Documentary at the End of Reality: An Interview With Finn Curran and Sam Sentivan

by Kate Weissenberger, Staff Writer

This summer, second-years Finn Curran and Sam Sentivan traveled along the East Coast in an effort to capture the infrastructure hiding behind the veneer of the digital cloud. The two are working to create a multimedia exhibition showcasing their work with monetary support from Oberlin’s XARTS Fund. I sat down with them to discuss their project and the human heart at the core of the debate around data centers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kate Weissenberger: How did you settle on the idea of investigating the cloud?

Sam Sentivan: We determined the medium before we decided what we were capturing.

Finn Curran: Originally we wanted it to be, like…

SS: We talked about still scenes, of—I hate the term liminal space now, because it’s kind of gotten…but transitional spaces, and sort of…

FC: Places taken for granted.

SS: Yeah. The format lent itself to the subject matter, and with that we could sort of retroactively decide what we found important about the stuff we were capturing and how the medium played into that, which had a lot to do with the way we ended up shooting it.

FC: Every shot is a wide. A lot of them are framed in doorways or porches. There’s nothing flashy going on.

SS: I think part of the idea, like the title, “Cloud”—are we sticking with that?

FC: We’re not.

SS: Okay, we’re working on it. But I think that title assured the direction we’re going in. It’s sort of a success in marketing of the last two decades that the cloud, at least to the average person, is a non-physical thing. The idea is making the cloud physical, and then making the experiences with people around data centers physical. It is buildings and infrastructure and miles of wire. Right now, I’m developing the score based on recordings of the data centers. So as many sort of low frequencies as I can represent…to sort of bring that space to a gallery. I like the idea of there being a physical sensation, possibly even before a visual one. That’s the case for these communities, that you can often feel it and not see it.

KW: Who is at the center of your project?

SS: It’s interesting. I think the data centers became characters.

FC: People spoke about them in a very personified way. There were a lot of comparisons to monsters.

SS: In multiple interviews, they were described as living organisms that are never satisfied, but there’s no real face to them. Companies go out of their way to make sure there’s no one person you can communicate with. It evokes a primal fear in a lot of people.

FC: They go up without really any input from the community. A lot of the people we talked to didn’t understand what they were.

KW: What did your timeline look like?

SS: Week one, we’re in New Jersey. That’s where the majority of our interviews came from. We spent our second week in Virginia, which is referred to as “Data Center Alley.” Socially, you could feel it. That community’s at a stage now where self-policing has become the norm under the assumption that they’re being surveilled. People were much less willing to collaborate over there. The one in Vineland [New Jersey] is surrounded mainly by residential, elderly communities.

FC: A lot of retirees. People assumed this is where they were going to settle down, and in the last few years, they’ve had to find a new way of life.

SS: One of the more heartbreaking interviews was our first. This woman, her husband has dementia. They’re both in their late seventies, I believe. She had chronic health conditions that had been treated and have now come back due to these sub-auto frequencies. Her quality of sleep has gone way down. And she had voted for all of these people, and felt a lot of regret about it, but was…fairly resigned, I guess.

FC: She said this is just her life.

SS: The more informed people were about it, the more optimistic they were. We worked really closely with Sustain [South] Jersey, along with Pinelands Alliance. Those folks who I’d met at the state house, who we had talked to at county fairs, who were letting people know what was happening, seemed to have the most hope. And they’re fighting it every day.

KW: Did you receive any pushback?

SS: We got followed a few times.

FC: We were in our car and pretty conspicuously had a camera sticking out of the window. There were a lot of big vans that would tail us until we drove away.

SS: The reason we had to do that is because they had bought every piece of farmland surrounding the data center. You can’t stand across the street, you can’t circle it in any way outside of being properly on the road. So we set up a camera in the backseat and stopped the car. But their security was no joke. Lots of dudes in big black trucks.

FC: I think that one of the best images we got is a big sign that said…it was like, “Warning, you’re being surveilled by an AI.”

KW: Are you feeling at all hopeful?

SS: I don’t think this is new in concept. There are histories of the poor being systematically…it’s not even a removal, it’s sort of a poisoning. There’s hope in the sense that there’s no mystery about what’s happening. It’s just…the amount of systemic change required to solve any one problem will take too long, because these things are built really fast.

FC: The amount of attention data centers have been getting—assuming that doesn’t slow down–-will lead to positive changes, I think. It used to be a much more local issue.

KW: What’s next for the two of you?

SS: We’re about to start working on the final cut. We have a sort of narrative structure set. I’m interested in ensuring there’s as little of a barrier between the audience and the interviewee as possible, and however we can do that, between now and then…I see that as the most important sort of task. If there’s some sort of grand truth we capture in doing this, so be it.