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Which uses more electricity, AI or crypto?

2025-07-19T10:22:02-07:00

Q. Which uses more electricity, AI or crypto? What about online video?

A. They both use a lot! AI uses more!

Researchers at the International Energy Agency computed the electricity required to train the largest AI model (one with a training compute of 1023 FLOP) at EpochAI to be 310 gigawatt-hours. On that basis they estimated the total training electricity consumption of all AI models from 2020 to 2024 to be 1700 TWh (0.1% of the global electricity consumption of data centers over this period). That works out to 425 TWh of electricity annually.

(They admit the estimate is rough, but within an order of magnitude.) (International Energy Agency, “Energy and AI,” 2025. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/)

That's just the training. I would at least double this figure to account for inference (individual use), and add another 10-20% for chip manufacture. Then I'd calculate the contribution of high-bandwidth networks and user-end devices.

Cryptocurrency is “mined” using different equipment from the data centers that power most other uses, which makes it relatively simple to measure its electricity consumption. The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index currently estimates Bitcoin mining to consume about 187 TWh of electricity annually.

(That figure is annualized consumption based on crypto mining on July 30, 2025. It falls between a lower bound of 95.25 TWh and an upper bound of 418.55 TWh.) https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci

I believe online video uses still more! As with AI, it's difficult to calculate separately from the total electricity for manufacturing and use of data centres, networks, and devices.

Tiny language models and tiny image generation

2025-07-19T10:01:07-07:00

Tiny language models and tiny image generation

Why does AI use so much electricity?

2025-07-19T09:51:05-07:00

Makonin, Li, MacCormack and I working on developing a tiny generative imaging model. We have surveyed the AI engineering literature pretty extensively. AI's electricity consumption is mainly due to:
· the use of accelerators, mainly graphics processing units or GPUs, also used for the Internet of Things, virtual reality, cloud gaming, and blockchain
·      5G. Telecoms around the world are building new data centers to support fifth-generation or 5G computing, which relies on core and edge network servers, essentially moving computational tasks closer to the user end
·      Training ML, especially large language models, requires repetitions of calculations using billions of parameters. Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes. This is pretty well known, but also
·      Individual inferences, or uses, of ML use much less computation, less electricity, but can be millions or billions of inferences per day. e.g. Google Translate, Chat GPT, or Google’s switch to AI searches. People use ML apps for tasks that a calculator or search engine (or own brain) could do, at much higher electricity cost. Great article on this by Sasha Luccioni and colleagues

Environmental impact of machine learning

2025-01-18T09:40:22-08:00

Mitigating the Environmental Impact of Machine Learning is my new research team with SFU computer scientist Stephen Makonin (collaborator on Tackling the Caarbon Footprint of Streaming Media), Makonin’s graduate student Kehui Li, and AI artist and SCA PhD student Jess MacCormack. We are researching the environmental impact of machine learning, aka artificial intelligence, and ways to mitigate it, such as by developing models that use much less electricity. Funded by the SSHRC Insight Grant of Arne Eigenfeldt (PI), Jim Bizzocchi, and me, Small-File Generative Art

low-impact music streaming

2024-07-30T12:37:46-07:00

An article on low-impact music streaming, quoting me, in the MIT Technology Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/17/1095024/music-streaming-climate-friendly-tips/

Marks and Przedpelski, "The Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Problems, Calculations, Solutions"

2024-04-09T15:07:46-07:00

Marks and Przedpelski, "The Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Problems, Calculations, Solutions," in Film and TV Production in the Age of Climate Change.
A massive survey, extracted and expanded from our 65-page 2021 report, featuring a critique of the politics of calculating ICT's carbon footprint, the International Energy Agency's attack on The Shift Project, and the small-file solution. On Selected Writings page

AI's carbon footprint

2024-04-09T14:33:30-07:00

At the Small File Media Festival we are not big fans of AI (or rather, machine learning, as we do not believe these systems are intelligent) which is now the largest contributor to the expansion of data centers and also has a whopping water footprint (though we surmise streaming is still the largest contributor to ICT’s energy use as a whole, given the strain it places on on devices). If you must artifice, please use a small vision-language model like TinyGPT-V, or train a homegrown bot with precise tasks, which will draw less energy.

