Professor Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

What Would Google Do? This is the question that government managers, educational administrators, and business leaders have pondered for nearly twenty years of data center development and innovation marketing in Groningen, the Netherlands. In 2014, this question became public when Google formally announced it would expand there by building its largest data center in Western Europe. Since then, I have been following the stories of Google’s coming. In this talk, I offer the infrastructural prehistory of these cloud dreams, followed by three perspectives on what Google does.

This event is part of Data Materiality, a three-year collaborative project co-sponsored by the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture, and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology.