DIGITAL CONSUMPTION: MODERN ART AND CARBON FOOTPRINT Global context: state of art in decentralized consumption and first prototypes During the first stages of our work, we have had one constant question in mind: What modern actions have an unperceived contribution to the global carbon footprint? and according to recent tendencies we tried to start our investigations around the cryptocurrency sector. As a straight analogy to the human action of mining, we decided to start our research with the concept of cryptomining. During our journey, we started to get familiarized with other terms such as blockchain and its decentralized system. This last word resonated in our heads and led us to the construction of new questions like who runs these transactions and organizations? and how is this big amount of data managed? We ended up understanding this as a community network system that has to be operated by many people with access to high-powered computers. In return for contributing their processing power, computers on the network are rewarded with new of the same currency they were managing. That is when we saw that there is a correlation between a blockchain and the global carbon footprint. After that, we decided to investigate deeply inside one of the most popular markets that contained this blockchain system: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). During their first appearance, they represented a big revenue avenue but also there were lots of speculations regarding their utility. This eventually caused many people to get involved in the making of transactions on something that they didn’t understand at all, contributing to the global carbon footprint. The average footprint of a single transaction involving an NFT, including minting, bids, sales, and transfers is 82 kilowatt-hours, with outputs of 48 Kilograms of Carbon. In August 2021 the NFTs sold by SuperRare digital market reached a quantity of 18,159, in terms of carbon emissions this is equivalent to 2000 years’ worth of electrical energy consumption by a single person in Europe or driving for 20 million kilometers and flying for 37,000 hours. Subsequently, we decided that the art style needed to be related with a NFTwith major historical relevance that also represented the hype surrounding these transactions, so one of our first inspirations was the artwork Every Day's - The First 5000 Days, One of the first trendy NFT’s sold for millions of dollars, created by Mike Winkelmann. Also, the concept of having a “miner” comes from the idea of the representation of the interconnection between the human forces and the digital ones, merging both concepts in the creation of a cyborg for the prototype made. To enhance this meaning of “awareness” we made a collage with compiled photographs that allude to the contamination made up by these transactions.
First concept notes ● ●
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Thousands of images using black and white that allude to events that pollute the environment (CO2). Create an image using the thousands of images that will be taken, forming something that alludes to the deterioration of our planet. (A photograph could be used as a template to overlay all the photos) A person dressed as a miner (holding a graphics card in one hand and a burning plant in the other). Encourage cryptocurrency companies to create more sustainable blockchain optimizations. Use their own medium as a way to "critique" transactions made with things that have no current functionality (NFTs)."
Character symbolism and personal context
As biotechnology engineers, we start from a context in which we use science as an analytical tool oriented towards research and technological innovation. We come from Monterrey city, located in the north of Mexico. This city is one of the most industrialized in the country and curiously one of the most contaminated by gas emissions in Latin America. In Monterrey, the automotive, cement, and chemical industries intermingle and connect with the culture and become a mixture of the past with modernity. Urban architecture, technological innovation, industry, huge machinery is mixed with cowboy popular culture, regional music, people's revolution and populism. As biology professionals and Mexican artists representing our culture, we find a very special value in projecting our social and environmental reality through science. Our line of artistic production tends to take advantage of biological and physical data of real phenomena to be used and transformed into a palpable and sensitive language for the viewer such as music, illustration or audiovisual effects. On this occasion, given our urban context, we feel very sensitive to the environmental situation at a global level. Carrying out research we found a relationship between the new trends and outlets of modern art and global CO2 emissions. Modernity and digital attachment have forced human beings to become consumers of new artificial intelligence and data storage technologies in which art is increasingly “consumable” and seen as an object that can be stored and “encrypted” as one more piece of information. This union between man and monitor creates fluctuations in global
energy consumption and the more information we generate, the more robust storage systems will be necessary and the more energy that feeds these systems therefore. We perceive a reality distorted by the digital world that is seen through an eye trained for express consumption, practicality and directly linked to the economy. We find ourselves with a world that is reunited with the discovery of great technologies, synthesis with the machine, but in a more elegant and synthesized way. As if it were a neo-expressionist movement in German cinema, we once again find ourselves in a metropolis, controlled by technology and condemned to pay the consequences of its side effects.
