FAQ Minimal Carbon Internet

  • The Minimal Carbon Internet project is a (media) artistic project under the direction of Professor Michael Saup. Initiated by the Working Group Culture and Society, it is a co-production of kalrsruhe.digital and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The project is supported by the UNESCO City of Media Arts.

     

     

  • The work of media artist Michael Saup refers to the connection between digital information processing and energy. Minimal Carbon Internet draws attention to the fact that our online behavior has real consequences for our offline world and at the same time offers a very concrete opportunity to act more sustainably.

  • The website avoids: Tracking, advertising, third-party traffic, auto-play videos, video backgrounds, outdated browsers and fancy scripts and effects.

    Instead, the website uses: state-of-the-art image and video formats, resized images, data compression, no web fonts, only browser fonts, compression of HTML, Javascript and CSS source code and a green, sustainable server infrastructure.

  • The Minimal Carbon Site offers all static content. The two versions are not (yet) connected to each other, which is why new content is added manually. Accordingly, all dynamic content, such as our blog, cannot (currently) be displayed.

    However, the measures to reduce energy consumption have other positive side effects:

    • The website becomes faster.
    • The SEO ranking increases.
    • They improve usage in regions with lower bandwidth and for people who can only afford a low data volume.
    • The website can also no longer be hacked.

  • The basis of the project was and is highly complex, namely calculating the amount of energy required to transmit these bytes via the internet. The production of the hardware used, energy conversion and the like are also taken into account. The calculation is based on the research work of Jonathan G. Koomey of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They calculated that in 2010, 3.5 kWh of energy was used to transmit one gigabyte of data over the Internet.