Capstone Project in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of ......Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" track 5 on The Future, Columbia, 1992, online. 4 architecture, art, sustainability, urban

The Personal Data Initiative

Capstone Project

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the

Renée Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse University

Umut C. Guney

Candidate for Bachelor of Architecture and Renée Crown University Honors Spring 2020

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Abstract

Unlike real clouds, the digital cloud is not in the sky. It lives in the thousands of data

centers dispersed around the world and its content incessantly travels in the form of light,

through a global network of fiber-optic cables. Investigating the public’s engagement with

network infrastructures of digital data and genetic information is a relevant undertaking in a

world where governments file multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against tech giants over privacy

concerns and our daily conversations are concerned over the distribution of deadly viruses and

public health information. This project reveals the internet infrastructure as a physical entity with

varying degrees of inaccessibility where billions of digital identities live. The internet

infrastructure is portrayed as a culturally significant artifact through the lens of personal data

agency that is governed by a third party. Varying degrees of transparency, ground-level formal

gestures and interfaces of byproducts such as exhaust vents and cooling towers build up levels of

awareness for the passersby that is unprecedented in the real-world examples of the internet

infrastructure.

The Personal Data Initiative is an imaginary publicly governed organization for personal

digital and genetic data agency which is comprised of a data center, a genome lab and necessary

public programs such as the personal data council. Proximity to the ocean brings the vulnerable

nature of the infrastructure forward and underlines the risk factor associated with storing

sensitive personal information on the seemingly ethereal and invulnerable digital cloud.

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Executive Summary

"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

-Leonard Cohen, Anthem1

This thesis project studies the public’s interaction with the physical infrastructure of the

internet and attempts to reveal that the content of the infrastructure is relatable, familiar and

ultimately very personal for the general public. The method employed to produce such an effect

is the design proposal for a fictional public organization; The Personal Data Initiative. The

complex houses a data center and labs for genome analysis at its core and is surrounded by

tangential programs such as office spaces for social organizations, service spaces for the

customers of the genome analysis center, a space for gatherings and ceremonies, a space for the

personal data council and a port for off-shore data and genetic sample transportation. The

programmatic hybridization creates a short circuit to portray the idea that data is just as personal

as DNA. From a personal perspective, there is a clear parallel between the control over data

privacy and DNA.

Multiple modes of research have been utilized along the development of the thesis

statement and critique. In the past semester and the winter break, two professionals have been

interviewed, fiber-optic cable landing sites in NJ and NY have been visited and documented and

several data centers with their surrounding areas in Amsterdam, the Netherlands have been

documented and studied to identify several architectural strategies employed. Majority of the

activities described above have been funded by SOURCE. Scholarly work from fields of

1 Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" track 5 on The Future, Columbia, 1992, online.

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architecture, art, sustainability, urban planning, media and policy have been influential for the

development of argumentation.

The proposal’s significance lies in various facets of its creation. The fictional narrative

serves as a way to bring two significant infrastructural facilities both of which operate on matter

harvested from or donated by individuals together in a single complex. The programmatic

hybridization carries out the reading of the data center as a culturally and personally significant

artifact by the pairing of DNA and digital data. The site chosen for the project, Far Rockaway,

Queens has several aspects that give the project the desired characteristics. Being conveniently

accessible by public transport but also isolated from the city as it sits on a plot of land on the

shoreline, the project offers its visitors a distinctive, pilgrimage-like experience in close

proximity to dense urban zones.

The phenomenological aspects of the site provided by the dunes, sand, wind and the

ocean are critical for the user’s experience as they walk through the site dispersed over a large

area without clear boundaries or patterns of circulation. The user gets to see all the weaknesses,

needs, requirements and fears of the internet’s seams as they wander. Loud fans whirling to

circulate the hot air out of the server rooms, the water containers, pipes and tubes to feed the

ever-thirsty AC, the repair of server racks and the pile of servers which have reached to the end

of their lifetime. The site also is situated on a flood-zone, which necessitates data infrastructure

to be on an elevated plane and communicates a narrative of counter-functionality to illuminate

another weakness of the infrastructure.

