Ethnography as Craft: Rendering the ‘Emic’ Space of a Server Farm using a 3 -D printer

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic data in server farms, this Master’s thesis explores the promise of sculpture as a method for ethnographic representation and anthropological scholarship. Inspired by Paul Atkinson’s ethnographic study of glassblowers, I frame ethnography as a craft practice, introducing an experimental method called ethnographic sculpture to generate insights about spatiality and culture that purely textual accounts cannot. To reproduce the lived experience of my research participants and the social world of data centers in which they are found, I propose a three-dimensional (3D) approach to crafting an ethnographic sculpture: 1) the material, 2) the semiotic, and 3) the phenomenal. In what follows, I enlist my archive of field notes and interview transcripts to flesh out the material, semiotic, and phenomenal aspects of life inside of data centers. I explore themes ranging from: the embodied knowledge and sensory habitus of workers, oceanic and biotic metaphors in the narration of thermodynamics, the invisibility of air as a medium, and the unreliability of numbers to apprehend the complexity of servers, air conditioners, and the ensemble of technical systems in data centers. I then walk readers through my creative process of rendering my ethnography into a sculpture; a 3d printed model of a data center augmented with additional elements (fabrics, clays, lighting) to simulate the ‘emic’ world of data centers. I conclude with a reflection on the affordances of sculpture as a medium for ethnographic representation that is as experiential as it is descriptive.