The digital cloud surrounds us—yet where exactly is it? We experience it through countless devices and screens that define our daily lives: smartphones, laptops, smart home devices, car interfaces, and displays throughout urban spaces. Behind every swipe and stream sits a vast and rapidly expanding data infrastructure: data centres in cities and remote regions, undersea cables, and satellites. These largely invisible structures shape how we live, communicate, and organize ourselves—while consuming staggering amounts of land, energy, and raw materials. Despite their enormous impact, data infrastructures rarely enter architectural or political discourse. Architectural research can illuminate these hidden material and political systems. This exhibition cuts through the cloud—tracing its historical roots to future possibilities—to argue for a stronger integration of data infrastructure design and planning into public and political consciousness.

The exhibition unfolds across three interconnected themes—Elementary, Spatial, and Temporal—each exploring a set of fundamental questions. The first chapter lays bare the infrastructure of the cloud itself. We descend into the depths of our oceans to trace the undersea cables responsible for transmitting over 95% of global communications today. From the historic laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the 19th century to modern global fiber optic networks, these systems expose profound geopolitical and colonial legacies. Objects from the Deutsches Museum ground these narratives in both scientific rigor and material reality. The chapter also examines data centers—increasingly powerful nodes that are far from neutral. These facilities consume vast quantities of energy and freshwater while claiming ever-larger tracts of land. As artificial intelligence expands exponentially, demand for new computational capacity surges relentlessly. The exhibition confronts their architectural footprint, political significance, and ecological toll through compelling case studies from Germany and beyond, including the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Munich. Data has emerged as the engine driving new extraction industries. The growth of data economies rests fundamentally on critical raw materials: lithium, copper, cobalt, and tin. This chapter scrutinizes lithium and tin mining specifically, tracing the ripple effects on local ecosystems and communities. We witness the fierce struggle for water rights in one of the Atacama Desert's largest lithium operations in Chile, and confront the ecological and social devastation wrought by tin mining on Indonesia's Bangka island. The exhibition also documents efforts to establish European sources for lithium and other critical minerals. By mapping these material supply chains, the exhibition reveals what the data economy truly costs us.

The smart city leverages data to "optimize" and "manage" complexity. This section examines how digital systems reshape urban environments, asking: what if data empowered citizens rather than fuelling surveillance capitalism? A case study developed with Digital Twin Munich proposes data as public infrastructure and a catalyst for civic participation. The exhibition also explores how architectural practice itself is being transformed through data modelling, machine learning, and AI, opening new conversations about how data shapes the design, construction, and deconstruction of buildings.

With rising demand for electricity, water, and mounting electronic waste, deciding what data to keep and what to delete has become a political choice. In an age of relentless backup and storage practices, the question of what we preserve—and on whose terms—has never been more critical. Digital archives shape historical memory, while AI training raises pressing questions about bias, access, and what we choose to remember. Can we distinguish signal from noise in this ocean of data? How do we ethically navigate black boxes and algorithmic bias? This chapter invites reflection on how data infrastructures influence what we remember and forget, and how architectural practice connects to digital systems. It asks: how might we manage data differently in the future? How do we let go of what we no longer need? And how can we design beyond the endless expansion of storage?

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