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Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………….……………….………….. 2

Executive Summary………………………….……………….………….. 3

Chapter 1: The Internet Infrastructure Across Multiple Disciplines .... 6

Chapter 2: Site Visits ……..……………………………………………… 9

Chapter 3: Near Future Fiction……………………………..…………… 14

Chapter 4: The Design Proposal…………………………………………. 16

Conclusion……………………...…………………………………………. 22

Works Cited.……………………………………………………………… 23

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Chapter 1: The Significance of the Internet Infrastructure Across Multiple Disciplines

A contemporary historian and theorist of architecture, Kazys Varnelis states “No type of

building embodies 21st-century culture more distinctly than the data center.”2 The flow of

information is optimized and perpetuated by the data centers guaranteeing that everyone is

always in reach of notifications and are conditioned to respond to them immediately. It is not a

matter of coincidence that the data centers are not publicly recognizable in the urban context, it

rather is a conscience effort to render the internet as a placeless entity. French philosopher

Michel Foucault’s panopticon comes to mind as the individual thinks of the internet as

omnipresent, disassociated from any architectural infrastructure. The person conditions

themselves to behave accordingly to the surveillance and dataveillance. The proposal will have a

very organic relationship with its surrounding, encouraging the passersby to explore what’s

inside and empower the individuals by revealing the content of the data complex through

transparency and an expressive clarity of function.

The exterior character of the data centers is not of primary importance for their owners

however, the interior representations of the data centers suggest deliberate strategies behind. As

it is very difficult for many people to visit and take a tour of what’s inside, there are published

images of the interiors. For instance, Google hasn’t published any photos of its data centers’

interiors for many years in order to protect its unique design. In 2012 Google published interior

photos of one of its data centers in Douglas County, Georgia under the title ‘Where the Internet

Lives’. In a short while, Photoshop forensics discovered that the photos taken by an architectural

photographer were very heavily edited to construct perfectly symmetrical, clean and aesthetically

2 Varnelis, Kazys. “Eyes That Do Not See: Tracking the Self in the Age of the Data Center.” Harvard Design Magazine, 2014.

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pleasing images.3 The title and the forensics’ discoveries suggest that Google aims to render

itself not as a private company (run by real people) with private interests that use the internet for

its operations. Google rather aims to depict itself as the Internet. Many companies depict their

data centers as highly secured, clean and futuristic spaces. An author, Andrew Blum calls such

qualities as cyberiffic qualities which are essential to lure a potential customer to store their data

in a data center. There is a constructed image of the data center in people’s minds, and they want

to see it when they visit one.4

Figure 1: The constructed one-point perspective image of Google’s data center collaged on the Renaissance

painting of the Ideal City of Berlin. The juxtaposition reveals a striking similarity of perceptive intention.5

3 Pearce, Thomas. “„So It Really Is a Series of Tubes.‘ Google’s Data Centers, Noo-Politics and the

Architecture of Hegemony in Cyberspace.” Enquiry: A Journal for Architectural Research 10, no. 1

(2013): 11.

4 Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: Ecco, 2019. 95.

5 Guney, Umut. Perspective Collage. Image, Syracuse University, 2019.

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The architecture and representation of the data infrastructure serves the purpose of

rendering the internet as an ethereal and omnipresent entity which does not seem very

approachable and personally relatable all the time. The personal side of the internet becomes a

critical question and a responsibility for the architectural designers to consider. Even though the

data centers are privately owned, the data flowing through the tubes of the internet belong to

individuals and perhaps should in some cases belong to the public.

Recent debates over data privacy and data use following the revelation of a data analysis

firm’s (Cambridge Analytica) activities over Facebook data for propaganda purposes in Brexit

and the US elections increased the awareness of the commonwealth on the importance of data

privacy. Whistleblowers from Cambridge Analytica (CA) uncovered that the firm was able to

identify individuals with flexible opinions through their online activity and tagged them as

persuadable. Profiled to the most peculiar detail, such individuals would receive targeted content

as pop-ups and ads aimed to change their behaviors. The ads would not clearly identify

themselves as propaganda material and would be served under the disguise of news or fake news.

Some of the content in the ads were created to trigger underlying xenophobic hate and fear, such

as showing a Brexit voter the 89 Million population of Turkey with the refugees and following

that with news of Turkey’s EU membership talks.6 It is hard for everyone to accept that

propaganda works as it pertains to all our susceptibilities on various platforms however, not

everything is what it seems. The British journalist Carole Cadwalladr aptly states; “[The social

media which was] set out to connect people... are driving us apart today.”7

6 The Great Hack. Netflix, 2019. 7 Cadwalladr, Carole. “TED2019.” TED2019. April 15, 2019.

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Chapter 2: Site Visits

The project has deployed multiple modes of architectural research with a mixed methods

approach. Site visits, documentation and interviews have been guiding the trajectory of the

research for the past few months which has led to a sophisticated understanding of the typologies

of internet infrastructure, their architectural qualities and the different ways they occupy their

sites. As the spring semester commenced, the efforts are shifting towards design and production

from research and documentation.

Figure 2: Map of the visited sites in NJ and NY8

The data centers are fairly well documented over a variety of sources unlike the fiber

optic cables which may not be as easy to trace. Naturally, documenting the thousands of miles

long span of cables doesn’t make much sense outside of an orthographic representation. It is

important to note however, that the fiberoptic cables are also associated with certain places other

than data centers, which are their landing points on shores or the landing stations where the

8 Guney, Umut. Map of visited sites in NJ and NY. Image, Syracuse University, 2019.

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fiberoptic cables are accessible by the technicians before they make the home run to the closest

internet exchange point, which is a large data center. For the purposes of research, large data

centers in Manhattan got documented alongside with locations on the beaches of NJ and Long

Island which are supposed to be the locations where the trans-Atlantic fiberoptic cables spanning

from the UK make landing on the Americas. All the locations were within 3 hours driving

distance from NYC, which acts as a reminder of the physical realities and the importance of

proximities to central network nodes. The fiberoptic cables buried under the 6 locations visited

carry the majority of data flow between the East coast and Europe, which is the most heavily

used route in the global internet backbone.

The main reason for the site visits was to asses to what extent is the presence of such

significant portions of the internet infrastructure are visible to the naked eye. 2 primary signifiers

have been identified to look for on the site documentations. The first checkbox indicated;

“Official fiberoptic cable marker” and the other one; “Unofficial fragment possibly acting as a

marker”. Only 2 of the sites had an official marker of the internet infrastructure whereas, 4 of the

sites had artifacts that could be read as a marker for someone who knows what to look for.

The official markers have dominantly been warning signs placed about 100’ apart from

each other prohibiting the people to dig holes because of the risk of damaging the buried

fiberoptic cables. Another sign was a very small cabin guarded by a wired fence constructed on

top of a dune lose to the ocean. The only conventional building that has been visited on this trip

was the cable landing station in Shirley, NJ, in a very calm residential area. The building had 2

stories and looked just like another one of the houses in the area. The building was devoid of any

signs indicating its use however somewhat ironically, the street is called ‘Cable Dr.’ and there

were many fiberoptic cable warning signs along the road.

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Figure 3: ‘Official’ markers9

The unofficial fragments possibly acting as markers include but are not limited to; piles of

rocks, poles and signal transmission towers. As such objects are more likely to not signify

anything, they offer a speculative, almost mythical sense of representation of the infrastructure.

Figure 4: ‘Possible’ markers10

9 Guney, Umut. ‘Official’ markers. Image, Syracuse University, 2020.

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Far Rockaway, Queens was one of the cable landing sites. The location is an appropriate

site for the proposal because of several reasons. The project is to be located on the shore in order

to provide access to an offshore data transfer port. The proximity of the site to the densely

populated boroughs of NYC renders the project as a convenient urban destination. The site is an

empty plot of land on the shore which is currently used as a park and hosts a lively beach

community in the summer, which is planned to be integrated into the proposal to maximize

interactions with the public.

The precedents in NYC offer monumental examples of data centers which do not have the

big-box form and are situated in a very dense urban context. 60 Hudson Street and AT&T Long

Lines Building both located in TriBeCa, Manhattan serve as major internet exchange centers

between Europe and the Americas. 60 Hudson Street was built in 1930 to serve as the

headquarters of Western Union and has undergone a renovation in 1973 to house

telecommunication equipment. It gradually became an outstanding internet exchange point where

hundreds of colocation servers of different networks connect to each other and form a very

important knot of the internetwork. Going two blocks east, a brutalist building with enormous

vent exhausts and no windows on its facade makes an honest statement of its protective nature.

Unlike the 60 Hudson, it could be said that AT&T Long Lines Building looks like a data center.

Constructed in 1974, The Long Lines Building was designed to house telecommunication

equipment from ground-up. The technical significance of this building lies in its basement, where

the transatlantic fiber cables landing on the shore of New Jersey make a home run to the building

to be distributed across the continent.

