At the V&A, Visitors Clean a Data Centre With a Vacuum

Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London were asked to do a job most people never see: cleaning a data centre, the warehouse-sized rooms of computers that power the internet and AI tools.

The game installation is called The Server. It was made by the design duo Playfool, Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama, and it was commissioned through the museum's Emerging Designer scheme, which backs up-and-coming designers. Dezeen describes the piece as a replica of an overheating data server, covered in digital dust.

Players take the controls of a decommissioned data-centre vacuum, the kind used to keep real server rooms clear. Their task is to suck the digital dust off the replica within 60 seconds. The machine being cleaned is modelled on Nvidia's latest AI server, the type of hardware that trains and runs large AI systems.

The vacuum has its own screens. They show clouds of digital particles being pulled in, and they rank each player's performance on a set of metrics, so the score is never far from view.

The museum's own description says the work draws on its everyday routine of cleaning objects in its collections. It also says the piece explores systems of care in the age of AI acceleration, and the role human labour plays in keeping fast-moving technology running. The V&A includes The Server in its Awakenings trail for London Design Festival, and lists it in the festival's 2026 programme at the museum's South Kensington site.

Playfool, the museum says, is an artist-design unit, a team that works across art and design rather than in one field alone. Its project page describes digital dust drifting and settling over a server sculpture, which is the effect players are trying to undo.

Access was free. Killscreen reported that the installation could be visited at no charge through 18 October.

What the piece asks is simple. Somebody has to clean the machines that run modern life, and that work is usually done by people the rest of us never meet. The Server turns that unseen labour into a 60-second task, with a score at the end.

For anyone who has ever wondered what happens in a data centre between the hum of the servers and the blink of a screen, the answer is a person with a vacuum and a short time limit.