A few resources:
"Data centers are sprouting up as a result of the AI boom," Business Insider, October 2023 https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-energy-centers-water-energy-land-2023-10
“Artificial Intelligence Threats to Climate Change,” Climate Action against Disinformation
Li et al., “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models”
Patterson et al., “Carbon Emissions and Large Neural Network Training”
Schick and Schütze, “Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners”
Wang and Wang, “Small language models (SLMs) A cheaper, greener route into AI,” UNESCO

Call for work, Fifth Annual Small File Media Festival!

2024-04-09T14:29:05-07:00

Coming very soon at smallfile.ca! We're continuing our partnership with Vancouver's legendary The Cinematheque and streaming at low bitrate worldwide in October. Deadline June 15.

Scaling Down

2024-04-09T14:20:17-07:00

My chapter “…Scaling Down: On the Unsustainable Pleasures of Large-File Streaming,” in What Film Is Good For, ed. Julian Hanich and Martin Rossouw, asks, How does the value of postponing satisfaction by enjoying non-streaming media, accompanied by the ethical awareness that one is not damaging the planet, compare with the luxury of movies on demand? And how does the value of watching brief, low-resolution, often low-tech cinema, accompanied by a similar ethical awareness, compare with the enjoyment of energy-intensive high-definition streaming?
I write, "I don’t think I’m the only person who finds the marketed appeal of high-resolution, ‘immersive’ media faintly insulting. It assumes we are so forgetful that we can’t recall what things look like, so unimaginative that our minds can’t fill in details, that our brains and senses have shrunk down to wizened nubs (which, according to McLuhan, they may have). As I demonstrated above, media build a contact between object and viewer, which an engaged viewer can imaginatively realize, even if the video file is low resolution. All media are like executable files—designed to travel small and unpack when they reach their destination."
The book, which relates film to the philosophy of the good life, was awarded Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture at the Popular Culture Association, 2024.

Collapse Informatics

2024-04-09T14:17:16-07:00

My chapter “Collapse Informatics and the Environmental Impact of Information and Communication Technologies” is published in The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, ed. Alenda Chang, Kiu-Wai Chu, Adrian Ivakhiv, Antonio Lopez, Stephen Rust, and Miriam Tola. Focusing on the important subcategory of ICT engineering research in sustainability, I argue that ICT’s growth is unsustainable, even given the vaunted efficiency of the technologies, especially as it expands to developing countries. Reviewing some proposed best practices for making ICT use sustainable, I suggest that the movements of slow computing and collapse informatics offer a model for learning to live with decreased expectations. On Selected Writings page

Yani Kong and Laura U. Marks on small-file aesthetics

2023-08-17T09:33:43-07:00

In conjunction with The Photographers Gallery, London's Small File Photo Festival, Yani Kong and I published “’You can’t look into my eyes.’ The Aesthetics of Small-File Cinema.” Unthinking Photography, May 4, 2023.

Great article by Nitish Patwa on carbon footprint of AI

2023-08-17T09:31:16-07:00

Patwa rightly points out that Chat GPT and other popular AI applications have a massive carbon footprint, due to the intensive calculations they carry out in data centers.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/chatgpt-ai-arms-race-sustainability.html

Talks!

2023-01-27T16:24:31-08:00

2023        “Small-File Elegance for a Smaller Carbon Footprint,” keynote talk, 34th Annual Society for Animation Studies conference, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ. June 12-15

2023        Laura U. Marks and Jason Livingston, “Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact,” Video Trust association of media librarians. April 20. By videoconference

“Efficiency fever dreams,” talk on the panel “Compression politics and aesthetics: Mitigating the carbon footprint of streaming media” organized by Marek Jancovic and Judith Keilbach. NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies), Bucharest, June 22 2022 (by videoconference)

“The Small File Media Festival,” talk on the panel “On Greening Film Festivals” organized by Ger Zielinski. Society for Cinema Studies 2022. April 3 2022 (by videoconference)

"On greening film festivals: The environmental impact of film festivals and their future design and operation," by Marijke de Valck and Ger Zielinski, in conversation with Rachel Dodds, Laura U. Marks, Fabienne Merlet and Amaia Serrulla. NECSUS. January 13 2022. Transcript

Azadeh Emadi, Joseph Malbon, Laura U. Marks, and Radek Przedpełski, “Bending the possible (one pixel at a time): Small-file ecomedia for the Anthropocene,” pre-recorded panel, ISEA 2022.

Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski, “A Contribution to the Critique of the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media. Earth’s Carrying Capacity as a Regime of Capital in the Postdigital Age.” Talk on the panel “Capital, Nature, Infrastructure” at the conference Many Regimes of Capital in the Postdigital Age, University of Warsaw. By videoconference. October 20 2021.

Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski, “Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: A Transdisciplinary Laboratory for New Media Informatics.” New Materialist Informatics 2021. March 24. By videoconference.

“Streaming media populate the ether and heat the planet,” talk on the panel “Expanded Environments II,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies. March 21 2021. By videoconference.

2020    Laura U. Marks, Joseph Clark, Jason Livingston, and Lucas Hilderbrand, “Let’s Tackle the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media.” Roundtable. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. April 4 2020. Videoconference organized by SCMS’ Environmental Special Interest Group.

Interviews!

2023-01-27T16:11:04-08:00

“Ask an Online Media Expert: What’s the Carbon Footprint of the Internet?”, told to Alex Tesar, The Walrus, June 2022.

Interview on carbon impact of streaming media with Carolina de Ryk, Daybreak North, CBC radio, Prince Rupert, BC. June 17 2022

“Is Our Netflix Obsession Harming the Planet? This Is the Environmental Impact of Streaming,” podcast interview with Stephanie Osmanski, Brightly.eco

“Media Genealogies and Haptic Geographies,” interview in Alex Estorick’s series “The Uncanny Valley,” Flash Art, October 12 2022.

Interview with Michael Hedges on the carbon footprint of streaming media, British Association for American Studies 2021 Annual Conference. June 30.

“Cinema, touch, and the climate movement with Laura U. Marks,” interview on Roz Skillen’s podcast Catch Yerself On. March 2021.

Recent smallfile publications

2023-01-27T15:54:52-08:00

We've been publishing a lot!

Laura U. Marks, “Collapse Informatics and the Environmental Impact of Information and Communication Technologies,” Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, ed. A. Chang et al. Forthcoming.

2023 Laura U. Marks, “...Scaling Down: On the Unsustainable Pleasures of Large-File Streaming,” in What Film Is Good For, ed. Julian Hanich and Martin Rossouw. University of California Press. Forthcoming

Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski, “The Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Problems, Calculations, Solutions,” in Film and Television in the Age of Climate Crisis: Toward a Greener Screen, ed. Pietari Kääpä and Hunter Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave). On Selected Writings page

Stephen Makonin, Laura U. Marks, Radek Przedpełski, Ramy El Mallah, Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, “Calculating the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Beyond the Myth of Efficiency,” Computing within Limits, LIMITS ‘22

Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski, “Bandwidth Imperialism and Small-File Media,” in Post-45, special issue on “New Filmic Geographies” ed. Suzanne Enzerink.

Laura U. Marks, “A Survey of ICT Engineering Research Confirms Streaming Media’s Carbon Footprint,” Media + Environment.

Laura U. Marks, “Collapse Informatics and the Environmental Impact of Information and Communication Technologies,” Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, ed. Alenda Chang, Kiu-Wai Chu, Adrian Ivakhiv, Antonio Lopez, Stephen Rust, and Miriam Tola. Routledge. Forthcoming 2023

Laura U. Marks, “Large-File Streaming: An Unsustainable Pleasure,” in What Film Is Good For, ed. Julian Hanich and Martin Rossouw. University of California Press. Forthcoming 2023

Small File Photo Festival

2023-01-27T15:50:50-08:00

Inspired by the Small File Media Festival, The Photographers Gallery, London, has a Small File Photo Festival!

Over-engineered infrastructure anticipates expanded consumption

2021-10-25T08:32:49-07:00

Recently a consensus has developed that it is not feasible to separately parse out the contribution of streaming video to ICT. It is more accurate to measure the power consumption of data centers, networks, and devices separately (see e.g. Hintemann and Hinterholzer 2021, Andrae 2021). It makes sense to calculate the electricity consumption of large actors like YouTube, and to calculate individual consumers’ electricity footprint, including the production energy of their devices, but not to add up all individual consumers’ hours of streaming. Some engineers (e.g. Malmodin 2021; Preist, Schien, and Shabajee 2019) argue that more data, as in streaming video and other data-intensive practices, does not necessarily result in more energy consumption. This is because networks and data centers are running 24/7, regardless of data use. As network engineer Chris Preist explains, ‘With current network technologies, if you send less data along it, in most cases it doesn’t reduce the energy use. It's like an airplane: if you don’t fly, the plane flies anyway, and so “not flying” only reduces emissions if it leads to less airplanes flying in the long term’ (Burgess, 2021).

