The Aegean Datahaven: A collaborative platform in the archipelago

Kyriaki Goni

2017



Project Team:
Kyriaki Goni with Thanos Eleftherakos

aegeandatahaven.com

The Mediterranean Sea, in the sidelined European South, has been the stage of major tensions and urgencies due to its geographical particularity and cultural diversity: climate change, population movements, financial crisis, military and political conflicts, tourist exploitation. Part of the Mediterranean Sea, the Aegean archipelago connects but also divides two continents being therefore of crucial importance for many centuries in this area. Having opposed numerous gentrification attempts and investment plans during the last decades, the archipelago is found to accommodate in the future a decentralized network of small, fully sustainable, climate-controlled data centers, constructed on the islands or floating on the water, which enables people to safely and privately store and share their digital information and memory without relying on any kind of corporate cloud. This network of data centers managed by the islanders brings into form a kind of local traditional platform cooperativism. The islanders’ community consists of people who abandoned the urban centers of Europe, former refugees and indigenous islanders. In the face of the harsh and erratic regional conditions, the Aegean Datahaven connects the islands with each other creating new topologies and questioning at the same time the established forms of sovereignty, identity, geography and power. An extended archive of the data centers can be found in the Aegean Datahaven collection. The data centers are depicted on a series of drawings by an unknown traveler.

Kyriaki Goni, The Aegean Datahaven, 2017 [Aerial view of the island of Tilos, From the archives of The Aegean Datahaven]