At very long last, the first episode of Data Materiality is out. Data Materiality is a podcast series I co-host with Joel McKim, and is related to our three-year research project running under the same name, co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology.

This episode is based on an interview I did with Vicki Mayer, from Tulane University – which was was actually recorded in June 2018(!). Despite the time gap, its subject – the arrival of Google to a remote corner of the Netherlands – remains really interesting, timely and relevant.

You can play the episode within this post, if you like, and the description is pasted below.

You can also listen over on SoundCloud, or listen/subscribe to the podcast series via Apple Podcasts.

Also: the keeners amongst you will also notice that a certain Episode 2 is already available as well. Alas, I’m going to delay publicising that until next week…

Data Materiality Episode 1: Vicki Mayer on Data Centres, Media Aura and Jobs

In this episode of Data Materiality, we speak with Vicki Mayer, Professor of Communication at Tulane University, New Orleans, USA. Vicki’s research on media production and consumption – and its relationships with economic and political transformations in the media and creative industries – is well known. In our chat we speak about her field research on the arrival of Google to a remote corner of the Netherlands, where the tech giant is building Western Europe’s largest data centre. Not only does Vicki provide a compelling peek into the peculiar places that data centres are, but also how they (particularly Google data centres) might be seen as sites of aura as well. This gives rise to questions about power in the contemporary era, not to mention whether data centres really provide the economic benefits they so often promise.

Music from filmmusic.io “Clean Soul” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) License: CC BY (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)