Marina Otero Verzier with Kate Crawford Conversation
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About this Event
In 2022, Marina Otero Verzier was named the winner of the Wheelwright Prize, a grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture with an emphasis on globally-minded research. In her winning proposal, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, Otero examined new architectural paradigms for storing data and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today. The resulting field research, data collection, and prototype development point towards alternative models for global data centers, including examples of ecological, circular, and egalitarian data storage models. As with past Wheelwright winners, the prize funded two years of Otero’s research and travel.
After presenting her project in a lecture on March 9, “Feral Clouds,” Otero will dive deeper into the questions and implications of her research the next day in a conversation with AI scholar and artist Kate Crawford.
Speakers
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Professor at USC, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR, and the founder of the Knowing Machines Group. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times, won three international prizes, and has been translated into fourteen languages. Beyond her scholarly work, she is an award-winning artist whose work explores the themes of technology, history, and power. She has had exhibitions in over 100 museums worldwide and has works in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, and the Design Museum. Her latest work with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and the European Commission’s grand prize for art and technology. TIME100 named Crawford as one of the world’s most influential people in AI.
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize for a research project on the future of data storage. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at the GSD and has led the Data Mourning clinic at Columbia University’s GSAPP Otero has collaborated with the Supercomputing Center of the DIPC to develop alternative models for data storage, including Computational Compost, awarded by Ars Electronica and the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2025. She was invited by Chile’s Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation to serve as an expert in the development of the country’s first National Data Centers Plan, working alongside local communities affected by extractivism, and she advises governments internationally on data center policies. Previously, Otero was Head of the MA Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut. She has curated exhibitions at major international venues, including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Oslo Architecture Triennale, and is the author of En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024) and co-editor of Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and Work, Body, Leisure (2018), among others.
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