Timothy W. Luke, Jeremy Hunsinger (eds.): Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, internet, publishing, research
The volume confronts many of the issues in contemporary academia as it meets the internet and computing in all of its spheres with many specific contributions on academic publishing, e-research, the history of the center, and related topics.
Publisher: Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA, December 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933217-00-0
A freely distributable, copyable, and downloadable digital e-dition in honor of the 10th anniversary of the
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture.
289 pages
YoHa: Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers – 318,000 Black Lungs) (2010)
Filed under brochure, catalogue | Tags: · coal, computing, critique, history of technology, industry, technology
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, with groups of miner activists, Coal Fired Computers articulates relations between Power, Art and Media. A new work by leading UK media artists Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa), in collaboration with Jean Demars, it responds 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). This power is produced by descendants of Charles Parson’s 1884 steam turbines, also on display in the Discovery Museum.
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 coal returns 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.
Authors: Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji
Commissioned by AV Festival 2010
Produced in partnership with Discovery Museum.
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
Comment (0)Nigel Thrift: Knowing Capitalism (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · actor-network theory, anthropology, capitalism, complexity theory, computing, cultural economy, economics, economy, genetic algorithms, geography, information technology, rfid, social theory
Capitalism is well known for producing a form of existence where `everything solid melts into air’. But what happens when capitalism develops theories about itself? Are we moving into a condition in which capitalism can be said to possess a brain?
These questions are pursued in this sparkling and thought-provoking book. Thrift looks at what he calls “the cultural circuit of capitalism,” the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit back to the 1960s when a series of institutions locked together to interrogate capitalism, to the present day, when these institutions are moving out to the Pacific basin and beyond. What have these theories produced? How have they been implicated in the speculative bubbles that characterized the late twentieth century? What part have they played in developing our understanding of human relations?
Building on an inter-disciplinary approach which embraces the core social sciences, Thrift outlines an exciting new theory for understanding capitalism. His book is of interest to readers in Geography, Social Theory, Antrhopology and Cultural Economics.
Publisher SAGE Publications, 2005
Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society
Theory, culture & society
ISBN 141290059X, 9781412900591
Length 256 pages