Wheelwright Prize Lecture: Marina Otero Verzier "Feral Clouds"

Feral Clouds draws on research supported by the Wheelwright Prize to examine the architectures and politics of data processing and storage in a context shaped by technological competition and climate collapse. Bringing together activism, policy work, design prototypes, and educational initiatives, this lecture proposes a reorientation of digital culture away from Cartesian paradigms and market-driven notions of efficiency.

Ferality operates here as a lens through which to understand both the excesses of an industry obsessed with winning the AI race at the expense of the planet and the unruly consequences of that obsession. From the residual heat expelled by servers to the destruction embedded in AI supply chains, digital infrastructures generate effects that evade design, control, and prediction.

At the same time, “ferality” refers to forms of contestation against this violence, as well as the unintended relationships and material transformations that fracture techno-solutionist imaginaries and give rise to alternative energy cultures. Drawing on sovereign and Indigenous clouds, feminist servers, permaculture imaginaries, and low-tech computation, Otero Verzier outlines speculative yet actionable directions for systems of data storage that embrace limits, decay, and transformation.