Carbonivore itself is a speculative, fictionalized hybrid creature—a fantastical chimera of animal, plant, mineral, and machine. Conceptualized through deep research into the supply chains that drive digital technologies, Carbonivore makes manifest the relentless physical infrastructure that supports the Cloud, Big Data, and AI.
The installation recreates the scene of a server farm, an architectural behemoth housing powerful computers and where data is stored and computational power is pooled. Often invisible to the consumer, server farms are ubiquitous around the world and can draw power equivalent to a small city.
Made from 2,000 lbs of e-waste collected from all over the Bay Area, Carbonivore's physical form in the main gallery is an immersive web of tangled, reclaimed cables, wires, pipes, server racks, monitors, air conditioners, and transformers. In its grubby grotto, this semi-organic mass pulsates with ravenous consumption—Carbonivore is a parasitic agitator that critically represents the excesses of technological innovation, resource extraction, and industrial development.
All digital technology requires rare earth materials—the extraction of which is linked to severe global environmental degradation, dehumanization of laborers, species extinction, and public health catastrophe. Carbonivore's visuals oscillate between physical objects and digital representations on flickering loops that imaginatively reconstruct sites of extraction like the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this way, materials remain perpetually connected to their geological origins, despite their violent processes of extraction and commodification.
Complementing the primary installations, monitors in the lobby feature Carbonivore's ‘offspring’—creatures composed of rare earth materials like lithium, cobalt, and silicon. These entities adopt surreal forms that similarly emphasize their entanglement with their geographical origins. To witness the pure elements is also to witness the mines, quarries, wells, and evaporation ponds from which they were removed to become the devices in our pockets.
Reflecting the world of material extraction and advancement back to us, Carbonivore reminds us that our technologies occupy expansive spatial and temporal geographies.
Missing Objects Library: Carbonivore was commissioned by Gray Area as part of C/Change, an initiative for prototyping future pathways for tech-enabled cultural exchange in partnership with the Goethe Institut San Francisco.
Additional support for Carbonivore was provided by UC Berkeley Surplus, UC Berkeley Center for New Media, and the City of El Cerrito Recycling and Environmental Resource Center.
