Laura U. Marks founded the Small File Media Festival to draw attention to the alarming and quickly growing environmental impact of information and communication technologies (ICT). The festival invites makers to submit works of a tiny bitrate of max. 1.44 megabytes per minute, demonstrating that moving-image medium can be absorbing and provocative without a high carbon footprint.
For this talk, Marks will explain some of the reasons for ICT’s environmental impact. Further, she’ll argue that the large files of streaming established the infrastructure of data centers, networks, and devices that machine learning applications later came to exploit.
In the medium term, renewable technologies are projected to supply only the additional energy demand as fossil fuels continue to be extracted. Thus the solution to this disastrous environmental impact can only be degrowth. Small files contribute to the graceful decline in which humans begin to make do with sparser infrastructure, on the model of countries in the global South. Doing so, Marks suggests, ICT can align with the cosmos, instead of exploiting it, in a practice that she calls talismanic.
This event is part of the Speaking of Media talks series hosted by the MA in Media Studies, bringing media scholars, makers, archivists, and artists to campus to share and discuss their work.
Presented by the School of Art, Media, and Technology's MA Media Studies Program at Parson's School of Design with the Tishman Environment & Design Center and Code as a Liberal Art
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New School students seeking accommodations should contact the Student Disability Services office at studentdisability@newschool.edu.
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Event guests seeking accommodations may contact the event organizer by clicking the "Contact the Organizer" link at the bottom of this page.
Laura U. Marks researches media ecology, non-Western media histories, Arab cinema, experimental cinema, Islamic philosophy, aesthetics, and embodiment. Her books include The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos (2024), Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (2015; on experimentation in Arab cinema), and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010). Marks programs media art for venues around the world. She leads research on the carbon footprint of streaming media and artificial intelligence and founded the Small File Media Festival, which celebrates movies that stream at extremely low bitrate. With Azadeh Emadi she co-founded the Substantial Motion Research Network of artists and scholars working on non-Western approaches to media. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Guggenheim Fellow, Marks teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, located on the unceded territory of the Squamish, Stolo, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam nations. She is also active in Scholars of Cinema and Media Studies in Solidarity with Palestine, SFU Faculty for Palestine, and the SFU Council on Islamophobia.
The Masters of Art in Media Studies program of the School of Art, Media, & Technology in Parsons combines media theory, research, and production studies, preparing students to contribute to a complex and rapidly changing media landscape. Studying in the world’s media capital, New York City, our students acquire critical insights and technical skills in rigorous topical courses taught by leading scholars and creative professionals. Our alumni find careers in a wide range of fields, from media curating and communications to film and media-making to media research and scholarship to industry leadership and innovation.
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