Hope to go to this:

PRAXIS II SEMINAR – DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH CENTRE: Professor Sean Cubitt

Ubiquitous Media, Rare Earths  - The environmental footprint of digital media and what to do about it.

Pervasive Media Lab, University of the West of England, 22 Sept 2009 2.00 – 4.00 pm The language of 'immaterial', 'weightless' and 'virtual' digital media inflects discussions from business models to aesthetics, cultural analysis to democratic politics. But digital media are none of these things. The raw materials, manufacture, use and recycling of digital tools all have significant impacts on the people who work in these sectors and on the natural environment. Loss of species and habitats, energy use, polluttion, labour and living conditions are all implicated in the physical infrastructure of computing, and are likely to become more so for reasons which include the rise of the BRICK countries, migration to cloud computing, virtualisation technologies and the integration of mobile and telecoms networks. Recent developments in software studies need to be supplemented with a move into hardware studies. At the same time, the apocalyptic tone common to some strands of Green politics and many aspects of critical theory need to be reoriented towards building solutions to these potential limits to growth. Once we recognise that there is a problem, we can begin to consider whether the appropriate solutions are technical, economic, political or cultural.

Sean Cubitt is Director of the Program in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Timeshift, Videography, Digital Aesthetics,Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia. He is series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press.