That’s not good news, though. ICT’s infrastructure of networks and data centers was put in place for data-intensive applications like streaming and computation-intensive applications like AI and blockchain. The infrastructure is engineered to anticipate future use and spur consumer demand. The argument that streaming only slightly increases electricity consumption naturalizes the notion that infrastructure should be over-engineered. It encourages additional high-data (and computation-heavy) use that will require infrastructure to expand still more.

Only slightly decelerated by the pandemic, ICT’s infrastructure of networks, data centres, and devices continued to expand worldwide in anticipation of market growth (Global Market Insights, 2020; Research and Markets, 2020).

The more we use them, the more the infrastructure will expand. Our goal can only be the equivalent of keeping more planes out of the sky: reducing the expansion of ICT. It is crucial to limit consumption, including devices.

References

Andrae, A. 2021. “New perspectives on internet electricity use in 2030.” Engineering and Applied Science Letters. 30 June.

Burgess, Matt. (2021) "YouTube’s carbon footprint is huge, but smarter web design could fix it." Wired UK, July 5, 2019.

Global Market Insights. (2020) "Telecom Network Infrastructure Market Size, By Component."

Hinterholzer, S., and R. Hintemann. (2020) Videostreaming: Energy Requirements and CO2 Emissions Background Paper: The Most Important Points in a Nutshell.‘ Trans. Stephan Meinke. BorderStep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability.

Malmodin, J. (2021) ‘The power consumption of mobile and fixed network data services: The case of streaming video and downloading large files.’ Unpublished paper.

Preist, C., Schien, D., and P. Shabajee. 2019. "Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services: The Case of YouTube." In: CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1-12

Research and Markets. (2020) “Worldwide Server Forecast, 2021-2025.”

Final report, evidence brief, and best practices

2021-09-23T18:40:47-07:00

Tacking the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media completed our research this summer. You can find our final report, evidence brief, and best practices recommendations here
We can now corroborate The Shift Project’s analysis that streaming video is responsible for over 1% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Exacerbated by new habits established during the Covid-19 pandemic, that figure is currently estimated at 1.2% to 1.4% and rising fast (Sandvine 2020). We triangulated among ICT engineers’ calculations of streaming video’s electricity intensity, the electricity needed to move one gigabyte of data, and also did Fermi calculations. The research remains contentious, but we are confident that our general findings are correct.
Our literature review played out like a detective story. Throughout the literature, the disparity between figures is enormous. Just like Maxime Efoui-Hess, main author of The Shift Project’s report, we “quickly realized that much of the literature on the subject used figures from previous documents, very often without cross-referencing them with others, and without taking precautions regarding the limits of their validity." This practice leads to error propagation, where the uncertainties of variables multiply.
We observed what appear to be political differences between at least two camps. There are those researchers who insist that ICT’s electricity consumption is remaining flat, while also urging that governments invest in research and infrastructure to deal with the rise when it happens.
We found a great degree of disagreement among ICT engineers about both figures and methods of their calculation. The dissensus largely centers around varying definitions of the system boundary of the Internet and of streaming; that is, whether devices, data centres, production, disposal and mining of metals should be included. The classic definition of the internet is confined to networks: long-haul, local, and consumer. However, in the case of streaming video and other data- and calculation-intensive applications, it is essential to include data centers and servers, including storage. We also side with engineers who argue that devices—smart televisions, TV-top devices, desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and phones—must be included in the system boundary of streaming video, and so must include the electricity required to produce devices and other ICT infrastructure.
Another key finding is that streaming video epitomizes the rebound effect (also known as the Jevons paradox), whereby increased energy efficiency leads to greater consumption of a resource. The engineering literature vigorously debates the rebound effect. Some argue that increases in ICT energy efficiency more than compensate for the acceleration of consumption, while others point to numerous case studies that show that when the production and use of data centers, networks, and devices become more electricity-efficient, demand by companies increases. They pass their savings on to consumers, for example in the form of cheap data plans and cheap devices, but in order to encourage them to consume more. So yes, streaming one video does consume less electricity than driving to the video store. However, the availability of online video has created new consumption patterns, driven by addictive design, which cancel out any energy savings. Streaming video exists within a market-driven feedback loop of infrastructural expansion and consumer demand.
We found that videoconferencing also poses the danger of rebound effects. Currently videoconferencing uses less electricity per minute than streaming video, but only because the companies like Zoom impose low resolution (Obringer et al. 2021) and a slow frame rate. However, as people replace phone calls with video calls and companies like Cisco and Peloton market “immersive” teleconferencing with large, high-resolution screens, new habits consume a lot more energy.
We found that redundancy, or the doubling of power supplies for data centres and networks in anticipation of spikes in demand, is one of the foundations of ICT’s disproportionate carbon footprint. Overpreparedness for worst-case scenarios—where the worst case is not, for example, the failure of the data center in a nuclear power plant, but, for example, the failure to deliver high-resolution streaming movies without lag time—is one of the foundations of ICT’s disproportionate carbon footprint. Data center and network security is predicated on redundancy, the doubling of power supplies (traditionally by diesel generators and battery packs), networks, and other equipment that runs in standby mode to prevent momentary blackouts or system failures (Schomaker, Janacek, and Schlitt, 2015). These dramatically amplify electricity consumption. Horner and Azevedo (2016) point out that, because of the priorities of uptime, reliability, and fulfillment of service agreements, data centers are generally built with extreme redundancy. As Tung-hui Hu suggests, infrastructure “converts an imagined crisis in the future into present capacity."

