The Art of Guarding the Russian Cloud : Infrastructural Labour in a Yandex Data Centre in Finland

• This visual essay discusses digital labour in a Yandex data centre located in Finland.Drawing on a combination of visual ethnography, elicitation interviews and participantobservation that took place in Yandex’ only data centre located outside Russia between 2018and 2019, I show how the labour of maintaining a crucial part of Russian internet consumptionand data practices is contingent on the creative work of everyday inhabiting and humanisingthe industrial space of the data centre. With feminist art critique Lucy Lippard’s(1974/2010), and anthropologist Mary Douglas’s (1991) ideas of home, I suggest how workin the data centre rests upon mobilising traditionally feminine domestic crafts and hobby artwork such as gardening, cooking, and waste reuse as mode of critique and ultimately, atransformational rehabilitation of a space designed to cater for the machines rather than forthe people who care for machines.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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art (ämneskategori)