Playfool's The Server Puts a Data Center Vacuum in the V&A
The Emerging Designer Commission turns museum visitors into cleaning staff at the South Kensington museum, and entry is free.
- When
- Sept. 12 to Oct. 18, 2026
- Where
- V&A South Kensington, Photography, Room 108, Cromwell Road, London
- Cost
- Free
The Server is a game installation by Playfool, the London duo Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama, and the game is a shift. You pick up a real data-center vacuum and clean digital dust off a sculptural server cabinet while its screen maps what you have missed, in a choreography drawn from the V&A's own daily routine of dusting the collection. At the end the machine prints a receipt thanking you for keeping the server alive. It is a maintenance simulator aimed at the one job in a data center that still resists automation.
Playfool’s documentation film for The Server (2026), with sound by Matteo Bandi. Via the studio’s Instagram.
The piece is this year's Emerging Designer Commission at the V&A in South Kensington, and it opened with London Design Festival on Sept. 12. The timing is pointed: nearly 100 new UK data centers are reportedly planned by 2030, and against that acceleration Playfool offers, in the studio's words, "the hidden, endless labour of maintenance." It hangs in the museum's Photography gallery, Room 108, through Oct. 18.
Visitors cleaning The Server. Photographs via Playfool
The commission was curated by Carrie Chan and produced by Katya Spiers, with fabrication by Art & Assembly and sound design by Matteo Bandi. The studio posted a behind-the-scenes look at the build last week, down to a shot of the cabinet’s guts captioned with an invitation to guess how it works.
Building and installing The Server, from Playfool’s behind-the-scenes carousel.
Killscreen tracks the installations, shows and commissions where games cross into museums, and most close before anyone lists them. The free KS Radar letter gets them to you while there is still time to go.
