{"id":17057,"date":"2022-10-11T16:09:58","date_gmt":"2022-10-11T14:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/karlsruhe.digital\/2022\/10\/karlsruhe-digital-praesentiert-minimal-carbon-internet-beim-digitalk\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T11:05:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T09:05:28","slug":"karlsruhe-digital-praesentiert-minimal-carbon-internet-beim-digitalk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karlsruhe.digital\/en\/2022\/10\/karlsruhe-digital-praesentiert-minimal-carbon-internet-beim-digitalk\/","title":{"rendered":"karlsruhe.digital presents “Minimal Carbon Internet” at #digiTALK"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Internet provides free access to knowledge, entertainment and\nworldwide communication. But the world pays a price for this. Websites,\nstreaming services, social media and email need electricity: around one PWh\n(petawatt hour) per year. That is 4% of global\nelectricity consumption, which generates around 432,594,303 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2<\/sub>).\nIf the internet were a state, it would be the third largest\nCO2 consumer in the world. There is still a lack of awareness of the connection between <\/em>Information\nand energy<\/em>.<\/em>Michael Saup<\/em><\/a>visionary, artist, musician,\nfilmmaker, professor and programmer, will be presenting on October 20, 2022 at the <\/em> #digiTALK<\/em><\/a> at TRIANGEL\nOpen Space the project “<\/em> Minimal Carbon Internet<\/em><\/a>“, a cooperation\nof the <\/em> Working group\nCulture of the karlsruhe.digital initiative<\/em><\/a>. of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media\nKarlsruhe and the UNESCO City of Media Arts. In addition to a keynote speech and subsequent discussion, visitors to\ncan expect a vivid demonstration of the “Minimal Carbon Internet” at the #digiTALKS.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

Entertainment, art, information, communication\nhas been shifting to digital since the mid-1990s. The pandemic has further accelerated this\ndevelopment. However, the increase in quantity and\nquality also increases energy requirements. If\ngenerated all the electricity for the internet purely from lignite, the\nconsumption would be equivalent to a lignite pyramid with a side length of 1,422 meters and\na height of 905 meters<\/a>. The\ncorresponds to a distance from the earth to the center of the sun. <\/p>\n\n

“We know that the Internet is our opportunity to promote\nhuman development, a valuable intellectual resource. We\nare burning this coal for a specific purpose,” explains Michael Saup, who has been researching\nthe energy consumption of digital culture since 1999. He makes it clear that the aim is not to demonize\nInternet consumption. Rather, according to Saup, we need to know very precisely\n“how to convert the old memory of the forest embedded in the earth\ninto the new memory embedded in flat hard disks,\n“. <\/p>\n\n

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We are burning the world’s fossil memory for the new digital memory. As long as this happens, no new form of terrestrial intelligence can emerge. <\/em> <\/p>\n – Michael Saup<\/em> <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n

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Michael Saup. Photo: Paul Needham <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

The media artist’s work refers to this connection between digital information processing and energy. It draws attention to the fact that our online behavior also has real consequences for our offline world. And it shows that there is another way! Two websites, hardly distinguishable from each other at first glance and yet completely different: artist Michael Saup has developed a version of the websitekarlsruhe.digital<\/a> that reduces its footprint by 95% – from 635 MB to 32 MB – with an almost identical appearance and only slightly limited functionality. <\/p>\n\n

AVATAR or thecarbon footprint<\/sub> of a movie trailer and the\nInternet<\/h2>\n\n

Back in the late noughties, Michael Saup, who works very closely with the ZKM | Karlsruhe<\/a> and is a UNESCO City of Media Arts<\/a> artist, illustrated these incredible quantities with the AVATAR project. The brown coal that would be needed to stream the electricity for all the views of the film trailer “Avatar” by James Cameron (2009) on YouTube was stacked in an installation that represents the original from the online video trailer. Saup did real pioneering work at the time in calculating and visualizing the energy consumption of digital tracks. The basis of the media art project, namely the calculation of the amount of energy required to transmit these bytes via the Internet, was based on the research work of Jonathan G. Koomey<\/a>, the discoverer of Koomey’s Law. In 2009, he and his co-authors investigated the question of how the energy consumption of computing machines has developed in relation to processor performance, making it one of the first scientific studies in this field. <\/p>\n\n

“If the internet were a country,\nwould be the third largest consumer of electricity in the world,” explains Saup. By visualizing\nthese incredible quantities, it becomes clear that “we have not yet developed an awareness of the\nconnection between information and energy. The “Minimal Carbon Internet” offers\ntechnical solutions for this,” says Saup.80% of the Internet’s electricity consumption is generated by streaming\nmusic and films, but the “Minimal Carbon Internet” project by artist\nshows that there are also options for action far removed from the major streaming services and\nsocial networks: the minimal carbon version of karlsruhe.digital\ndemonstrates this using a concrete example. <\/p>\n\n

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Hardly distinguishable, 95% CO2 savings. Minimal Carbon Site shows how it could work. Photo: Michael Saup (created with the artificial intelligence DALL-E) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

The website avoids:\ntracking, advertising, third-party traffic, automatic playback of\nvideos, video backgrounds, outdated browsers as well as fancy scripts and\neffects. The website uses instead:<\/p>\n\n