10 Guney, Umut. ‘Possible’ markers. Image, Syracuse University, 2020.

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The last site to be studied is Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The Dutch internet is a

unique case in the world as it was strongly supported by the local government from the very

beginning. Blum writes in his book Tubes, “From early on, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange

was heralded by the government as a “third harbor” for the Netherlands - a place for the bits, in

the way that Rotterdam is a place for ships and Schiphol for planes.”11 The government

incentives for cheap electricity and the general support led to several areas around Amsterdam’s

city center to be densely populated by data centers. In fact, Amsterdam has such an abundance of

data centers that the Dutch government has recently officially halted further construction of data

centers.12 In some cases, it seems like the data centers do not have a very exerting presence on

the general identity of the neighborhood however, in some cases such as in Teleport, even the

street names reflect the tech identity of the neighborhood; Gyroscoopweg (Gyroscope road),

Kabelweg (Cable Road) or Elektronstraat (Electron Street).

The neighborhoods visited in Amsterdam were very influential in identifying common

strategies used over the buildings documented. The strategies used are diagrammed in a

simplified version of the building in the following series of images.

11 Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: Ecco, 2019. 147. 12 Proper, Ellen. “Too Much Information: Amsterdam Hits Pause on Data-Center Boom.” Bloomberg,

July 16, 2019.

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Figure 5: Diagram depicting various architectural strategies used on the visited data centers.13

13 Guney, Umut. Data center architectural strategies diagram. Image. Syracuse University, 2020.

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Chapter 3: Near Future Fiction

An architectural proposal situating itself in a near-future fictional scenario is an

appropriate way to utilize the research in a critical way and design a built-environment to tell the

story of alternate realities. In the recent past of architectural discourse, projects situating

themselves within a fictional framework have been influential over today’s designers. Some

examples for such projects include those by the radical architects of 70s’ Italy, Archizoom and

Rem Koolhas’ Exodus. Perhaps similarly to those projects, the Personal Data Initiative offers a

commentary for the present by presenting a near future fiction however, differently from those

projects, the setting, users and program of PDI are not necessarily from a future fiction, they

might very well be from the present day. The Dutch graphic design studio Metahaven states that

the present time with the complex systems of communications technology, blurred layers of

transparency and the terrifying rate of progression makes it hard to decide on what is fictional

and non-fictional.14 Even though PDI is clearly fictional, the reception of it may not be very

clearly on a single side of the spectrum of fiction.

14 Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015.

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Chapter 4: The Design Proposal

An associate professor of Information Science at Cornell University, Steven Jackson

discusses the significance of our reading of the information technology infrastructure focusing on

the repair and decay aspects of it. He compares a reading of the infrastructure with a nineteenth-

century mindset which is characterized by progress, novelty, invention and endless development

to a twenty-first-century perspective which is more about uncertainty, growth and decay,

fragmentation and breakdown. He refers to the second one as ‘broken world thinking’.15 The

proposal takes the side of the twenty-first-century mindset to an extent which does not

completely situate the project as an execution of the ideas put forth by Jackson, but as a guiding

force.

Other scholarly work dealing with infrastructural speculations discuss ways for designers

to reveal underlying aspects of local infrastructure supporting a larger scale technology and paint

an unconventional picture of the artifact. Some of the methods proposed include but are not

limited to infrastructural inversion, using past aesthetics, practices and technologies to speculate

on the present and future state of the infrastructure, revelation of the seams and counter

functional design.16 The proposal deems such narratives valuable for the readings of data center

and the genome lab.

The proposal’s significance lies in various facets of its creation. The fictional narrative

serves as a way to bring two significant infrastructural facilities both of which operate on matter

15 Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” Media Technologies, 2014, 221–40. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011.

16 Wong, R. Y, Khovanskaya, V., Fox, S. E, Merrill, N., & Sengers, P. (2020). Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds. UC Berkeley. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376515

Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bm4g0fn

17

harvested from or donated by individuals together in a single complex. The programmatic

hybridization carries out the reading of the data center as a culturally and personally significant

artifact by the pairing of DNA and digital data. The site chosen for the project, Far Rockaway,

Queens has several aspects that give the project the desired characteristics. Being conveniently

accessible by public transport but also isolated from the city as it sits on a plot of land on the

shoreline, the project offers its visitors a distinctive, pilgrimage-like experience in close

proximity to dense urban zones.