Why did the International Energy Association attack The Shift Project?

2021-04-25T15:56:11-07:00

The French carbon-transition The Shift Project (TSP) developed an impressive and exhaustive calculator for the carbon footprint of streaming media, first published in 2018 and updated in 2019. TSP’s calculations that streaming media is responsible for 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions made a splash in popular media, with coverage by the BBC, The Guardian, the New York Post, CBC, Gizmodo, and other news agencies. It quickly drew a rebuttal from George Kamiya, an analyst for the International Energy Agency, which is oddly ungenerous in tone.

With some justification, Kamiya criticizes the science behind The Shift Project’s model. But otherwise his article, available on the IEA website and widely popularized, deploys language, charts, and hyperlinks intended to downplay the carbon footprint of ICT and discredit The Shift Project in the eyes of a layperson.

First, Kamiya focuses on Netflix, not all streaming video as TSP does. Netflix is unusually energy efficient. As its content is hosted on content distribution networks near the end user, it does not have to travel through multiple networks. Second, Kamiya cites a 2014 study stating that streaming video’s energy usage from data centres constitutes “<1% of the total video streaming energy use,” because streaming uses not data centres but servers, “cloud-based IT equipment.”* This is simple wordplay, perhaps exploiting the light and fluffy connotations of the term. Cloud servers are data centres, more efficient because they respond to demand. Elsewhere Kamiya states that “energy efficiency of data centres and networks is improving rapidly,” with an ungrammatical hyperlink under “networks is improving rapidly” to an article about the electricity efficiency of the Internet (Aslan et al., 2017). However, that article excludes data centres from the Internet’s system boundary.

But the article’s mean-spirited character really comes to the fore when Kamiya takes advantage of the spoken error a member of The Shift Project made in an interview—”megabits” instead of “megabytes.” Based on this verbal error, Kamiya multiplied all TSP’s calculations by eight—even though the bitrate error only affects calculations for devices—and produced a chart that makes them look ridiculous. Months later Kamiya published a chart with the corrected figure.

After trashing TSP and citing a few ICT engineers who are most sanguine that the energy usage ICT is under control, Kamiya takes a more thoughtful tone, echoing the concerns of these same engineers that energy efficiency will soon run its course. By the end of the article, the IEA analyst is reiterating TSP’s recommendations. But by that point most readers will have already stopped reading. Now, a search on DuckDuckGo for "The Shift Project" and "streaming video" shows that IEA’s strategies have succeeded in muddying the waters.

TSP responded graciously to Kamiya’s critique, considering each of his points in turn.

So why did the International Energy Agency, the planet’s most influential voice on energy policy, so determined to demolish this little French think tank? Why does it need to reassure the public that the energy consumption of ICT is not a concern? The organization advises governments and the private sector on energy policy, but it also represents the interests of energy producers worldwide. Its public media emphasize that ICT companies are investing in renewable energy—but hold back the fact that these renewables are usually complementing, not replacing, energy sources powered by cheap fossil fuel, as the demand on ICT continues to rise. The IEA’s estimation of the worldwide energy consumption of data centres at 194 TWh in 2017 is very low compared to almost all reputable estimates, for example from GreenIT.fr, World Borderstep Institute, and Greenpeace. As the environmental research organization Oil Change International explains, the IEA’s model of continued fossil fuel extraction, gradual conversion to renewable energy, and reliance on unproven technologies like carbon capture is designed to intoxicate investors. In fact, “Emissions under the IEA’s alternative “Sustainable Development Scenario” (SDS) would exhaust the 1.5-degree Celsius carbon budget by 2023 and the 2-degree budget by 2040.”

