Clutter and Peñarroyo reimagine the ‘90s ‘Internet Cafe’ for INCA “Data Materialities” exhibition
Architecture faculty members McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, who work together as the design collaborative EXTENTS, unveiled their new project, “Internet Cafe,” at the INCA Exhibition in Bologna, Italy, last month. The project is part of INCA’s Data Materialities, a multiyear exhibition focused on the materiality of techno-capitalism on the micro and macro scale. Clutter and Peñarroyo’s project was one of four selected and planned during a one-week research colloquium last year. Late last month, the exhibit moved to the Limonaia di Villa Saroli, in Lugana, Switzerland, where it will be on display until Nov. 22, before moving to Aarhus, Denmark, in spring 2026.
“Internet Cafe” is an effort to recreate the experimental nature of early internet cafes in the 1990s. The cafe is designed from different building component systems hacked to playfully unite while destabilizing digital and dining habits to create visual and spatial relationships across surfaces and guests. Visitors are invited to sit down and celebrate connection with friends, strangers, and technology.
“Our work on this project began with reflection on the desocializing effects of many of our contemporary digital habits,” Clutter said. “Today, most people are free to browse the web in the comfort of their homes: curtains drawn and nestled behind the veil of iPhone’s privacy mode. We surrender to feedback loops of online advertising tailored toward our individuated data profiles, and we seek out digital communities of consensus to reinforce our political and social ideologies. We had a hunch that by looking back at cyber history, we might find counter-examples.”
With “Internet Cafe,” EXTENTS reasserts the internet as a material space. The two were influenced by community forms of internet access and data ownership, which suggest possible alternatives. Created with fabrication help from Krzysztof Lower, M.Arch ’27, and proposal support from Axel Olson, M.Arch 24, “Internet Cafe” invites guests to look back on the internet as a carefully negotiated social space.
“Much of our work is critical of techno-determinism or -solutionism, and we try to foster alternative models for coexistence with web-based technologies,” Peñarroyo said. “We had been inspired by community wireless organizations, for example, who build and maintain their own internet infrastructure as a way of empowering users to be the stewards of their own data, and we drew upon firsthand experience navigating a spatial geography reconfigured by internet access during the pandemic. These examples demonstrate that ‘another internet’ is possible, and our Internet Cafe is one attempt at testing that.”
INCA, which stands for “Increase corporate political responsibility and accountability,” investigates the impact digital platforms have on European democracies and institutions. Peñarroyo and Clutter hope visitors will reflect on their own online habits and imagine a new possibility for the future of the internet.
“We hope that the project will cause visitors to reflect on how they normally use the internet, and whether their digital habits help to make them productive members of democratic society,” Clutter said. “We also hope that visitors will have fun. The project is intended to cultivate novel relationships between people, technology, and food, and we hope that those relationships will encourage imagination of new possibilities at the intersection of space, technology, and public life.”
— Story by Joshua Nicholson
