2024
Laura Marks
New media researcher works to reduce carbon footprint of streaming media
2024
New media researcher works to reduce carbon footprint of streaming media
Laura Marks is on a mission to reduce the carbon footprint of Internet infrastructure with a simple message: “Let’s use small files.”
The Grant Strate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University is a winner of the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. The award will support her work on a new book, Small Files for a Small World, on the carbon footprint of the Internet including her sponsorship of international small-file workshops in 12 cities including Dhaka, Bangladesh; Cairo, Egypt; Kigali, Rwanda; Tehran, Iran; Guwahati, India and Mexico City, Mexico.
“It’s the idea that Internet infrastructure uses too much electricity, too many resources, and that’s not sustainable with our planet’s limited resources,” Dr. Marks explains. “The approach I’m bringing to try to fix it is that we should produce and consume fewer huge files, to put less pressure on servers and networks. The goal is to slow the expansion of Internet infrastructure. We also need to be aware that artificial intelligence uses an amount of electricity that’s untenable if we have any hope to stop catastrophic global warming.”
A major challenge in this mission is the lack of awareness of how big the problem is. “It’s about the carbon footprint of information and communications technology, so that’s basically data centres, networks and the Internet plus devices,” she says, noting the carbon footprint is double that of the aviation industry, which garners much more attention for its emissions.
Dr. Marks is a leading contributor to and champion of the small file movement. Among other contributions, she started the Small File Media Festival (smallfile.ca), now in its fifth year. People from all over the world submit very tiny films to the festival. “They have about three per cent of the bitrate of standard video,” she says, “and they’re gorgeous.”
As a film and media theorist, Dr. Marks’ work covers a broad area of study, stretching from media ecology and experimental cinema to Islamic philosophy and Arab cinema.
