Distant lands? People in West Virginia constantly die of black lung
disease; coal dust is everywhere. In the winter, coal is used instead of
salt for keeping the roads snow-free. It doesn't work that well, leads to
even more dust, but it's cheap and WV is poor.
Alan
On Fri, 9 Apr 2010, Olga wrote:
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
COAL FIRED COMPUTERS
GRAHAM HARWOOD & JEAN DEMARS
talk to Matthew Fuller at [ Space ], London
///////////////////////////////////////////////
Thursday 6th of May 7pm - 9pm
http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/All_Content_Items/Forthcoming_Events/Graham_
Harwood_&_Matthew_Fuller_Talk/
///////////////////////////////////////////////
INFO:
A one-hundred year old, 35-ton showman's steam engine powers a computer with
1.5 tons of coal. Black lungs inflate every time a database record of
miners' lung disease is shown on the computer monitors. It feels like you've
been invited into a fun fair, but one where the rides log their own
accidents ? a fun fair run by people who long ago became indistinct from the
machines they maintain.
Over three days at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle, with groups of miner
activists, Coal Fired Computers articulated relations between Power, Art and
Media. The new work by leading UK media artists Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa),
in collaboration with Jean Demars, it responded to the displacement of coal
production to distant lands like India and China after the UK miners' strike
in 1984/85. Coal Fired Computers reflects on the complexities of our global
fossil fuel reliance and especially on how coal transforms our health as we
have transformed it. Today coal produces 42% of the world?s electricity, and
in many countries this rate is much higher (more than 70% in India and
China).
It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs
of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to
the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic
bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common
perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them,
displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant
lands, however coalreturns into our lives in the form of the cheap and
apparently clean goods we consume.
Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is
integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81%
of the energy used in a computer's life cycle is expended in the
manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of
coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal
it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons
of coal dust into unknown lungs.
Coal Fired Computers brings together these disparate elements into an
artwork, allowing us to reflect on the complexities that have created and
maintained power, the crisis of fuelling that power and its subsequent
health residues.
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for
Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author
of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT
Press, 2005) and Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software.
Powered by PERMACULTURES: Exploring the tensions between Art, technology and
ecology.
--
Olga P Massanet
--------------------------
www.ungravitational.net
virtualfirefly.wordpress.com
www.vimeo.com/ungravitational
==
email archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
webpage http://www.alansondheim.org sondheimat gmail.com, panix.com
==
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
