Have you ever asked yourself how much energy is needed to view one single video on Youtube?
We calculated this monumental task for the trailer of Avatar by James Cameron (2009) on YouTube. Find all calculations here.
posted February 9, 2012
Avatar incarnation cRdxXPV9GNQ - Mumbai Sun Gates
A cube of coal with a side length of 8 meters smoking in the Mumbai Sun. The cube holds the exact amount of coal that was consumed by 21.4 million people watching the trailer of the Avatar-movie by James Cameron on Youtube. The cube is therefore the avatar of the film "Avatar".
The giant black pyramid in the background is the Avatar of the Internet: a coal pyramid with a height of 900 meters representing the amount of energy that is consumed by the Internet in just one year. It is therefore not surprising, that the Russian word for coal is pronounced "oogle".
Be precise with the precious knowledge of the Internet. Use it wisely. Use it soon.
cc by-nc-sa 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
original photograph by
http://www.flickr.com/people/italo_ana/
Saturday 11th of February 2012 until Saturday 10th of March 2012 in Mumbai, India.
"expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability" demonstrate artistic practices that contribute to the preservation of the planet, intend to influence conscious consumer behaviour and be economically efficient: examples to follow!
More than 40 artistic positions in which the boundaries between art, activism and inventions dissolve and the experiences and methods of environmental initiatives interconnect with artistic approaches are exhibited.
After one year traveling through Germany the exhibition is now reaching Mumbai, being followed by Addis Abeba, Ethiopia and Beijing, China in cooperation with the respective Goethe Institutes and the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
exhibition reflections
posted February 7, 2012
PDF with Article available at kunst-magazin.de. Page 4 ff.
posted November 8, 2011
foto by christin lahr 2011
show at Umweltbundesamt + Bauhaus Dessau March 23 - April 20 2011
posted March 23, 2011
Foto: wendepunktzukunft.org
Vortrag von Michael Saup zur Finnisage der Kunstausstellung ZUR NACHAHMUNG EMPFOHLEN! im Zehntspeicher in Gartow bei Gorleben am 5. März 2011.
posted March 4, 2011
Just 3 months later, the Internet prooves worth our massive investment of natural resources. Without the social binary machine there would have been no revolution in Egypt. Besides being the avatar of the Internet, the black pyramid may as well be the avatar of justice, the body of our second chance.
posted February 13, 2011
Pyramis Niger - the avatar of the Internet. A lignite coal pyramid with a base side of 1,422 meters and a height of 905 meters created by the electrical power consumption of the Internet in 2009, totaling 1,000,000,000,000 kWh’s. The lignite briquettes would create a line 1.5 times as big as the distance between Earth and Sun.
The shape of the pyramid is thought to be representative of the descending rays of the Sun (Avatara, Sanskrit for "descent"). The same is true for coal, a frozen message from ancient solar rays, an embodied secret from millions of years ago. We are burning it for a purpose, generating electrical power for the net, assembling and compressing cultural memory: global (s)warming for intelligence. Let us be very precise about the way we transform the old memory of the world into the new.
"Avatar" is a science fiction film in the context of imperialism and ecology where an aggressive corporation mining for a valuable natural resource is starting a military conflict with a native tribe which is living in harmony with nature, worshiping a mother goddess called "Eywa". To advance it's materialistic interests, the mining corporation uses an avatar, a hybrid, genetically engineered native-human body to interact with the tribe and the bio-botanical spiritual neural network it is connected to.
In order to raise interest before the official cinema launch, the movie "Avatar" employs an avatar itself in the form of an online-video-trailer released into the wild of the YouTube-video-community, a digitally engineered native-coded body targeting for the valuable resource "views" in the digital network we are connected to.
My installation "Avatar - incarnation cRdxXPV9GNQ" will introduce the avatar of the film "Avatar"'s online video-trailer represented by a massive lignite coal briquette body equivalent to the volume of coal that was burnt for the creation of the electrical energy used to serve, transmit and view the online-video-trailer 1 million times. We convert pixels into briquettes, a naturally engineered valuable fossil resource produced by mining the network Earth we are connected to.
Where Ava is another form of Eve (Eywa) and tar is another form of coal, the Internet is our only chance to enhance human development, a precious intellectual resource, our native body of knowledge. Even if we would consider only one percent of the available information in the net to be valuable, it would justify the large amount of natural resources we are investing at this point of human development.
With the availability of information comes a deal: the individual responsibility of knowing and acting. Where Earth enforms, intelligence informs, society otherwise uniforms.
On October 29th, 2009, just after the release of the trailer and the manifestation of our concept, the trailer hit one million views, which creates the exhibited cube with a side length of 3 meters and a weight of 37 tons.
Cubus Niger - incarnation cRdxXPV9GNQ, a lignite coal cube with a side length of 3 meters created by the electrical power consumption of one million views of the "Avatar"-movie-trailer on YouTube.
"@", Foto by Leander Hörmann
As of June 1st, 2010, the total views for the trailer have surpassed 14.5 million creating a cube with the side length of 7 meters, weighing 540 tons. The cube is continuously growing and hence so is the amount of coal physically burnt in exchange and hence so is the size of the hole in Earth.
AVATAR - incarnation cRdxXPV9GNQ has been produced by and is currently on tour with ZUR NACHAHMUNG EMPFOHLEN! - examples to follow!
SUPPORT
Dr. Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D. / Prof. Niko P. Ernsting, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin / Hans Engelke Energie OHG, Berlin / 7pixels.de, Berlin / Stiftung Forum der Kulturen zu Fragen der Zeit / Jochen Flasbarth, Umweltbundesamt Dessau
IMAGE CREDITS
Titel: Cubus Niger - incarnation cRdxXPV9GNQ
Author: Michael Saup
License: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Original photograph by Rita Willaert
Titel: Pyramis Niger - incarnation net MMIX
Author: Michael Saup
License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Original photograph by Ricardo Liberato
PDF de/en
posted September 2, 2010