Narratives “We are made of steel, iron and gas”
“Horno Alto 3” is a gigantic iron factory structure that is located in the center of the Fundidora Park, in Monterrey city, and that is unmistakable due to its set of enormous cylinders. Currently this site has been adapted as a technology/science center and museum which commemorates decades of history. Built between 1965 and 1968, when it produced between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of cast iron per day. Thanks to it, Fundidora Monterrey achieved an annual production of one million tons of steel, making it the first steel mill in Latin America. The oven fell into disuse with the company's bankruptcy in 1986, but 19 years later work began to restore it and turn it into what it is today. Fundidora is located near the center of the city and is a point where the culture and technology of the city converge. It is a place that remembers the beginnings of the industrial era in the country, which housed thousands of workers who built what our culture is today. At some point in history, industrial life, hard work, family sustenance met with popular culture, regional songs and pictorial dyes that adorn the city today. Just as it is a symbol that inspires one of the cities with the greatest investment in technology in Latin America, Horno 3 was the beginning of a culture of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in the Monterrey territory. The city of Monterrey is one of the most polluted in Latin America, as the PM10 particles present in the air of the capital of Nuevo Leon continually exceed the limits established by the World Health Organization (WHO). A study published by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reveals that Monterrey is the third most contaminated city in Latin America and the Caribbean by PM10 particles. Above the capital of Nuevo León are Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and Lima, Peru. “Beeple and his creative imagination”
In March 2021, a work of art was sold in an online auction for a price close to $70 million. Despite the astronomical amount, the news itself is nothing new: without going any further, in 2019 Jeff Koons sold his famous Rabbit for $91.1 million. The incredible thing in this case is that the work we are talking about, Everydays: The first 5,000 days, does not exist. Or, to be more exact, it does not exist in the “physical” world: it is an NFT file (non-fungible token) and has been conceived in, and to exist in, the virtual world. The creator of this work is called Mike Winkelmann and is known worldwide as Beeple. The work of 21,069 x 21,069 pixels brings together hundreds of images. As described by the author, it is a work where "the individual pieces are organized in an imprecise chronological order: zooming in on the images reveals abstract, fantastic, grotesque or absurd images, deeply personal or representative of the "Recurring themes include society's obsession with and fear of technology; the desire and resentment of wealth; and the recent political turmoil in the United States."
Concept materialization
After the creation of the first prototype we continue our reasearch about the NFT markets. We found out that one of the most important aspects about this market is that it gave the Fusers an opportunity to get something “exclusive”. The term NFT means that there cannot be two of the same kind, and that was its major difference against common cryptocurrency. The term minting, used in this market, can be compared to the act of getting an authentication document that means that you are the only owner of that particular piece of media inside that market. This lets us think about the value of art in that type of market and take the concept of the artwork Comedian by Mauricio Cattelan as inspiration to create a major critic of the immense amount of transactions. We used it as inspiration because there is this message that what has a real value is not the artwork itself, but a document that proves its legitimacy. This means that because of this facility of practically making everything a NFT, everyone can participate in these markets just for the sake of profit, without seeing the consequential outcomes of it. That leads us to another question, How can we represent these collateral effects in a visible way? For our second prototype we decided to make two images that with the help of a computer program, create a visual analogy of the impact of the NFT market transactions in the global carbon footprint. To create an impactful transition we decided to use the style of Bored Ape Yacht Club by Yuga Labs, this in order to maintain the congruence within the artwork and also to make it more attractive among people by utilizing a popular NFT style that is now part of pop culture. Also, the minimalist bright colors are important in making a complete visual contrast inside the transition. For the second image we maintained the initial idea of the collage in black and white maintaining the identity of the first image. For the character we continue the idea of the miner, and now we took inspiration from German expressionism and 1930’s German cinema because it was related to the combination of man and machines. The dark color pattern of german expressionism and the bright colors of the Bored Ape
Yacht Club create a color contrast that catches the eye. For the transition we use Javascript coding (Processing), and also to used data of global estimates of the NFT carbon footprint generated through recent years in order to make the sizes of the squares oscillate between those parameters.
Digital Tools We wanted to use a digital medium for the final visualization of our miner. Incorporating an electronic component that, in addition to transmitting the image, could modify it, was an important part of the process that refers to the mining process. We use Processing software to connect real mining contamination data with visual effects observed on display. Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment based on Java, which serves as a means for producing multimedia and interactive digital design projects. It was initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas from reflections in the Aesthetics and Computation Group of the MIT Media Lab led by John Maeda. When we were devising the symbolism of the idea and materializing the miner, we decided that we wanted the final image to be gradually modified with small spots that represented the "carbon footprint" that the action of mining implies. Furthermore, we wanted these stains to be symbolically coherent with pollution data in the world. Thus, the stains have a different size and order of appearance on the work according to the contamination data. Coordinating this animation was only possible with the use of Processing, which helped us create the final image of the miner stained with small carbon footprints. We programmed the small dots with contamination images and randomized them so that they appeared on the miner's face and background gradually, ultimately creating a completely distorted or contaminated image.