In 2004, while I worked for Google, I completed an 8 ft. by 22 ft. mural in a datacenter in Northern Virginia. Below are photos of the mural as it was painted and after it was completed.
The project was featured in a post on the official Google Blog, which I authored.
I had specific goals in mind for this project. One goal was to execute a painting on a mural scale, which was larger than anything I had done before. I also knew I would not have large amounts of time for execution. So the design needed to be one that I could complete within days instead of weeks. Another goal was integration. I wanted to see if I could integrate the visual elements of the space in which the mural existed with the purpose and context of that room and the equipment which it housed. Google datacenters house the machinery that connects search queries from individual users with the data gathered from the internet. The 'Googlebot' is the name for the program that roams the internet gathering the data to serve back to users when anyone conducts a search. The purpose of any search engine is to connect people with the information that exists across the internet. All of these presented ideas that I wanted to tie together in visual form.
Another aspect I wanted to integrate was the work being performed in the room. At the time, a task that required a large amount of attention and effort was the process of running cable. Any datacenter, server room, or any location that houses a large number of computers requires a lot of cable. As a result, a well designed and maintained server room will require a lot of hands-on labor to weave a large number of copper and fiber optic cable in an orderly and neat manner. This can be considered on of the most manual and physical tasks in a datacenter. All the wire strung up throughout the room also presented an interesting visual element. Yet another challenge posed by the size of the painting was how to visually unify the composition. I knew wires would be a linear element that could do this.
The ideas then evolved to the point where I knew I would have a robot (representing the Googlebot) connecting the world with the internet, with wires. The question became how does one depict the internet visually? I had a number of ideas that I tried, on paper, until it occured to me that one could think of the internet as a world, of pages, and hence a globe that matched a terrestrial earth. This was something that completed my design scheme and became the final design. It should also be noted that the rectangles behind the robot represent the cabinets containing stacks of servers that exist in the actual room. If one looked around the actual room, one would see more instances of the triangle pattern on the rectangles immediately behind the robot. This served to further integrate the visual elements of the mural with the visual elements of the rest of the room.
The end result is something I am satisfied with. It is a way for a piece of art to serve as an immediate and concrete reminder of larger ideas. I have received a large amount of positive feedback on it.
Another interesting aspect of the work is the life it has taken. The number of actual people who have physically seen the mural in person is limited to a small number of Google employees. The number of people who have seen images of it, especially thanks to the post on the official Google Blog must be into the thousands at this point. Due to the nature of the location in which it exists, there is a distinct possibility that the wall will not exist or need to be painted over at some point. (I knew this from the start.) With the posting on the Google blog a large number of people linked to it and posted images of it on their own blogs. When the painting ceases physical existence, will it continue to live on in digital form? Will it have returned to the place that stimulated its creation? It will be interesting to see.
