Power Creep is a sculptural work that examines the relationship between Ireland’s energy landscapes and expanding demands of digital infrastructure driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence. Borrowed from gaming culture, the term power creep describes the gradual escalation of power within a system, where continual growth is required to maintain relevance. In this work, it reflects the exponential expansion of computational infrastructure, and it’s increasing consumption of energy, water, labour, and land within an Irish context.

Digital vernacular is collected and processed using a Large Language Model, with it’s generated output distributing commands to an automated typewriter. The typewriter acts as both an interface and historical artefact within the computational stack; rendering tangible the resource-intensive infrastructures obscured through the the metaphor of the “cloud”.

Through this process, Power Creep reflects on the reconfiguration of the Irish landscape through the very technologies that consume it, asking who really benefits from this digital infrastructure? and what finite costs underpin it’s exponential ‘creep’?

The project was support by the SEED Project – an interdisciplinary project, between communications, environmental geography and engineering. It explores how environmental data can be communicated through the five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.