Last week I returned home for a couple of hours, at least metaphorically, by presenting my current research at Semana da Imagem, an event that the TCAv group has been organizing annually at Unisinos for more than two decades now. The research seeks to connect game studies and Earth systems, by analyzing the environmental entanglements of the computing-intensive infrastructure that supports, among other things, cloud gaming platforms. I present some cases to demonstrate how platforms are mediators not only of so-called "content", but of thermal processes that are intertwined with it. This approach seeks to tackle a conceptual problem: the usual imagination of media as dematerialized forms. The main argument is that, just as important as practical mitigation and reduction strategies, is the initiative to take a step back (literally to the background) epistemologically, to better understand the infrastructural relationships that mediate these interactions, which shape how games and other digital services circulate around the world. After all, if present-day media assemblages enable information exchange on a global - albeit asymmetrical - scale, the heat exchanges mediated by them also entail a planetary outcome.
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AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
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