In 2016, Matt Parker, Michael James Lewis and Sebastien Dehesdin founded The People’s Cloud, an artist led investigative team interested in the material infrastructures of the Internet.

Internet enabled computers and mobile devices are ubiquitous amongst much of the world but not too long ago computers were humongous machines, occupying vast spaces and generating a great deal of noise; the noise of spinning fans and disks. As technology has evolved, ‘cloud computing’ has become prevalent and today’s smartphones sit silently in our pockets, no longer making the noise of computers of old.

As we transfer our data across the Internet, where is it going? Most people have no idea where their ‘online’ data is once it’s uploaded onto ‘the cloud’, but it is definitely not in the sky. The Data Centre, an often huge building filled with computers, heat, spinning fans and disks has enabled us to transfer the noises of computing and locate them somewhere else, somewhere unknown, and somewhere on a mass scale.

The People's Cloud collective travelled across Europe, visiting various sites of media infrastructures, Data Centres, fibre optic cable networks, Internet exchanges, surveying their acoustic properties and their relationship with the overall environmental and geopolitical impact of mobile data storage.

The People’s Cloud documentary film will be released in early 2017 and to celebrate the release, we’re delighted to be launching this campaign with the Original Soundtrack for The People’s Cloud.
The Soundtrack is an hour of field recordings, soundscapes and compositions produced exclusively from recordings taken during field trips to critical sites of media infrastructure including data centres in Iceland, The Netherlands and the UK, hydroelectric power stations in Iceland, Fibre Optic landing stations and other critical network sites across Europe and one of the world’s most powerful computers, SURFsara.

For more information about The People’s Cloud, visit www.thepeoplescloud.org.

For press enquiries contact Matt Parker at mail@earthkeptwarm.com.