28/04/2026
Kaya & Blank - Infrascapes
on view until May 10, 2026
Room 7
Stream
Stream situates itself in one of the most critical yet visually unassuming hubs of the global Internet. Since the late 1990s, Frankfurt am Main has developed into Europe’s primary digital exchange point, hosting DE-CIX, one of the world’s largest Internet exchange nodes. The city’s central geographic position, stable energy infrastructure, and dense fiber-optic networks have attracted a growing concentration of data centers, now numbering in the dozens across the metropolitan region.
These facilities route and store the vast flows of information that underpin financial markets, cloud computing, streaming services, and everyday communication. Built for efficiency rather than visibility, they appear as anonymous, sealed architectures: windowless, climate-controlled, and designed to operate continuously. Their presence is quiet, yet their energy demands are immense, making them both infrastructural keystones and significant contributors to resource consumption.
Filmed in winter using thermal imaging, the video at the center of the installation renders this hidden energy visible. The heat emitted by Frankfurt’s data centers, normally invisible and unnoticed, appears here as glowing surfaces and radiating forms. Paired with conventional footage, the thermal images depict the ventilation systems and chimneys required to sustain the seemingly immaterial operations of the Internet.
In the exhibition space, silicon wafers, normally concealed within the architectures of computation, become both material and mirror. Arranged in front of the projection, their circular, polished surfaces fragment and redirect the moving image across the room, scattering light in shifting reflections. Like data signals moving through global networks, the projected images are broken, rerouted, and redistributed in space.
📸: .blank
Supported by and
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 3–7 PM
Thursday: 3–9 PM
Saturday–Sunday: 12–6 PM
