[root&router-readinggroup] Storage Studies: Thinking across Scales, 29 September 12:00, OMHP C3.17

[Alex Gekker]

Dear list member,
While aimed primarily at RMA students, this event might be interesting to some of you, if physically present around Amsterdam.
Kind regards,
Alex

Storage Studies: Thinking across Scales

A masterclass with Dr. Ella Klik, author of Negative Media: Erasure and the Limits of Retention (2026).

When: 29 September 2026, 12.30 – 14.00hrs
Where: University of Amsterdam – Oudemanhuispoort 4-6 (OMHP) Room C3.17
Instructors: Dr. Alex Gekker (University of Amsterdam)
Open to: RMA students, PhD researchers, and academic staff in Media Studies
Registration: via THIS LINK<https://www.rmes.nl/events/rmes-masterclass-storage-studies-thinking-across-scales/>

This masterclass introduces a way of thinking more closely about how things are actively contained. Rather than treating storage space as a secondary concern that merely follows questions of content or circulation, the session asks what becomes possible when it is taken as the analytical starting point. I propose “storage studies” as a prism for discussion that attends to the operational dimensions of how systems are made to maintain things and the ways in which retention is designed and practiced. Approaching media technologies in this way makes it possible thinking laterally across domains that are often treated as separate objects of inquiry (e.g., warehouses, archival systems, computer memory, formats, volumetrics). What if we were to instead focus on decisions, affordances and parameters such as capacities, thresholds, and durations that govern the life of data?

We will discuss two case studies of emerging technologies: the NewSpace industry and its proposals for erecting interplanetary data centers and DNA data storage. Ventures such as these argue to have solved the problem of data overabundance by placing it out there or compressing into the smallest possible substrates. Such solutions often carry with them a plethora of attitudes regarding the longevity, density and comprehensiveness of information that we will probe throughout this session. By examining these attempts to redistribute data across utterly different scales, from the orbital and lunar to the molecular, we will explore what these projects reveal about storage as one of the most mundane yet conceptually neglected dimensions of contemporary existence.

Readings:

Edwards, D., Cooper, Z.G.T. and Hogan, M., 2025. “The making of critical data center studies<https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl/doi/full/10.1177/13548565231224157>.” Convergence, 31 (2), pp.429-446.

Ensmenger, Nathan. 2021. “The cloud is a factory.”<https://research-ebsco-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl/c/bkudj5/search/details/enfkweo77z?request-context=plink&db=nlebk> In Your computer is on fire, edited by Thomas S Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip, pp. 29-49. MIT Press.

Calvino, Italo. 2009. “World Memory<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uMHzuWnDLM0cjd4qFfJ7FJp60ZhUjlQY/view>.” The Complete Cosmicomics. Penguin Books.


Dr. Alex Gekker.
Assistant Professor in Digital Research Methods; Programme Director, MA New Media and Digital Culture; Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

📚 My latest book, Maps as Media, is now available from Polity: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509550128
Profile and publications<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6042-2086> // a.gekker at uva.nl<mailto:a.gekker at uva.nl> // X: @AlexGekker <http://twitter.com/alexgekker>  // mastodon @gekker at aoir.social<https://aoir.social/@gekker>

Recent works include: A post-mortem of Google's Stadia as an "Infrastructural Hubris",<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2691776> LLMs as ‘general-purpose’ promise in the autonomous vehicle industry<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2689026>, an <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2631709> analysis<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2631709> of 69k patents on how the car industry sees <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2631709> “<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2631709>the cloud<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2631709>”<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2631709>, and this special issue on <https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/11/playable-cities-intro/> Playable<https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/11/playable-cities-intro/> Cities<https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/11/playable-cities-intro/>
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