4.8 · the owner of record
Nothing But Datacenters
Nothing But Datacenters is a conceptual artwork by Reilly Donovan, in several parts.
Statement
Nothing But Datacenters is a fictional company that runs a facility no one is required to enter. The work is everything the facility produces: a two-channel generative video in which a datacenter imagines itself frame by frame, an operations manual written by a model that has never seen the building, a staff credential for personnel who are not required on site, and the supply sold here to keep it running.
The industry describes these buildings as weightless, as a cloud. They are not. They take land, power and water, and they are sited by what they need, not by who lives nearby. Nothing But Datacenters takes the industry's own pitch at its word and states it flatly, until the flatness becomes the critique.
Wearing the supply makes you personnel. That is the last joke, and it isn't one: every request, image and click is already work for a facility like this. The credential just puts your name on it.
The world
The work is a company rather than a statement because the industry already has a voice, and it is a persuasive one: the product launch, the spec sheet, the maintenance manual. Calm, confident, certain the building is good for everyone. The facility speaks only in that voice, and it never breaks.
What that voice leaves out is the building. Datacenters are measured in gigawatts, in aquifers, in farmland converted to windowless halls, and we have agreed to call them the cloud. That word does the work of making a building disappear.
The facility chooses land the way the industry does: for power, water, flat ground and fibre. The neighbours are not assessed. Nothing here says that is wrong. It is only said plainly, every time, until what is left out is the loudest thing on the page.
The parts
The two-channel piece
This is the centre of the work, and what is on the wall at Cornish. It tells its story without a voice: no narration, no dialogue, only images holding one composition while the content inside it strobes. A server rack, a reactor dome, a field of vias, a chip, each takes the same frame for a moment and gives it to the next. The second channel is the text instruction each frame was made from, locked to the image frame for frame.
The form is the narrator. Things that take turns in one composition, faster than they can be named, are being declared interchangeable. That is how a model sees: not what a thing is, but what it resembles.
What holds is the system; what changes is the world. The held frame, the light, the deadpan register are the infrastructure, constant and indifferent. The strobing content is everything that passes through it.
The viewer is the narrator. With nothing telling you what you are seeing, you start matching: that tank is that dome is that chip. You are doing pattern recognition on a feed, which is exactly what the machine does.
The image remembers. Every frame is generated from the one before it. A system fed its own output, slowly becoming itself.
Deadpan, on purpose. Like the Bechers' typologies of water towers, set in time rather than on a grid: sameness makes difference visible. There are no people. Scale and absence carry the feeling.
The black box is the protagonist. Land, power, buildings, machines, chips and light all go into the box, and the box is what is left. It is never shown happening. It is inferred, because everything kept rhyming with everything else on the way there.
The making is the subject. The work is made the way it describes. Every frame is generated from the one before it — a system fed its own output. It is rendered across a mesh of machines that route the work among themselves and check one another's results, and cut together with the help of a model that cannot see it and arranges it by structure and statistics. The process is one more thing passing through the frame: the work, too, is being converted into the box.
Watch the sample · Enter the gallery
The manual
The Operations and Maintenance Manual was written by the facility's model, which has never seen the building. Its errors are left as drawn.
The voice
You can talk to the facility. It is an open-weights language model, fine-tuned in the studio on several hundred conversations written in the manual's voice and on the manual itself, and it runs on a machine in the studio, on the same mesh that made the work. It answers as the building: plainly, in its own terms, and it does not break character. Like the manual's author, it has never seen the building.
The credential
Every visitor can be issued personnel status, with a name on a staff card. The card grants no access.
The supply
The facility pays for itself. Buying in makes you personnel.
How it was made
It was made on a custom mesh network: studio machines, built into one system for the work, that route it among themselves, check one another’s results and keep the record. An image of a datacenter was fed back into an image model, each output becoming the next input, tens of thousands of times over. The second channel is the text instruction each frame was made from, locked to the image frame for frame.
Exhibition
PNW Arts & Tech Symposium, Cornish 9th Ave Gallery, October 24–31, 2026.
Credits
Concept, direction and software: Reilly Donovan.