On Exactitude in the Cloud

On Exactitude in the Cloud
2021

00:43 min excerpt

This video uses Google Street View to retrace the route I took on a road trip to visit twelve data center locations across American West in the summer of 2021. The title of the video comes from the short story On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges, in which cartographers in an empire create a map so detailed that it matches the territory exactly, ultimately rendering it useless. The map's precision leads to its abandonment and decay in the deserts.