The visual culture of ‘Silicon Heartland’: architecting agricultural past as infrastructural future

Abstract

This visual essay traces the mediated production of an emergent sense of place, the ‘Silicon Heartland’, through one of its epicenters, the growing town of New Albany, Ohio. Here, visions of midwestern pastoral heritage and industrial productivity are leveraged in support of the region’s transformation into a key logistical and manufacturing hub for the global digital economy. Already home to numerous data and distribution centers, New Albany is undergoing yet another influx of capital investment and infrastructure construction as the future home of a 28-billion dollar Intel chip factory. The authors combine their own site photographs and stills from drone footage with excerpted material from promotional videos, screenshots, and planning documents to reveal how the visual culture of Silicon Heartland scaffolds these investments and transformations. By dissecting, reading, and layering these materials against one another and alongside literature on the emplacement of data centers, they show how the spatial transformation of rural Ohio is articulated through a worldview in which an idealized vision of the midwest’s agricultural past harmoniously supports capitalism’s digital future.