6 Stunning Photos of the Internet’s Hidden Infrastructure

We know the internet as a 2-D screen, but in reality, the web is an immensely physical thing. The cloud isn’t an ephemeral, immaterial place where our pictures just happen to hang out, but rather a series of massive servers, wires and equipment tucked away in high-security buildings. It takes a lot of stuff—power and space—to make sure things run smoothly.

The internet has its own form of architecture, one that we rarely get to see. Timo Arnall, a designer and artist from London, has documented these hidden spaces his new project Internet Machine for Big Bang Data. And it turns out that these spaces are actually quite beautiful.

Arnall gained access to Telefónica, a 65,700 square meter data center in Alcalá, Spain that handles much of Europe’s cloud computing services. He wandered the halls for miles, capturing the sprawling  rooms with a Canon 5D. “The server rooms felt like entering an intensive care unit at a hospital,” he says. “I felt quite alien, especially as film and photography shoots are always a bit hazardous, you have unwieldy bags, lights and tripods and sound recording equipment.”

The images are strikingly sterile. You see rows of nondescript servers and the machines that keep them going. Fiber optic connectors are routed through the labyrinthine building and connect to from room to room through holes in the concrete walls. Power sources, Arnall writes, are backed up by caverns of lead batteries, which are in turn backed up by rows of yellow generators.

“The thing that most surprised me about the data centre was how much of the space was taken up by support systems, and how little space was actually used for servers,” he says. “I didn’t imagine the cooling, connectivity, power and fire suppression to take up so much space and to be so loud and visible.”

It’s large scale infrastructure, to the tune of €300 million according to Telefónica. It’s easy to forget the internet is a big, weighty business, and that’s a problem, Arnall says. “We tend to be quite unreflective about this stuff, how it works and what it implies, because we can’t see it and it often ‘just works’,” he says. “It’s very difficult to pay attention to and critique stuff that is invisible or hidden behind many layers of abstraction. Data centers are incredibly important yet invisible places, they demand more critical reflection and attention.”