Overheated Cloud

Emily Hsiang-Yun Huang received a grant for Overheated Cloud: an artistic research project exploring the hidden material and colonial histories of AI infrastructures. As data centers expand worldwide, their immense demand for water and energy reshapes landscapes, ecosystems, and local communities. Drawing on anthropology, decolonial theory, particularly the colonial term of tropical disease, the project examines how contemporary data centers reproduce extractive logics in vulnerable regions in contemporary time. By connecting this colonial narrative with the overheating, humidity, and embodied vulnerability of servers, Overheated Cloud challenges the myth of the immaterial cloud and reveals digital infrastructure as a non-place-neutral system sustained by labor, care, and ecological sacrifice.

Emily is a researcher and visual artist with a background in philosophy and sociology. Her research interests focus on the relationship between body and technology from the perspective of postcolonialism, cyberfeminism, digital materialism and critical AI. Projects she has curated include Net.Open Project at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Our Terms, Our Conditions at  IMPAKT Festival, and Fake It Real at Taipei Digital Art Festival. Her dance films often derive from her poetry on the vulnerability of (non-)human existence, with a focus on collective mourning and digital intimacy. Her works have been exhibited at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Cinedance Festival at Eye Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Ars Electronica, Kikk Festival, and panke.gallery, among others.