What it had to solve
Data centers look fully automated but still depend on people with vacuums; museum objects, too, need care long after they are made — yet both kinds of maintenance stay invisible.
The idea
A real data-center vacuum is the controller: players vacuum digital dust off a giant sculptural server, echoing the manual care behind servers and museums.
How it works
Playfool built The Server as an interactive installation: a sculptural server visitors clean using an actual data-center vacuum, with sound by Matteo Bandi and fabrication by Art & Assembly, on view at the V&A South Kensington through 18 October 2026.
What it did
No metrics: the commission puts the work in front of the V&A's South Kensington audience through 18 October 2026, reframing cleaning — in server halls and galleries alike — as visible, ongoing care.
Background
At the V&A in South Kensington, visitors pick up a genuine data-center vacuum and start cleaning: The Server, an interactive game installation by art-design duo Playfool, casts them as data-center cleaners removing digital dust from a giant sculptural server. The work was commissioned by the V&A Museum through its Emerging Designer Commission and is on view through 18 October 2026.
The conceit rests on a parallel: data centers are highly automated, yet cleaning remains a manual task essential to their operation, and museum objects likewise require ongoing care long after their creation. Referencing Mierle Laderman Ukeles' practice of maintenance art, Playfool frames cleaning as an ongoing process of repeated actions under changing conditions — and makes the usually unseen labor behind technological progress physical and playable.
The duo — Daniel Coppen (UK/SG) and Saki Maruyama (JP) — built the piece with sound designer Matteo Bandi and fabricator Art & Assembly, curated by the V&A's Carrie Chan, with Ella-Marie Maude and Johanna Puisto of the V&A Conservation Department advising.
Why it lands
It uses the real tool — an actual data-center vacuum as the controller — so the metaphor lands in the hands, not on a screen.
It draws a straight line between two invisible maintenance regimes: server-hall cleaning and museum conservation.
It extends Mierle Laderman Ukeles' maintenance art into digital infrastructure, treating cleaning as care rather than drudgery.
The V&A's Emerging Designer Commission format gives an untested duo a flagship platform and a real brief about labor behind collections.
What you can take
The surest way to make invisible labor visible is to make people do it — especially when the tool in their hands is the real thing.
Since then
The Server is on view at the V&A in South Kensington, London, through 18 October 2026.
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