within limits

residency and exhibition
materials: solar powered internet infrastructure, cold cathode lights, modded server rack, custom electronics, code and computer hardware dipped in molten aluminum.
dimensions: variable
year: 2025

"Meekly humming atop the roof, the fragile solar server continues to deliver our cloud(y) infrastructure. Inside ITU’s atrium, its curatorial other blinks whenever its webpage is graced, clicked, refreshed, or just minimally paid attention to. The various sculptures – molten dipped aluminum hard drives decommissioned by ITU – probe our data storage ideologies: what data do we cherish, what can we live without? At the same time these distorted drives speak to a constrained infrastructural aesthetic. In voices of alchemy and uncertainty they ask about our server’s beauty, its hope, its vulnerability, its transformational possibilities."

from the text Within Limits - On Computation and constraint by james maguire, which served as an exhibition text for the installation.

in the periode from spring 2024 until february 2025 i was artist in resident at the center for climate IT (CCIT), at the IT university in copenhagen.

in the beginning of the residency i conducted a series of conversations with researchers and scienctist affiliated with CCIT, these conversations served as a base research in to the work at ITU / CCIT. during the fall 2024 i decided to focus on the topic of digital degrowth working with DASYA, FM and several other departments at ITU on getting a solar powered server up and running on the roof of ITU, as well as producing a series of new scultpural works for the exhibition in the atrium of ITU.

the solar server now serves a simple website solar.itu.dk with a collaborative editing tool. students and researchers from ITU are invited to make their own use of the server, using the existing infrastructure, exploring computation within limits. the solar powered server was very much inspired by low tech magazines solar server.

click here to download the text as pdf.

the light installation / abstract server rack is connected to the server on the top of the vuilding. when people interact with the website solar.itu.dk the light animations in the server rack sculpture changes.

i did several aluminum dips of discarded hardware from ITU. graphics cards and harddrive were dipped in 400 degrees molten aluminum, creating new composite sculptures.

i also did sand cast aluminum copies of harddrives.

the residency and exhibition could only be created with generous help and kind support from james maguire, frauke tom h mennes, luis alfredo landa mariaca, sebastian büttrich, julian charles philip priest, yucheng lu, halfdan hauch jensen, halfdan mouritzen, the danish arts council and center for climate IT