Art, Technology and The Industrial Future

For decades, society and predominantly first-world society has blindly overlooked technology’s impact on climate change. By exploring Rifkin’s America 3.0 from The Age of Resilience, reflecting on the industrial revolution and juxtaposing it with the emergence of technology in the popular consciousness, I hope to encourage individuals to be more conscious about technology’s negative effects on the climate through the use of Spam Ham; Spam Ham being the name of the finite state machine that with some applied creativity can help propagate the ideas for climate change. Doing so by delivering to nearby devices, an Image and a corresponding reading on climate change. For example, Rain, Steam and Speed, Figure 1, the image will be shared with a message apologizing for the disturbance and an introduction to the project Spam Ham, maybe even this paper.

Originally, I asked, is the Age of Technology from Rifkin’s Age of Resilience a part of the Age of Resilience which Rifkin describes throughout the book. After further reading, I came to learn that the Age of Technology is actually the current Industrial Revolution we are experiencing. Rifkin in The Zero Marginal Cost also talks a lot about what the world would look like after the collapse of capitalism, dubbing it The Age of Collaboration. Describing a period where knowledge is a crowdsourced process and a publicly shared good. Rifkin mentions, “In the Collaborative Age, students will come to think of knowledge as a shared experience among a community of peers. Students learn together as a cohort in a shared-knowledge community.” (Rifkin, 2015). For this reason, Spam Ham is meant to be an open-source project, using software that is available for free and in the near future may be translated to be able to run on more widely available hardware. In hopes that those who receive Spam Ham’s message and wish to further interact with it may further push the information that Spam Ham can share, as many other crowdsourced projects regularly achieve. Rifkin further speaks of the future in The Age of Resilience, where he foretells “In the coming era, buildings will be retrofitted for energy savings and climate resilience and embedded with IoT infrastructure.” (Rifkin, 2022) and IoT as noted In The Zero Marginal Cost Society “is a distributed, collaborative, and peer-to-peer technology platform, is the only mechanism agile enough to manage renewable energies that are similarly constituted and organized” (Rifkin, 2015). As such, Spam Ham was decidedly made from a

development board with a simple processor and only essential components, being one of the earliest versions of the embedded systems which is a core piece of the Internet of Things (Jones & Ferran, 2023). Hence, one of the first messages Spam Ham shares is The Monk by The Sea, Figure 2, which calls to the early days of class when we began to learn about how art would often speak on climate change, which is a topic covered in Coded: Art enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 which will accompany the image in the message.

One of the first images that came to mind when developing Spam Ham was that of Maria, by Rose B Simpson. Maria being a 1985 Chevy El Camino, where Simpson reinvented an ancestral pottery firing technique to create distinct black-on-black Tewa designs as shown in Figure 3. Using applied creativity and combining her unique educational background, Simpson sought to combat the lack of creativity in everyday life by transforming this utilitarian object.

Simpson, in a conversation with Jessica L. Horton describes applied creativity as creating innovation at every moment of life. Being raised in a permaculture community, following a non-traditional education, which teaches individuals which plants are sustainably cultivated and how to purify drinking water, about and following their indigenous heritage. In order to gain the capacity to handle environmental, internal, and spiritual situations. Thus, I sought to emulate her work with Spam Ham. Spam Ham, originally a development board from Texas Instruments used for my embedded systems class. Often used to show off technological advancements and their low barrier to entry, I intended on reversing the two, to show receivers of the message the effects of technology on the climate.

After presenting Spam Ham to the class community, many shared a common worry. Would Spam Ham be a nuisance? Is it too annoying? To which I would reply, that this Spam Ham is meant to be an unapologetic attempt at. That being said, taking peer feedback into account and to some spam might have implied various times in a small period, here Spam Ham will relay one of five messages in what is roughly an hour. Additionally, once Spam Ham has been finished, I plan to stage it in a public place temporarily, as a way to share its goals. After a short performance, I plan to create a public GitHub repository, to contain all the program files, along with the Images and their accompanying resources. In the event that someone wishes to carry on this project or rework the entirety of it, there is more value in having Spam Ham be an open-source project than existing purely for an individual project.

