By defaulting to ever-higher file sizes and encouraging consumers to store their data on the so-called cloud, image-making devices and platforms are contributing to the fast-expanding carbon footprint of information and communication technologies. Laura U. Marks will share why that footprint is currently about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as the airline industry. In her talk, she will explain why those emissions are rising, and some of the means to individually and collectively restrain ICT’s expanding carbon footprint.
Marks will also introduce the Small File Media Festival, the reference for the Small File Photo Festival. Now in its second year, SFMF was founded by Marks to draw attention to the carbon footprint of streaming media and celebrate movies that aim at a file size of one megabyte per minute. Small files are inaugurating a new aesthetic that is intensive rather than extensive, for artworks that embrace their infrastructure rather than deny it.
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou and Giacomo Mercuriali will present Hot Pictures, the first issue of RESOLUTION Magazine they collaboratively edited. Hot Pictures takes on the ecological paradox digital images present: offering novel ways to visually depict environmental destruction and climate change, while simultaneously polluting and heating up the planet through their production and circulation. By investigating the production, distribution, and reception of what they call ‘hot’ images –images of climate disaster, fast and slow, spectacular and indiscernible– Mavrokordopoulou and Mercuriali will discuss what it means to research the digital image’s ecological footprint through the print medium.
Øyvind Kolås will share his Colour Assimilation Grid experiment working with compression techniques, image file sizes and quirks on human visual perception. Considering human eyes as optical capture units similar to cameras, and the mind as the computer where the visual experience happens, Kolås’ experiment help understand how altered experience of space, time and colour might be interesting to explore in order to reduce the weight of images.
