Interactive installation by the London design duo Playfool in which visitors use a data-centre vacuum to clean a sculptural server cabinet, part of the V&A's Digital Art Season: On Agency.
Playfool are showing The Server at the V&A South Kensington until Sunday 18 October, in the Photography room (Room 108). It's a piece by the London duo Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama, which opened with the London Design Festival on 12 September as part of the museum's Digital Art Season: On Agency.
The work takes its starting point from something most people never think about when they visit a museum: the daily routine of cleaning the collection. Playfool have turned that act of dusting into a simulation. You pick up a real data-centre vacuum and clean digital dust off a sculptural server cabinet; as you go, a screen maps exactly what you've missed. The whole thing is a choreography drawn from the V&A's own daily routine of dusting its objects, and when you're finished, the machine prints a receipt thanking you for keeping the server alive.
They describe it as a maintenance simulator aimed at the one data-centre job that still resists automation. It's their take on systems of care in the age of AI acceleration—the idea that even in a world of high-speed automation, there's still a basic, manual need to look after the things we rely on. The piece was awarded the V&A's annual Emerging Designer Commission, so it's a good chance to see what they've been up to.
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Behind the scenes, it was curated by Carrie Chan and produced by Katya Spiers, with fabrication by Art & Assembly and sound design by Matteo Bandi. It's free to see, and the V&A is open 10.00 to 17.30, so you can just drop in whenever you're around South Kensington. It runs until Sunday 18 October.
