CRUNCH: Data Mourning

We live in a time when humans and AI are creating vast amounts of data with significant environmental consequences. The digital industry relies on extractive practices that consume vast amounts of energy, occupy large tracts of land and contribute to high CO2 emissions. 

In a conversation with Nai Lee Kalema and Professor Peg Rawes, Dr Marina Otero Verzier explores these pressing issues by proposing new paradigms for data storage that integrate architecture, preservation and digital culture. Central to this discussion is the concept of ‘Data Mourning’, which acknowledges the deep connection between the digital and physical worlds. This concept encourages us to consider the full lifecycle of digital data – from its creation to its inevitable decay and disposal.

The conversation will examine the loss of control over our digital memories, now largely managed by corporations, and how practices of erasure and mourning can act as forms of resistance against the relentless drive to accumulate data.

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, replacing the International Lecture Series.

Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. 

Speaker biographies

Dr Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. In 2022 she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. Her winning proposal, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, examines new architecture paradigms for storing data and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.

Since 2020, Marina has been the Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. The programme focuses on design practices attuned to ecological and social challenges. From 2015 to 2022, she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, where she led initiatives focused on labour, extraction and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective, including ‘Automated Landscapes’, ‘BURN-OUT’, and ‘Lithium: States of Exhaustion’. Previously, she was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia GSAPP. Marina has curated exhibitions such as ‘Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains’, at Galería Municipal do Porto in 2023, ‘Work, Body, Leisure’, the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and ‘After Belonging’, the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016. She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), A Matter of Data (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others. Marina studied at TU Delft, ETSAM and Columbia GSAPP. In 2016, she received her PhD at ETSAM. Her PhD thesis Evanescent Institutions (2016) examines the emergence of new paradigms for institutions, and in particular the political implications inherent in mobile and transient structures.

Nai Lee Kalema is a PhD candidate in Innovation and Public Policy at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). Her research is supervised by Prof Rainer Kattel, Professor of Innovation and Public Governance, and Dr Kate Roll, Associate Professor in Innovation, Development and Purpose. Nai’s doctoral research looks at the global political economy of digital transformation, examining how global digital and AI governance influences public-sector digital transformation and digital governments in the Global South.

Prof Peg Rawes is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy and Director of Research at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is an interdisciplinary architectural historian whose teaching and research focus on 'relational architectural ecologies’. Her publications examine architecture in connection to the arts, humanities, social sciences, human and environmental rights, and medical and health practices. 

More information

Image: Studio Marina Otero. Quipu 3D Model.