Delay Lines
Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, 2021
Clouds are shapeshifters, subject to their environment. Calling our remote data storage infrastructure ‘the cloud ’conjures up images of morphing invisible networks, always on, existing in an undefined somewhere. But this entangled information doesn’t exist in the sky. The cloud is in the ocean. Tethered by umbilical wiring to warehouses of hardware, tended by humans, across the world. The cables begin as a cluster of glass fibres. Deep under the sea, data travels at near light speed, emitted by lasers.
Data centres are often situated near rivers and oceans, where water is used to transfer heat from their operations. Seymour Cray, who set out to create the world’s fastest computer, was inspired by his engineer father, who designed dams for power stations. Liquid was used to cool the Cray-2, a supercomputer nicknamed ‘Bubbles’, which took up an entire building. While electronics are aquaphobic, water has long been used as a way to transfer heat. Experiments with submerged data centres have proven viable, a reverse evolution from land to sea.
The story of our transformation takes place in water, inside the amnion, a bubble of protective fluid. We have no memory of this place, but our body remembers. Our middle ear retains a record of this moment, vestigial features of our time as fish. This transformation from sea to land also owes itself to silica, one of the most common substances on Earth, formed when massive stars explode. This star dust permeates our bodies and all aspects of the natural and built world through a variety of geological, technological and biological transformations. Silica deposits, transported by the water of subterranean rivers like a delay line through the sediment, rest deep in the earth, made solid over time. These prismatic gems called opals and opalized fossils play a role in Indigenous and geologic histories, and their finding on Mars fuels speculation of previous life.
Glass and water share many attributes. They are simultaneously transparent and reflective. They distort, magnify and can create a barrier of separation. Neither solid nor liquid, glass is often called a rigid liquid. Sea sponges and microscopic organisms with glass skeletons inhabit the waters, phytotoliths abound in plants, and even the dust on the surface of the moon is materially related to glass. Volcanic eruptions, lightning strikes and meteorites all have the intense heat necessary to transform sand into glass. The human transformation of silica into glass allowed for new forms of vision, expanding our perception towards the microscopic and the telescopic. Glass enables access to the future, our hands endlessly touching glass surfaces, planning our hours, gazing into a myriad of worlds.
THE CLOUD IN THE OCEAN, 2021
Water, borosilicate glass, overclocked water-cooled computer, silicone soft robot manta, temperature sensors, micro-controllers, air compressor, air control system, simulated environment, monitor, metal, plastic and power supplies.
Courtesy the artists
Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson’s work The Cloud in the Ocean explores connections between water, time, heat, silica and silicone, and our own beginnings as watery beings. A network of glass forms transports water and air through a series of pathways. Functioning as delay lines, lengths of material that are equivalent to measures of time, they create a timed organism that uses water to transfer heat from a computer running a simulation of an ocean floor, to a tank of saline solution holding a soft robotic manta ray.
‘The computer generates heat as a by-product of its efforts to render the simulation and is cooled by water. This warmer water becomes an environment for the artificial manta housed in its amniotic world, coupling organism and machine, chip and fetus.
The story of our transformation takes place in water, inside the amnion, a bubble of protective fluid. We have no memory of this place, but our body remembers. Our middle ear retains a record of this moment, vestigial features of our time as fish. This transformation from sea to land also owes itself to silica, one of the most common substances on Earth, formed when massive stars explode. This star dust permeates our bodies and all aspects of the natural and built world through a variety of geological, technological and biological transformations. Silica deposits, transported by the water of subterranean rivers, rest deep in the earth, made solid over time.’
