How can we redefine our cities by reshaping our relationship with intangible digital data?
The idea of combining digital infrastructure and nature does not immediately spring to mind as the answer to this question. Yet, through my work and research as a founder of Grow Your Own Cloud, exploring how digital data might be stored within the DNA of organisms, we start to see how breakthroughs in synthetic biology might lead us to regenerative ideas that could inspire our futures in unexpected ways.
Urban Data Forest is a project and proposal to reimagine the city as a site of data storage in plants and trees. Situated in The Hague, Netherlands, the Urban Data Forest symbolises a regenerative and multispecies space to archive data. It explores the possibility of using DNA data storage technology to transform urban areas, bringing nature and data back to the city.
In modern cities, humans and machines produce petabytes of data everyday, placing an enormous strain on scarce energy resources and in turn emitting yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The data infrastructure system is symptomatic of a broader economic model that is fundamentally broken; while externalities remain ignored, incentives to produce yet more data greatly outweigh any potential negative social or environmental consequences.
But what if we could transition from an extractive data system, which inflicts further harm upon our planet, to a system that brings us into greater symbiosis with the regenerative, living systems of the natural world?
The concept for Urban Data Forest is based on a model I developed in 2018, imagining a system where a biological cloud emerges to support the current digital cloud. Data necessary for real-time or regular usage flows through energy intensive and highly efficient silicon data centres. In parallel, through a bifurcation, DNA based data infrastructure addresses what I call the ‘phantom data’ issue, by archiving the approximately 60-80% of unused data stored in the cloud. Storing this data in DNA results in low-energy, long-lasting data archives that are compatible with organisms.
To extend this further an Urban Data Forest imagines that these biological data storage facilities might be, at least in part, plant-rich spaces filled with data encoded plant, shrub and tree varieties. This new model creates a virtuous cycle where storing more data enhances the environmental condition, while providing a rationale for the proliferation of nature in urban spaces.
Living Archives and Breathing Museums
In the final concept, two types of Urban Data Forest are proposed: ‘The Breathing Museum’ which serves to archive public and cultural data, and ‘Living Archives’ which are forests primarily dedicated to citizens as facilities in which they can store their personal data. Two future scenarios from these concepts are presented in the film ‘Bathing and Breathing / Data Harvester’ which is presented below.
Breathing Museum
The Breathing Museum is an organic archive and contemporary cultural institute powered by DNA data storage technology in plants. It offers a calm, meditative space, where the public are invited to explore digital archives and cultural works through their contact with living organisms such as trees and shrubs. With species like field elm and sea buckthorn, data storage is low density. However, repurposing an existing natural habitat allows for a large area for this typology of data forest.
As a contemporary cultural institute, the Breathing Museum utilises a biological cloud to inspire new forms of interaction between culture and nature. Artistic collections play a large role here, with collections planted in collaboration with artists to be stored for future generations. As an organic archive, the Breathing Museum preserves significant local data, including scans of old maps, rare books and historical photos. Snapshots of modern life are also regularly added such as viral videos and social media announcements related to The Hague.
Living Archives
Living Archives are community centric data forests offering local citizens a way to store their digital files in the DNA of living plants and trees.
Rather than storing their data in far flung, carbon emitting server farms, citizens and groups can obtain plots for themselves in nearby data forests to grow and care for their data. From family pictures to their favourite NFTs, these forests act as truly local and personal archive facilities. Data may be open-source or encrypted depending on the type of data and needs of the citizen. To secure organism preservation, protocols are put in place to help citizens retrieve data in a way that respects the natural growth cycle of the plant life that carries it.
These regenerative spaces for data storage are a site where local citizens and workers collaborate to preserve data and the living organisms which carry it. This all contributes to bringing biodiversity and data back to the city, involving people of all ages and creating new local meeting places.
New Jobs in the Data Forest
As data infrastructure necessitates the creation of new jobs, Urban Data Forests might offer new opportunities for local employment and a chance for urban workers to reconnect with nature.
In this speculation we imagine how new roles would emerge such as Bio-archivists who know everything about the data stored in the plants. Many used to work as archival specialists, while others are synthetic biologists trained to transform digital media into sequences of DNA for storage in plants and trees. Data Migration teams keep everyone updated with how data is spreading in the forest through pollination. Data Harvesters are specialised foragers who care for plants and the data inside. If a plant is unwell they ensure data is backed up across organisms, seeds and synthetic DNA.
Research and Development Process
The design process for this project, located in The Hague, Netherlands, involved a series of workshops and sessions with a diverse working group, including Witteveen+Bos, local stakeholders, In4Art, and members of the local government.
Through these sessions, it became evident that understanding local concerns, especially urban planning, was crucial. Stakeholders provided insights into zoning, infrastructure, and preservation considerations that needed to be integrated into our plans.
After identifying these issues and constraints, we organized a visionary workshop based on our own speculative design methodology, to collectively explore the potential for Data Forests in The Hague in 2050. This workshop helped us envision use cases, such as community-specific applications, and also potential challenges, like impacts on local ecosystems.
The vision-based workshop allowed us to assess both the benefits and drawbacks of our concept, ensuring it aligned with ambitious 2050 sustainability goals while mitigating potential challenges. We also delved into new interactions between people and living systems, including the creation of new job opportunities, drawing inspiration from local archives.
This led to a final proposal featuring two data forest typologies designed with consideration for space, ecology, community, and data, following urban planning models. The design was context-specific, with Living Archives in the more urban, sea clay and low peat landscape and the Breathing Museum in the dunes region, each featuring carefully selected plant species for ecological synergy.
Working with the botanical garden of Delft, we selected organisms to form these data forests, considering attributes like carbon remediation, compatibility with existing ecosystems and of course genomic size as an indicator of data storage capabilities. To bring this research to life, we created renders and produced two films to provide a more immersive and human touch to this complex research.
Vision and Outcomes
The Urban Data Forest was first exhibited at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2022) and has since been exhibited at Highlight Festival (2023). The installation is a semi-enclosed space that incorporates various elements of the research, including two large infographic posters, a display cabinet containing selected plant species and their genomic information as well as the display of two films for Breathing Museum and Living Archives.
The purpose of the installation is to communicate a vision of working with nature as technology for data storage, encouraging visitors to see an opportunity for new symbiotic relationships with other organisms that might promote regeneration and healing in place of destruction and extraction.
The Urban Data Forest proposal has more recently been nominated for a S+T+ARTS Prize by Ars Electronica.
Ultimately, my hope is that this hopelessly hopeful literally green vision for the cloud might inspire us to rethink and transform our associations with digital data and our conceptions of urban environments. Our experiences with both the digital and physical world can be beautiful, vibrant and low-carbon.
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Until next time, Cyrus 🌱
