wanted to call it “Monument.”

What the NYT article is doing and what “Monument” is intended to do is reveal these hidden systems that we all rely on. In the case of “Monument” — we’d attempt to aestheticize the purely functional (the NYT photos do something similar). permanent link to this post