The phenomenological aspects of the site provided by the dunes, sand, wind and the

ocean are critical for the user’s experience as they walk through the site dispersed over a large

area without clear boundaries or patterns of circulation. The user gets to see all the weaknesses,

needs and requirements of a seam of the internet as they wander. Loud fans whirling to circulate

the hot air out of the server rooms, cooling towers, pipes and tubes to feed the ever-thirsty AC,

architectural means present for the repair of server racks and the blinking lights of server rack

LEDs. The user also gets to experience the activities that typically happens on a beach and a

public park. The sound of waves, people laying in the area, chatter, a bouncing basketball and the

yelling of beach volleyball players to each other layer on top of the physical reality and the

sensual byproducts of the underlying infrastructure. The experience makes two separate systems;

the personal data infrastructure and the chain of events that happen on a casual beach day clash.

In this way, a truly unique experience situating the data center infrastructure in an unprecedented

position is generated.

The figures on the following several pages depict a summary of the design ideas at play

on the proposal. The form of the individual units is generated by a very rudimentary reading and

visualization of the hot aisle-cold aisle principle of the air-cooled data centers. (Fig.6) The

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rudimentary form with its extruded ribs and faceted exterior surface inspired by the heat

exchange plates essential for the function of the AC, generate very articulate seams with the

natural topography. Having a form that is consciously in conversation with the topography is

very important as most of the forms are partially buried underground. The rudimentary form is

aggregated on the site and individual members are connected to each other either by overlaps or

by contact on the seams. (Fig.7) The scattered general organization making use of in-between

spaces and pockets generated by the rectilinear forms stand in contrast to the rigid and utilitarian

interior organizations of most of the program spaces such as the data center, freezer room or

genome lab. Such highly regularized interior organizations are apparent when the rudimentary

forms are studied in isolation. The forms are partially submerged, offering formally articulate

readings of their individual nature and a dynamic relationship with the ground plane on the

section. (Fig.8) Natural qualities such as vegetation, soil, sand and the fog are very important as

the reception of the project by the user heavily relies on such qualities readily available on-site.

The perspective renders visualize some of the important natural sensual qualities on the site and

the material qualities of the constructed volumes. (Fig.9)

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Figure 6: Form development diagram17

17 Guney, Umut. Form development diagram. Image. Syracuse University, 2020.

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Figure 7: Plan diagram18

Figure 8: Section sketches19

18 Guney, Umut. Plan diagram. Image. Syracuse University, 2020.

19 Guney, Umut. Section sketches. Image. Syracuse University, 2020.

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Figure 9: Perspective renders20

20 Guney, Umut. Perspective renders. Image. Syracuse University, 2020.

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Conclusion

The Leonard Cohen quote at the beginning of the paper summarizes the intention of this

thesis project. The cloud lives in the buzzing and blinking servers concealed and protected from

us in the safe data centers and its information silently travels in the fiberoptic cables buried

underground. The research has showed that personal data agency on the internet and on the realm

of public health both have flaws, and both rely on infrastructure such as genome labs and data

centers. The inaccessible infrastructure of the cloud that is being protected from us is in fact

fueled by our personal data that is input by our online profiles and incessant digital activities.

Physical site visits have showed that the presence of internet infrastructure is nowhere to be seen

in some key locations such as the submarine fiber optic cable landing points. The data centers

which are physically much more visible than the fiberoptic cables use various strategies to

conceal their interior content. The Personal Data Initiative is an augmentation of one of the

seams on the system. With the introduction of additional programs, the political agenda of the

initiative and the highly specific formal language, the seam becomes a crack where some of the

realities about the personal data agency become legible. The final result of the project is a

straightforward translation of the research and site visits into an architecture that tells the story of

the data center in a way that is more communicative and critical than the data centers that exist in

the built environment.

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Works Cited

Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" track 5 on The Future, Columbia, 1992, online.

Varnelis, Kazys. “Eyes That Do Not See: Tracking the Self in the Age of the Data Center.” Harvard

Design Magazine, 2014.

Pearce, Thomas. “„So It Really Is a Series of Tubes.‘ Google’s Data Centers, Noo-Politics and the

Architecture of Hegemony in Cyberspace.” Enquiry: A Journal for Architectural Research 10, no. 1

(2013): 11.

Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: Ecco, 2019. 95. The Great Hack. Netflix, 2019.

Cadwalladr, Carole. “TED2019.” TED2019. April 15, 2019.

Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: Ecco, 2019. 147.

Proper, Ellen. “Too Much Information: Amsterdam Hits Pause on Data-Center Boom.” Bloomberg, July

16, 2019.

Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” Media Technologies, 2014, 221–40. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011.

Wong, R. Y, Khovanskaya, V., Fox, S. E, Merrill, N., & Sengers, P. (2020). Infrastructural Speculations:

Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds. UC Berkeley.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376515 Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bm4g0fn

Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015.