*That study (Shehabi et al., 2014), comparing the environmental impact of DVDs and streaming, warned that the rebound effects of streaming in greater numbers of hours and higher resolution would overtake the initial environmental benefit of streaming.

Our team at Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media is working on a survey of calculators for the carbon footprint of streaming media. We'll be sharing our findings in May 2021.

Call for work, Second Annual Small FIle Media Festival

2021-04-25T15:43:12-07:00

Call for work: Second Annual Small File Media Festival, www.smallfile.ca
Submission Deadline: June 4, 2021

Movies don’t have to be big to be bingeworthy! All your favorite genres—cat videos, ASMR, reality TV, nü media formalism, sexual emancipation, animism and more!—look and sound great in a tiny file size that streams without damage to the planet.

Streaming media are calculated to cause over 1% of our global carbon footprint and rising fast. During the coronavirus pandemic, folks bingeing on streaming media consumed untold terawatts of electricity and produced choking megatons of greenhouse gas emissions. Large-file media are killing the planet!

Use your artistic voice to contribute to climate change action and cool down the planet. The SFMF makes HD, 4K, and 5G look unnecessary! Unsexy! So pre-pandemic! Immersion is so overrated! Small-file movies are exquisite, intensive, inexpensive, attractive, creative, and fun. We encourage you to experiment with low-energy technologies and deconstruct the fetishization of the pristine image. Small-file movies are not faithful, they’re promiscuous! <3

The Small File Media Festival will be streamed in lovingly curated programs for 10 days in August 2021 from glorious Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watuth nations, through data centers and networks traversing Indigenous lands worldwide. We will host exciting lo-fi forums on small-file aesthetics and politics. All works will receive a rental fee. Award winners will receive a tiny certificate and the coveted SFMF Micro Bear!

Come join us and celebrate the beauty of the small file!

Guidelines:
category 1: 5 Megs of Fun:
File size restricted to 5 megabytes!
Length: up to 5 minutes

category 2: 22 Megs of Trouble:
Our bingeworthy category! A series of 3-8 parts, total file size 22 MB.
Length: up to 22 minutes

For both:
Size to aim for: 1 megabyte per minute
Please record and submit processing/encoding time
Please note the work’s aspect ratio
For aesthetic and technical tips on making small file movies, visit smallfile.ca

Categories:
Storytelling
Bingeworthy Sports Documentary
Reality TV
Nü Media formalism
Compression aesthetics
Decolonial cosmotechnics Small files love the planet
Youth makers (let’s stop asking young people to save the planet!)
Animism
Animation ASMR
Meditative
Cooking shows
Cat videos Sexual emancipation
Oceanic sound design and small-file beats
Supersmall files (how low can you go!)
GIFs
Executable files ‘Obsolete’ technologies New Media Idiocy
Cross-platform works (one version for live screening, another for streaming. Please include one minute excerpt of the live work)
Anything imaginable!

Submit through info@smallfile.ca or visit us at smallfile.ca. You can also copy your movie onto a USB and mail it to us. Great for groups! Send to Small File Media Festival, SFU School for the Contemporary Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver, BC V6B 1H4, Canada. We will return your USB.

Questions? Contact us at info@smallfile.ca

Cryptocurrencies’ carbon footprint

2021-03-04T18:59:08-08:00

Cryptocurrencies’ carbon footprint

Lots of excitement about the high price Beeple’s artwork using non-fungible tokens captured at Christie’s. A smart editorial by Michael Connor at Rhizome points out that many artists work with cryptocurrency. Connor minimizes the issue of the huge electrical consumption and consequent carbon footprint of cryptocurrency.

