This workshop proposes an open discussion on the relationship between cloud infrastructures and environmental issues, in light of emerging cloud gaming services and other computer-intensive media platforms. The imageries surrounding digitalisation have been largely associated with ideas of green growth, energy transition, and resource efficiency, while at the same being conceptualised within a post-industrial epistemological framework that envisioned digital media as cold, ephemeral, or weightless. However, by analysing reports from monitoring organisations, as well as the very physical structures that make platform services possible, one can trace some of the frictions in the environmental imagination at the heart of ambient supercomputing. The scale of these technical systems also poses challenges to perception and visualisation: it is not only that the sheer volume of data they carry is difficult to conceive. With the outsourcing of computer processing and storage to geo-distributed facilities, planetary-scale cloud infrastructures convey the prospect of ubiquitous telematics yet opaque industrialisation, showing and concealing at once.

After a short impulse talk on the topic, we would like to jointly discuss the interplay between infrastructures and environments, making sense of the constellation of servers, biomes, logistical operations, air conditioners, groundwater, generators, cables, heat dissipation, and real-time processing techniques that compose the ecosystem of synchronous networked computing.

Wir bitten um vorherige Anmeldung unter .

Dr. Eduardo Harry Luersen ist Postdoctoral Fellow am Zukunftskolleg, angegliedert an den Fachbereich Literatur, Kunst und Medien der Universität Konstanz. Er studierte Bildende Kunst, Grafikdesign und Musikkomposition an der Bundesuniversität von Pelotas und promovierte an der Universität Unisinos in Brasilien. Seine Studien konzentrieren sich auf die Umweltdimension von Gamingtechnologie und digitalen Spielpraktiken, Sound Studies und Gamification. Luersen hat ein starkes Interesse an interdisziplinärer Forschung und experimentellem Forschungsdesign. Das Projekt, das er derzeit am Zukunftskolleg durchführt, trägt den Namen ‚The Cloud Gaming Atlas: from Earth’s metabolism to the longing for radiant infrastructures‘. Hier gelangen Sie zur Personenseite von Eduardo Luersen auf der Website der Universität Konstanz.

Bildquelle: Bibiana da Silva de Paula.

Organisator*innen:
Prof. Dr. Birgit Schneider (Universität Potsdam)
Prof. Dr. Jan Distelmeyer (Fachhochschule Potsdam)

Gefördert durch das ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften