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Short abstract

This contribution describes the ideation, design and production of a physical exhibition and associated media making as a form of critical research method and dissemination, intended to promote critical engagement with the environmental politics of technology.

Long abstract

In contemporary Ireland, where big tech and a pro-industry government seek access to ever more resources for expanding AI infrastructure and the tech economy at large, there is an ever greater need to critically engage with the complex and often contradictory relationships between the technology industry, resource scarcity and the climate crisis. In this context, the author shares their recent practice of using critical and creative methods to undo the prescribed logics and the dominant narratives of technological inevitability in the case of Ireland. The author details the process of combining material experimentation with historical research and critical thinking about the environmental politics of data technologies. This includes the design and making of a large scale physical exhibition for a wide public audience, designed to provoke embodied and visceral understandings of how data processing and storage rely on intensive consumption of resources and territorialise the physical environment. Using the prism of heat, to foreground the thermodynamic processes necessary for data production, storage and distribution, the installation asserted that the production and dissemination of information is intrinsically connected to the production and dissemination of heat. In conclusion, the author reflects on the need for alternative narratives and visual languages; winning over the unconverted; and making room for critical technology literacy in engineering contexts.