For the bigger picture of cryptocurrencies’ carbon footprint: “A large number of independent studies … calculated that Bitcoin mining alone required about 60 to 70 billion kWh of electrical energy in 2019. If other cryptocurrencies are also included, it can be assumed that 70 to 90 billion kWh/a of electrical energy is currently required for cryptocurrency mining” (Borderstep Institute). Bitcoin is “mined” where energy is cheapest, which in many places means coal (in 2014, 93% of Mongolia’s energy derived from coal--energypedia).
So for a conservative estimate of cryptocurrencies’ carbon footprint, multiply 80 billion KwH by The Shift Project’s global average carbon intensity factor, 0.519 kgCO2e/kWh. That’s 41,520,000,000 kilograms of CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases. Converting using the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator, that’s the carbon equivalent of about 5500 tanker trucks of gasoline. It would take 69 million tree seedlings growing for 10 years to sequester it. Bitcoin artists, get planting!

“Lean ICT Materials,” https://theshiftproject.org/en/lean-ict-2/
Borderstep-Datacenter-2018_en.pdf, https://www.borderstep.org/

Here’s a crypto-art carbon calculator
And Everest Pipkin’s post “Here Is the Article You Can Send to People When They Say “But the Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

Our research team, Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media

2021-02-17T17:09:55-08:00

Our research group Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media has been hard at work since April 2020, in a one-year project funded by SSHRC's Living within the Earth's Carrying Capacity initiative. We are surveying the mightily complex and contradictory engineering literature and developing a calculator. I'm the principal investigator, with ICT engineer Stephen Makonin, founder of the Computational Sustainability Lab here at SFU, engineering PhD student Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, and media studies postdoc Radek Przedpełski. This cross-disciplinary work is incredibly productive and fun.

Together we’ll be presenting “Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: A Transdisciplinary Laboratory for New Media Informatics” at the New Materialist Informatics conference, March 23-25

Here's Marks and Makonin's op-ed, “Streaming video is overheating the planet," The Vancouver Sun. August 15, 2020

In the coming months we will be publishing survey articles, a refinement of our current carbon-footprint calculator, and policy papers.

More info here

Small File Media Festival report!

2020-07-18T17:23:32-07:00

The Small File Media Festival was a roaring success! We screened over 100 works by artists in 16 countries, in beautifully curated programs, to 165 attendees. For safety during the pandemic, we held the festival online with minimal environmental impact, as each movie was 5 MB or less!
We had fantastic panel discussions: makers' forums one and two; a small-file aesthetics panel moderated by Clint Enns (lo-fi media maker and theorist, Montréal), with Mena El Shazly (Medrar for Contemporary Art, Cairo), Azadeh Emadi (Glasgow U), Radek Przedpełski, and me; and a youth panel moderated by Sanjana Karthik. Festive opening and awards ceremonies! (all documentation squashed to small files before sharing on Vimeo.)

Awards!
Audience choice
First Place: Hân Phạm, Once Upon a Time Second Place tie Trevor Byrne, Sticky Note Studies #1 & #2 (Orange and Pink) François Quevillon, Exhaust
Youth choice – Phoebe Todd-Parrish, Searching:
Smallest file – Daniel Carter, Star Trek: Voyager Intro in 283kb Aesthetic invention tie Azadeh Emadi, Entangled Orb Andy Catsirelis, Noise of the Stream
Best Cat Video – Pierre Leicher, Catfessions #1
Best Narrative – Colin Williscroft, O’Hara Lane
Best Documentary – Mike Hazard, Something from nothing (Dr. Evermor)
Best Porn – Dooley Murphy, Shameless Plug
Best Animation – Ben Mosher, Cloud Loaves
Best Obsolete Technology – Ashley Blewer, Throttled
Best Post-Apocalyptic – John Tinneny, The End
Best Cross-Platform Work—Nathan Wyatt Kiesman, New Beginnings
Curators’ Choice – Leanne Dunic, Melt
Best Actor – Weihan Zhou, Moththth
Most Sensuous – Paul Clay & Sarah Kantrowitz, I Missed You
Best New Media Idiocy (shout out to Olga Goriunova)– Hany Rashed, My Instagram
Best Underdog – Daupo, And Success Will Be Your Name

Most of the artists gave us permission to link to their works after the festival: coming soon. We’ll announce the call for work for the Second Annual Small File Media Festival in spring 2021. Meanwhile, check out the aesthetic and technical tips on the festival site!

Carbon footprint calculators

2020-07-18T15:15:21-07:00

IT engineering colleagues Stephen Makonin and Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva and I are working on a good streaming carbon footprint calculator. Here's what we have so far.

