Carbonivore

Video and sculptural installation, a collaboration with Jill Miller, 2023

Carbonivore (with Jill Miller), 2023. Video with sound and sculptural installation including data cables in storage unit, dimensions variable.

Carbonivore (with Jill Miller, 2023) is a video installation and performance that speculatively and playfully visualizes the invisible infrastructure of the global internet and communications technologies.

While drawing on the same carbon resources, Carbonivore functions as a parasitic agitator that critically represents the web of tangled coaxial cables, air conditioners, computer servers, water pipes, electricity, minerals, and metals that make up the relentlessly material Cloud.

Carbonivore: video detail (with Jill Miller), 2023. Video with sound and sculptural installation including data cables in storage unit, dimensions variable.

Carbonivore was featured in the exhibition More Than Meets AI, October 2 - 14, 2023 at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery at UC Berkeley. It was also part of the Internet Tour - Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations, a bus tour on October 12, 2023 initiated by artist Mario Santamaría in collaboration with Alex Saum-Pascual, featuring Jillian (Lee) Crandall as the “Keeper of the Carbonovore.” The tour was presented by the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, sponsored by the Arts Research Center as part of the Berkeley Center for New Media’s Critical Infrastructures and Cultural Analytics program.

Carbonivore Performance: Feeding the Cloud (with Jill Miller), 2023. Video with sound, sculptural installation, and performance in storage unit featuring “keeper” Jillian (Lee) Crandall, dimensions variable.

Like any other digital technology, or the Internet itself, the current explosion of AI research and applications relies on their conceptualization as immaterial technologies. The idea of clean, ethereal networks whose data is stored in a bodiless Cloud is nothing but a fallacy that hides thousands of miles of fiber optic cables, innumerable data centers, and increasing global energy consumption. The Internet that feeds and fuels AI is made up of a series of materials, constructions, and interventions that are hidden from the naked eye; from inconspicuous buildings in the centers of our cities, to urban beaches where the undersea cables that connect countries and continents are buried under the sand.

– From Internet Tour - Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations text