The Thirsty Cloud
N’Found Objects
Description
Although they seem immaterial, data flows rely on actual material flows. As AI doubles data flows every two years, the number of data centres worldwide grows by 20% each year. These sites — blind buildings where data is processed and distributed — need permanent cooling systems, and the cheapest way to provide them is to use water flows. In this scenario, a curious inversion emerges: while real clouds release water, the digital and AI “cloud” absorbs water.
The Thirsty Cloud shows the environmental cost of data through an installation in which water flows against gravity to be absorbed by the cloud. An Arduino-controlled choreography of raindrops is intercepted by a stroboscopic light set to a slightly lower frequency, so the audience sees the raindrops falling up, towards the cloud. By re-materialising the metaphor of a cloud that consumes water, The Thirsty Cloud underscores the hidden environmental price our planet pays to satisfy our ever-growing need for data flows.
N’Found Objects
N’Found Objects is a critical design collective formed by Chilean architects Francisco Díaz, Aníbal Fuentes and Mathias Klenner, whose trajectories intersect architecture, sound art, cultural production and interdisciplinary research.
Their works begin with a simple yet incisive gesture — taking an existing object and displacing it from its original function and context, either through distortion or relocation into unexpected settings. By altering the familiar, they open a space of friction where the narratives, values and systems that shape everyday life are called into question, inviting us to imagine other ways of relating to things and to the world around us.