Cat art and climate change collecting in the Data Anthropocene
What does it mean to collect in the digital age? Abundance inheres in digital objects through the possibility of their limitless duplication, a fact which should represent a challenge for collection. In this essay I will consider an attempt to make digital objects collectible by artificially imbuing...
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| Format: | Artikel |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2022
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| Zusammenfassung: | What does it mean to collect in the digital age? Abundance inheres in digital objects through the possibility of their limitless duplication, a fact which should represent a challenge for collection. In this essay I will consider an attempt to make digital objects collectible by artificially imbuing them with scarcity, and thus making them discrete. Manufacturing that "digital scarcity" will in turn depend on an enormous energy investment, on the mobilization of collections of natural resources for the production of data. This process serves as an example of what I term the Data Anthropocene, the condition in which humans have taken on geological agency, and in which our data appear as a primary locus of that agency. In this time, a different sort of collection, the gathering together of water and mineral deposits, powers both digital abundance and digital scarcity, and the question of the collection of digital objects recedes behind the question of the collection of natural resources. My essay thus moves from the question of collecting in the digital age to the question of digital collecting in the Anthropocene. |
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| ISBN: | 978-1-57113-970-2 |