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Defooooooooooooooooooooorest

Title: Defooooooooooooooooooooorest
Artist(s): Joana Moll
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): Environmental impact of digital ‘cloud’ services such as Google

This is a piece of net art, available for the viewer to witness at: http://www.janavirgin.com/CO2/DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST.html . Visually, this site is simple – as the viewer is watching, the page fills with representations of trees. However, what the trees represent is ‘amount of trees needed to absorb the amount of CO2 generated by the global visits to google.com every second’. 1 Therefore, this piece powerfully visibilises the ecological impact of daily embedded cultural and societal practices connected to our digital lives. The ubiquity of Google, even articulated in the verb ‘to google’ when a web search is performed, veils the backdrop of material and infrastructural processes required to sustain such networking capabilities. This project therefore ‘has been created with the aim to explore strategies able to trigger thoughts and actions capable to highlight the invisible connections between actions and consequences when using digital communication technologies’.2 Often cited in ecological metaphors, this project visibilises the ecological requirements needed to offset visits to the most visited website in the world. Yet it also highlights the disjuncture between what is required, the continued destruction of ecosystem services such as forests.

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Harvest

Title: Harvest
Artist: Julian Oliver
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): sound, visual
Issue(s): cryptocurrency, data mining

 

This piece could be seen as a precursor to the later ALT-C by Michael Sedbon. It is significant for this project as it is an example of how critical making, and in this case, critical engineering, can be utilised to problematise the ecological impacts of mining cryptocurrency, while transforming the problematic dimension of the energy use of such activities. HARVEST is an installation whereby a computer system is connected to a wind turbine. The computer mines cryptocurrency. Thus, the computer itself is powered in an ecologically sustainable way, counterposing the potentials for renewable energy to transform socio-economic processes. However, what is also novel about this piece is in how the cryptocurrency is invested. In this case, it is invested in ‘donations to non-profit climate change research organisations such that they can better study this planetary-scale challenge’.1 Indeed, the artist himself ‘envisages hundreds of such HARVEST nodes could be deployed in the windiest parts of the world, together generating large sums of supplementary funding for climate-change NGOs in a time where climate science itself is under siege from the fossil-fuelled interests of governments and corporations’.2 Oliver describes the work as ‘computational climate art’.3

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Alt-C

Title: Alt-C
Artist(s): Michael Sedbon
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): ecological cost of data, ecosystems and growth-based economies


This piece is a novel attempt to communicate the link between ecosystem health, and the vast ecological cost of the ‘mining’ of cryptocurrency. In this piece the artist created an electronic installation that utilises the electricity produced by the natural processes of plants, to power a small computer that in turn ‘mines’ cryptocurrency. In this regard it connects the economic world of the ‘cloud’ and data processing to that of the environmental impact of powering such data centres. Furthermore, the algorithms also created as part of the project ‘will try to come up with a strategy to reinvest the grown/harvested money into farmable land’.
1 Thus, as the system becomes more profitable, it self-sustains by investing in land that (in theory) is planted with trees that can provide more electrical power to continue to support the cryptocurrency mining.

This project therefore asks key questions about the nature/society relationship, particularly in relation to nature ‘capital’, the non-ecological nature of data, and the potential to utilise ecological networks in economic contexts. Thus the artist asks:

Could an ecological computer virus reverse deforestation?

Alt-c question our relationship to ecosystems in regards to networked technologies and abstraction problematics.

What would it mean to perceive forest and fields as giant networked processing or powering the information grid?

How forecasting technics in places in the finance industry can recall Aeromancy (Cloud reading Divination)?

What would it mean to live in a world where economic would be driven by the weather forecast, atmospheric conditions or any naturally occurring phenomenon?

Would this made us respect more natural ecosystems or nourish our will to control them?
With enough abstraction and control, could we plan on growth?

In such a context, would economic growth lead to ecological sustanability or a total financialization hegemony on farmable lands making them vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market?

Furthermore, the project closes the conceptual gap between economics and ecology, and between ephemeral data and material impacts.

 

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Waiting for the Light

Title: Waiting for the Light
Artist(s): Taavi Suisalu
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): data, bioart

Waiting for the Light is an installation by the artist Taavi Suisalu that integrates ideas of data and connectivity, with bioart.

This installation places plants in protected ‘Wardian’ cases , where they are free from pollution or predation.

The plants are supplied by light that comes from them being connected to the internet via mobile broadband. 1  Therefore, the light comes ultimately from submarine fibre optic cables. As the artist explains ‘This network carries threads of light as thin as tenth of human hair while being as existential to technological societies as the sun is for the plants. We are hanging by a thread while the artificial sun rays plunge through the oceans and light up our faces via bright screens’. 2  The lights that help the plants to grow are triggered by bots, as any device connected to the internet becomes a visibile entity, capable of interacting with such bots. Therefore ‘each plant then becomes an object of interest to these robots whose communicative acts, streams of light, once passed the floors of oceans, are lit back into our environment as bursts of growth light, giving them an agenda they are unaware of.’3

This project is of interest in how it links together the often dematerialised aspect of data communications, that is, thousands of kilometres of underwater cable, with the materiality of biological and ecological growth. Therefore, it invokes in the viewer a connected space of data communication and the living world.