Christina Gruber

Fliegende Fische

wax, textile dye, water, textile

2024

Our daily lives are based on interactions, and these are taking place more and more online. But what if the digital world was just as dependent on water as we are and did not weightlessly drift through cyberspace?

“Fliegende Fische” (“Flying Fish”) is the sequel to the work “Digital Water” (2016) in which Christina Gruber went on a search for the infrastructures of the cloud and found them in a small town in Upper Austria called Kronstorf, where the tech company Google bought a plot of farmland measuring 78 hectare (190 acres) for a future “cloud factory” in 2008.

Data centers need an enormous amount of water for cooling their servers, meaning our digital actions have an impact on the water cycle. “Fliegende Fische” shows the close connection between digital and analog ecosystems and the possible consequences for their inhabitants in the form of fish.

 

(c)Photos: Kulturdrogerie 2024