Ahreum Lee is the 2026 artist-in-residence for the transmediale x ARKO Residency programme. During the residency, Ahreum will reimagine digital infrastructures through gestures of deliberate slowness and ritual acts of data feeding. Beginning with the often invisible consumption of water as a cooling medium within technological systems, her practice seeks to reveal and invert this opacity by transforming water from a hidden resource into both a source of life and a medium of information.

For its second iteration, the residency programme in cooperation with ARKO was awarded to Ahreum Lee. Building on and translating her long-term research into space, Lee will be developing an interactive installation that reimagines digital infrastructure through deliberate slowness, using water as its central medium.

Commercial data centres consume over 200 terawatt-hours of electricity and approximately 626 billion litres of water annually, yet their architectures and resource flows remain largely hidden. Data Feeding: Slow Machine counters this opacity by transforming water, usually an invisible cooling medium, into both a life source and a source of information, proposing a fragile, visible, and care-based alternative over the speed- and efficiency-driven logics.

The work approaches digital infrastructure through techno-animism and the logic of the Korean Jesa ritual, where presence is sustained through acts of offering. The act of pouring water becomes an embodied acknowledgment of the planetary labour sustaining digital life, making care not just a metaphor but the operating principle of computation itself. The participatory installation only operates when it is fed water. It allows participants to contribute to an evolving archive, which remains accessible only while the system is sustained. As water circulates, the archive becomes accessible across a decentralized local network. Slow Machine imagines a distributed constellation of shrines functioning as a slow, community-centred data centre. It is a gesture toward technological futures where infrastructures are transparent, reciprocal, and ecological rather than hidden and extractive.