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Natalie Jeremijenko is an inventor and engineer who focuses on the design and analysis of tangible digital media. Her work explores the transformative potential of new information technologies and alternatives to dominant IT design paradigms. Jeremijenko's mission is to reclaim technology from the idealised, abstract concept of 'cyberspace' and apply it to the messy complexities of the real world, often with disquieting results. Her project Stump is a software program that sits on a users computer and counts the number of pages that pass through the printer queue, rewarding the user with a single tree ring every time a certain volume of paper is used. When the equivalent of a tree in pulp has been consumed, the program automatically prints out a slice of tree--a tangible representation of tree debt, dispelling the common myth of our times that the digital world is somehow clean and 'paperless.' Her current projects include OneTrees, a collection of one thousand walnut tree(s), clones, micro-propagated in culture. The plantlets were exhibited in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (shown at left), and subsequently planted in sensor-equipped planters around the San Francisco Bay Area. Because the tree(s) are genetically identical, their slow and consistent growth will record the experiences and contingencies that each public site provides, rendering the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed. In the coming years they will serve as a networked instrument that maps the micro climates of the Bay Area, revealing the region's surprising discrepancies in climatic, environmental and socio-economic conditions reminding us that Silicon Valley is home to a large concentration of toxic waste sites, and has one of the USA's biggest gaps between rich and poor. |
