Jeroen Koolhaas 

DATA CENTER

2022 Amsterdam. Audio visual installation
Big Art Fair, Amsterdam.
MOYA Museum, Oosterhout
Kunstkerk, Dordrecht

In the interactive spaces of our digital era, users allow for their data to be owned by predatory entities within whose boundaries our online lives take shape. Data center, as a digital enclosure, interrogates the relationship between surveillance and the interactive economy.

It can be argued that the digital enclosure connects back to the enclosure movement of the middle ages, where farmers were forcibly separated from their land, only allowed to produce for the owner class.

Karl Marx viewed enclosures as a key component in establishing structural conditions necessary for a capitalist economy, framing it as “the systematic theft of communal property. He defined it as ‘primitive accumulation’ and viewed the colonization of the Americas, the African slave trade as examples of this process. Marx argued that primitive accumulation alienates humans from nature

In digital enclosures, the individual unknowingly or willingly submits to giving up their information that generates economic value for the new owner class.
Digital enclosure has the purpose of privatizing, controlling and commodifying both information and intellectual property.