A near-obsessive focus on visibility drives the exhibition architecture of “City in the Cloud. Data on the Ground,” whose raw steel frames, dangling cables, and exposed plug-ins form an industrially stark scenography at the Architecture Museum in Munich. Challenging the abstraction through which data infrastructures conceal their extractive substrates, visibility reverberates ambiguously throughout. On the one hand, the museum’s crowded halls reveal a collective desire to make our digital entanglements tangible. On the other hand, the emphasis on exposure borders on excess, where revelation and blindness teeter on the brink of convergence—a feeling of digital oversaturation all too familiar.

Hauntingly curated by Damjan Kokalevski and supported by Marina Otero Verzier’s evocative research, the exhibition negotiates the balance between “City in the Cloud” and “Data on the Ground” with remarkable fluency. Visitors move from the rubbery tactility of 19th-century submarine cables to the algorithmic abstractions of 21st-century planetary computation. This choreography mirrors the infrastructures it seeks to expose. Yet, in grounding the cloud, one wonders whether its opacity is truly dissolved or merely displaced; whether what becomes visible refracts what remains unseen—a question the exhibition appears to leave deliberately open.

Consistently exposing the ecological and social costs of datafication, the show unfurls the politics of the digital cloud: its extractive energy regimes, surveillance logics, and algorithmic biases. Its distributed, multi-authored contributions—rooted in years of research seminars at TU Munich—embody the very networks of mediation and dependency it examines. If questions of governance or resistance remain unresolved, this seems deliberate. Confronting the ghost in the machine, Kokalevski’s curatorial project acts like a cloudbuster: demystifying digital infrastructure while demonstrating how acts of exposure can themselves become forms of spectacle. The exhibition succeeds by staging contradiction, reminding us that even when revealed, digital architectures continue to drift between forced transparency and enforced obscurity. 

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