[-empyre-] Sean Cubitt: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Krosrods Moarquech]

Dear Sean,
 
How great is to read your words, once again.
In 2005, I was critized because the curatorial process of Arte Nuevo InteractivA was based in an imagined post technological future.
Your words bring back a lot of the issues I was facing as a new media artist and curator living in Latin America.
Hope our imagination will expand enough to understand how close we are to the zero energy level.
Best,
Raul

--- El mar 27-ene-09, Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu> escribió:

De:: Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
Asunto: [-empyre-] Sean Cubitt: Resolution for Digital Futures
A: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Fecha: martes, 27 enero, 2009, 7:52 am

There are not enough rare earths on the planet to replicate for the
developing world the density of personal computers and wireless devices that
prevails in the West. Even the most efficient recycling cannot extract 100
per cent of the materials in defunct kit, and the recycling villages of West
Africa and Southern China are not only inefficient but fatal sumps of
carcinogenic pollution. The era of the personal computer, premised on the
individual as the prime consuming unit in contemporary capitalism, is
nearing its close.

Soon we will be unable to power the networks, such is our profligate use of
finite energy sources. Compression doesn't resolve this problem:
decompression has an energy cost, regardless of the degree of compression in
the network signal, it has to be decompressed elsewhere, so maintaining the
same cost. Information is energy hungry: that is the meaning of the second
law of thermodynamics. The laws of physics have us over a barrel. We will
have to get used to using less computer power in fewer machines.
Time-sharing may yet prove to be the fundamental social economy of
computing. It is time to demand better - and less!


Bio: Sean Cubitt (Australia)  is Director of the Program in Media and 
Communications
at the University of Melbourne.

-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University
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