Conference

Plenary Speaker Interview: Laura Marks interviewed by Michael Hedges, BAAS 2021 Annual Conference

Laura U. Marks is the Principal Investigator of Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, a research group at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. This interdisciplinary project brings together researchers from the university’s School for the Contemporary arts (Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski) and the School of Engineering Science (Stephen Makonin and Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva). The project is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Its aim is clear: to address the high and rising electricity consumption of information communication technologies. As the group sets out on its website, ‘[s]treaming media is calculated to contribute to a surprising 1% of global greenhouse gases, because most regions of the world obtain electricity from fossil fuels to power their data centers, networks, and devices. Streaming large files in large quantities, then, ethically implicates spectators in the warming of the planet.’  I sat down with Laura (over Zoom) to discuss the necessary […]