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An Amazon Earth Archive
Beneath the surfaces of our screens are enormous assemblies of infrastructures and bodies; An Amazon Earth Archive is an attempt to draw the arrangements of geography and labor that underwrite contemporary digital content. The online archive contains a collection of digital motion-graphics. Each graphic consists of between three and thirty independent .gif files. These individual layers have (in part) been produced by an anonymous pool of online workers operating on Amazon.com’s micro-labor platform Mechanical Turk. Each individual .gif is hosted from one of the thirteen different geographically distributed server farms comprising Amazon.com’s AWS Cloud Network. When the archive is accessed by your device, the .gifs comprising the layers of a randomly selected motion-graphic are served to your browser from datacenters as nearby as Ohio or as far away as Mumbai. These distributed .gif graphics are collapsed into a unique composition within the two-dimensional space of your screen. Each of the cycling compositions in the archive attempts to turn the geographic distance between your device and the content comprising the image into a depiction of the spatial distance of the internet in real-time. Every composition’s appearance is unique, the misalignments between layers and their fluctuating resolutions are the product of the speed of Amazon’s earth in real-time. This archive is a first attempt to transform the lag of digital distance into a graphic instrument.