Butterfly: glo-cal effects of data, energy and industry, New Media and Performance Exhibition Catalogue

2025-10-24

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevalent reduction of infrastructure to mere technical artifacts, proposing instead its reconceptualization as a dynamic, living ecological entity requiring sustained care. Methodologically, it integrates new media art, interactive installations, and ecological data visualization to render digital, energy, and industrial infrastructures perceptible and interactive across spatial scales, deploying immersive exhibitions to activate public ecological awareness. Its primary contribution is the first systematic articulation of the “infrastructure-as-ecological-body” framework—challenging technocentric paradigms—and advancing eco-digital theory toward embodied, socially engaged practice in alignment with EcoDigital Futures. Empirically, the project demonstrates a paradigmatic shift from conceptual exhibition to localized ecological action, offering a transdisciplinary methodology for infrastructure studies and sustainable design. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Other Foundations of Data Mining & Knowledge Management
• Humans and AI: Understanding People, Theories, Concepts and Methods
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies

Abstract

The exhibition Butterfly: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy, and Industry is, at its core, a meditation on entanglement-between the global and the local, the ecological and the digital, the material and the virtual. It asks how we might reframe the infrastructures that shape our lives not only as technologies of efficiency or convenience, but as ecosystems themselves: dynamic, interdependent, and in need of care. It emerges from a prior exhibition, EcoDigital Futures, presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024, an Australian initiative of Creative Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. That landmark exhibition spotlighted the growing imperative to align our digital futures with ecological sensibilities. Butterfly carries forward this vision, but also intensifies it by shifting the focus from speculation to activation, from theory to lived intervention.

Problem

• Examining global-local entanglements of data, energy, and industry
• Reframing technological infrastructures as interdependent ecosystems requiring care
• Shifting focus from digital-ecological speculation to practical activation

Innovation

• Reframing infrastructures as dynamic ecosystems
• Shifting focus from speculation to activation
• Integrating digital futures with ecological sensibilities