Surface Studies for a Cloud Archive (2013-preset) is an ongoing photographic series that examines the monumental, often anonymous structures that house the Internet. Since 2013, I have traveled across the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia to photograph the exteriors of massive data centers operated by Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and other major tech companies. These compounds appear at once enormous and unremarkable—corporate, opaque, and quietly fortified. Their surfaces are hard to read by design: an aesthetic of concealment and control.

Working quickly and from the closest point I’m allowed to access, I travel to document the scale and material presence of these sites—structures that mark the global sprawl of Big Data as it rapidly expands and evolves. Sometimes I’m able to frame their vast footprint; other times, I capture only slivers from behind barriers, documenting their inaccessibility.

These buildings are not just sites of information storage—they are engines of energy consumption. Data centers require immense power to run servers and mitigate the heat produced by processing, often drawing from non-renewable sources despite corporate sustainability claims. Their environmental impact is significant: from carbon emissions and water usage for cooling, to the reshaping of local ecosystems and the displacement of agricultural or fishing economies. They represent the material costs of digital convenience and surveillance capitalism.

Images from Surface Studies have served as source material for interactive, augmented, and sculptural works in Data Shadows. Together, these projects examine the entangled relationships between our bodies, our data, and the power structures that seek to control them. Through this ongoing work, I aim to visually register the scale and physical reality of the digital cloud—a system that extracts, surveils, and consumes, while appearing to float just beyond the reach of public understanding.