Museum of Natural History · 22 November, 12:30
Otero’s lecture draws upon Computational Compost, a project addressing the environmental impact of data storage that proposes a synergy between technology and ecology, between advanced physics and regenerative design. It consists of a prototype using the heat emitted by computers simulating the universe’s origin to power a vermicomposting machine, where worms and microorganism produce fertile soil. The project reimagines digital infrastructure as a life-generating, ecologically integrated, and democratically governed, challenging the extractive logic of today’s digital systems.
Marina Otero Verzier, an architect and researcher, is Lecturer at Harvard GSD. She also leads the Data Mourning clinic at Columbia University GSAPP. Her work focuses on infrastructures, ecologies, and new pedagogical models that question the politics of technology. In recent years, Otero Verzier has investigated the environmental impact of computation, looking at the material consequences of digital infrastructures and proposing ways of reimagining them through composting and circular strategies.
At Perma/Soils, she addresses the entanglement of soil and computation, showing how infrastructures of extraction and infrastructures of data are deeply interconnected.