Beta Bunker: The Bunker Monolith and the Data Center at the Edge of Northern Geographies

Photographs by Agnès Villette and Grégoire Dupond

Pushing the heavy metal door left ajar, I entered the subterranean nuclear bunker through a grey, dimly lit tunnel progressively unravelling the labyrinthine-buried circuitry of the interior structure. Outside, in the humid landscape of central Sweden, shreds of fog attached themselves to the canopy of pine trees. A mesh of sensations and ideas brutally imposed themselves: the uncanny muffled suspension of air, ancient tombs, hidden knowledge, reminiscences of mythological Greek caverns, profound fears and insecurities, telescoped fragments of literary readings from Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Plato’s cave and Lascaux’s grotto. Penetrating the bowels of the hidden architecture offered a temporal journey permeated with images of the Cold War and, simultaneously, a spectacle of James Bond–esque grotesque. It took a few hours of walking around to totally grasp the internal layout: the matrixing corridors, floors, multiple spaces, and rooms that stretch underneath a sixty-meter layer of Nordic granite protecting the former military installation, now in the process of being transformed into a data center. Voices heard from afar brought a reassuring human element to the disquieting experience of walking in the empty space. They belonged to a team of Polish workers who were installing high-security internal doors and vast, elaborate ventilation systems, and laying an elevated platform floor in the basketball-court-sized main room where thousands of computers would be using algorithms to process and crunch vast quantities of data.

The three days spent in the bunker photographing and filming its transformation from a Cold War structure informed by secrecy and military purpose into a modern data center shaped the first phase of the art project Beta Bunker. It opened up multiple lines of inquiry into the physical infrastructures and spaces where information technology is embedding itself. The ubiquitous discourse about the cloud, dematerialized technology, information culture, and portability vividly contrasts with the physical reality of infrastructures solidly anchored in redistributed, often largely unscrutinized geographies. The project also invited us to critically rethink the archaeology of bunkers and to explore how Cold War legacies seep into our technological present through the versatility of their emblematic architecture. To grasp the Swedish state’s current marketing of its military estate, one has to reframe it historically within the nation’s choice to remain neutral during and after World War II, a decision that led to a vast program of construction of military and civil protection covering the whole country. The subsequent coalescing of Cold War infrastructure with information technology engages our analysis with the material and geographical considerations that led to the selection of Nordic geographies as ideal underground spaces for data, secrecy, and flux. In Paul Virilio’s analysis of the liminality of the military bunker, the bunker is an architectural form with an inherent ability to project itself into technological and geo-political futures, a concept that became central to our critical assertion of the strategies underlying the transformation of military bunkers into data centers. Beta Bunker as an ongoing artistic, collaborative project retains the haunting narratives of history and critical analyses aligning bunker architecture, techno-military legacies, and the growing importance of data. Visually, as a photographic and filmic project, it aims at merging such critical discourses with a visual aesthetic, by adopting the 360-degree image as a form of exploration of new regimes of visibility.

The New Politics of Military Bunkers in Sweden

During the drive to the bunker from an airport in central Sweden, Frederik Vyncke, CEO of Rockan Data Center,¹ gave me an accelerated course on the nuclear shelters’ legacy in Sweden and their current redevelopment into data centers. The Scandinavian state had just voted in favor of a series of tax breaks for companies willing to invest in data-centers technology and business (Bourne 2016). Scandinavian countries are promoting themselves as ideal territories for the exponential development of information technology. The renewed interest in the subterranean structures came not...