Terra Null

Artists: Paul Dolan, Daniel Walsh, Pete Howson

Terra Null brings together staff and postgraduate researchers from arts and geography exploring connections between NewSpace industries and cryptocurrencies, data infrastructure, extractivism and histories of colonisation. 

Dolan’s Extraterritorial photographic series depicts American rocket launch facilities in Texas and New Mexico as extraterrestrial landscapes rendered in stark black and white via a specialised infrared camera.

Alis Oldfield’s OMEN, Polyphonic Orbit, is a sonic artwork that gives voice to three historically significant comets who have visited as our planet has undergone profound ecological and technological transformation. Witnessing histories of enclosure, industrialisation, and transhumanist philosophy, mirrored later in our digital networks, the work questions what these deep-time travellers might perceive next as Earth accelerates toward unknown technological futures.

Daniel Walsh’s research tracks the supply chain of American rocket launch sites, revealing continuities with the global extraction of materials and minerals.

Dr Pete Howson will be giving a talk on Wednesday 18th March 1-2pm in Gallery North entitled Extra terra nullius: Off-worlding the externalities of AI, crypto mining and cloud computing with Orbital Data Infrastructure

Despite ambitious carbon neutrality targets from Big Tech companies like Google, the rapid global proliferation of AI data centres means the industry’s energy use could triple by 2030. Business-as-usual development could result in a data centre industry accounting for between 14 and 20 percent of the US’s total power demand in the next 5 years. To reduce the fossil fuel and water demands of sprawling facilities on Earth, there has been much discussion in both the computing and commercial space communities concerning the feasibility of developing orbital data infrastructure. This talk considers the economic drivers for these developments as well as their social and environmental opportunities and threats. I also propose a need for further social science research in this rapidly evolving sector. While together, space technologies and data centres underpin much of the global economy, I argue that planned developments for off-world data centres appear to be driven more through circular investment strategies and a libertarian accelerationist ideology, than sound environmental management or rational economic logic.