Agenda

On the occasion of the international conference “Toward a Sustainable Attitude:Aesthetics, the Arts, and the Environment” at Ca’ Foscari University, the artists Tega Brain, Benedetta Piantella, and Alex Nathanson of New York University have their seminal work SolarProtocol installed in the Aula Magna of Ca’ Dolfin (6-7/10/2022). Their project stigmatizes the necessity to rethink global server networks that feed the internet in a democratic and sustainable way. The three artists created a global server network fed by self-made solar panels and steward servers, whose varying battery level is reflected on the aesthetic of the mediatic transmission. The Venetian exhibit of Solar Protocol presents the viewer with a large disc suspended in the Baroque hall of the 18th century Ca’ Dolfin palace onto which a circular diagram is being projected, thus showing the last 72 hours of the solar server network’s functioning. In doing so, interconnection and intermittence, which lie at the heart of this artistic project, find a plastic form and utter their importance for a new way to make the internet sustainable.

The sustainable art installation is funded and organized by Ca’ Foscari’s Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities at the Department of Humanities and by Sustainable Ca’ Foscari with the collaboration of New York University Tandon School of Engineering.