Head in the Cloud

Project Leader: Vanessa Graf

Project Team: -

Project Partners: -

Type of Funding: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Post-DocTrack 

Project Duration: September 2026 to January 2027

Institut: Institut für Bildende Kunst und Kulturwissenschaften 

This postdoc project grant has been awarded for the completion of publications resulting from the dissertation "Head in the Cloud," which examines the material-semiotic construction of the data center industry and its infrastructures in the German-speaking Alps. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews with data center managers, the project represents a site-specific and local study of the global phenomenon of the cloud, its infrastructures, and the rhetoric, narratives, and sociotechnical imaginaries that shape them. "Head in the Cloud" takes a narrative and language-based approach to network infrastructure, through which the interplay of material conditions and cultural logics in the construction, management, and development of data centers is carefully carved out. How are network infrastructures imagined, conceptualized, envisioned in the Alps? And according to which logic are they then built, operated, and run? Network infrastructures, in this sense, are materializations of imaginaries, their cultural, conceptual, and imagined components – their poetics – as essential to their construction and upkeep as their material ones. 

Contact: Vanessa Graf

Weblink: https://vanessagraf.at