Other artworks that are going to be shared by Spam Ham are Javons Paradox IV, Figure 4, which will be accompanied by The Zero Marginal Cost Society, as they both frame the need to have climate restoring policies. Specifically the aptly named, Javons Paradox IV, describes how “Technological advances bringing greater effectivity in using a certain source paradoxically increases the consumption of this resource due to higher demand…(Javons Paradox) is probably the greatest paradox of environmental economics'' (Demos et. al 2023). Javons Paradox IV in Spam Ham aims to describe how technology will continue to be a dual-edged sword, reminding us that for every advancement and stepforward we have taken with each industrial revolution, the environmental damage should also be taken into account when measuring impacts it made on society. Presenting a more gruesome and dystopian future are Can’t Help Myself, Figures 5, which depicts a robotic arm repeatedly sweeping a red blood like substance towards its base, drawing upon themes like the consequences of authoritarianism misguided by political agendas that seek to profit from the environment. Further supporting this dystopian outlook is Sci Fi Agit Prop, Figure 6, which approaches viewing the future via bifurcation, depicting on one side with a new type of slavery, where individuals become slaves replacing fossil fuel dependent technologies like cars, even literally carrying them on their backs. Contrasting is the section titled Folk Science, designed on the principles of traditional knowledge, easing the burden of transportation through cooperation and social equality, it paints where humanity passes the era of fossil fuels with political tools favoring the climate. Overall illustrating the high-stakes struggle over the social and political trajectories of climate emergency. Accompanying Sci FI Agit Prop will be Rifkin’s Age of Resilience, as they both cover the need to have our environmental forward policy.  

Each piece, along with the reading covering the corresponding topic, is meant to guide the receiver, teaching them about how technology has negatively impacted the climate. First, the receivers will begin by receiving Rain, Steam and Speed, which like the first industrial revolution, marks the beginning of technology’s effect on the climate, plaguing it and setting the tone for technological advancement. Followed by The Monk by the Sea and Maria, which will set a framework describing the project and why applied creativity our collective approach to climate activism and here specifically a means to understand how technology has impacted the climate. This framework, is meant to prepare the receiver for material covered by Rifkin, supported by

Javons Paradox and Sci Fi Agit Prop which detail how with technologys’ Internet of Things, embedded systems and Jevons Paradox itself are key to self reliant systems of the future juxtaposing it with imagery of what humanity is to face if it does not heed climate scientist and their warnings.

Images

Fig. 1. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844, Oil on Canvas, National Gallery, London.

Fig. 2. Caspar David Freidrich, The Monk By The Sea, 1808-1810, Oil on Canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Fig 3. Rose B Simpson and family, Maria, 1985 Chevy El Camino Bodywork and customization, 2014, Denver Art Museum, Colorado.

Fig. 4. Zbyněk Baladrán, Javons Paradox IV, 2020, Print Series On Paperboard 51x42cm, Gandy Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia.

Fig 5. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself, Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame, 2016, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Fig. 6. Tamás Kászás, Sci Fi Agit Prop, 2010–12. Two silk screen prints on paperboards, each 50 × 70 (19⅝ × 279/16), installed on a euro-pallet, 80 × 120 × 30 (31½ × 47¼ × 11⅞).  Kisterem Gallery, Budapest.

References

Demos, T. J., Scott, E. E., Banerjee, S., & Simpson, R. B. (2023). With Applied Creativity We Can Heal. In The routledge companion to contemporary art, visual culture, and climate change. essay, Routledge.

Fowkes, M., & Fowkes, R. (2022). Art and climate change. Thames & Hudson Inc.

Jones, L., & Ferran, B. (2023). Coded: Art enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982. DelMonico Books-D.A.P.

Obrist, H. U., & Stasinopoulos, K. (2021). 140 artists’ ideas for planet earth. Penguin  Books.

Rifkin, J. (2015). The Zero marginal cost society: The internet of things, the Collaborative    Commons, and the eclipse of Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rifkin, J. (2022). The age of resilience: Reimagining existence on a Rewilding Earth. St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.