Marks, Makonin, and Rodriguez-Silva, Calculating the carbon footprint of a streaming program
(in Marks, Clark, Lucas Hilderbrand, Jason Livingston, and Denise Oleksiczjuk, forthcoming, Media+Environment):
Length of the streaming video in hours
x gigabytes per hour for a given resolution (Summerson 2018):
480 pixels: ~792 MB/hour
720p: ~1.3 GB/hour
1080p: ~1.9-2.55 GB/hour
1440p: ~2.8 GB/hour
4K: ~3.5-7 GB/hour
x energy intensity: 4.91 kWh/GB
x number of unique viewers
x 0.007 metric tons of CO2 (Environmental Protection Agency 2020)
= carbon footprint.

Joseph Clark’s energy intensity calculator, also in our article in Media+Environment:
Multiply file size in gigabytes by 5 kWh/GB to get energy in kilowatts.
Example: Streaming a high resolution copy of a 10 minute newsreel (500MB) is about 2.5 kWh. That, according to the owner’s manual for Joe’s clothes dryer, is about the equivalent of drying one load of laundry.

Teaching online with a small carbon footprint

2020-07-18T15:14:51-07:00

Issues
Streaming video’s electricity consumption responsible for 1% of global warming! (The Shift Project ; see other posts on this page)
Health effects of high electromagnetic frequencies (Denise Oleksiczjuk, in article by Marks, Joe Clark, Lucas Hilderbrand, Livingston, and Oleksiczjuk, forthcoming, Media+Environment)
Corporate-driven streaming dependency

General pedagogy
Help students become mindful of carbon footprint of streaming media and devise alternatives.
Teach the environmental impact of the media—production, distribution, and consumption—into our curriculum
Show The Shift Project ’s surprising charts (in Executive Summary)
Show Jason Livingston’s funny video (note footprint is likely 1%, not 3%). At 6 minutes he talks about Zoom
Streaming audit: Ask students to note how many hours they stream a day, week (Joe Clark)
Use a carbon footprint calculator: examples in next post

All online teaching
Keep in mind that all online teaching happens on small screens, so high resolution is never necessary

Asynchronous online teaching
Recorded lecture:
audio-only sections: lecture, dialogue, interview. Students can listen away from the desk.
Consider stills rather than video
Video: Short clips. Consider resolution needs. 240 or 340 p is adequate for informational purposes.

Students watching media independently:
View in groups if possible—always better, and smaller footprint
For multiple viewings: Best to download, but copyright issues arise (requested opinion from Don Taylor in library). Suggest that if SFU Library has purchased the movie, we are within our rights to let students to download for study purposes.
Turn off HD, and use the lowest resolution necessary.

Synchronous online teaching
Short clips, resolution as necessary. Consider stills rather than video.
It’s more energy efficient to share video on video conferencing platform (e.g. Zoom) than for each student to view separately (Stefan’s tip).
Share video, audio from original source (e.g. YouTube, Criterion Collection through library).
*Make sure to click “Share computer sound” and “Optimize screenshare for audio” every time!
If possible, choose media already available online, rather than uploading—Youtube’s local data centers make this more efficient for international viewers (Simone’s tip)
Zoom:
Invite students to sign in with video, then switch to portrait with name.
Suggest they experiment with minimizing the frame in speaker view, gallery view

Teaching media makers
Consider making versions for different platforms: high resolution for theaters, lower for online
Teach small-file video making—Stills and sound, low frame rate, compression, animation; splurge on sound. Compressed movies look best with:
-slow or still camera movement
-shallow focus
Tips on Small File Media Festival site.

Lucas Hilderbrand’s streaming acknowledgment (edit as you wish):
“Streaming media has a significant carbon footprint due to the high energy usage necessary for data storage on servers, for transmission, and for playback. The scale of emissions depends on both the energy sources (fossil fuels create more impact than renewable ones) and the amount of data streamed (higher definition streams use more energy than standard definition ones, and video requires more energy than audio). Although migration to renewable energy sources has improved, demand for streaming content and bandwidth has accelerated even more. You can reduce your carbon footprint by reducing how much you stream, by reducing the resolution of your playback, by dimming your device, and by lobbying your energy provider and government regulators to switch to renewable energy sources. Broadcast sources (such as using the radio), tangible media (such as vinyl records and DVDs), and collective viewing (such as in a movie theater) have a lower carbon footprint than everyone individually streaming music and audiovisual media.” (In Marks, Clark, Hilderbrand, Livingston, and Oleksiczjuk, forthcoming, Media+Environment)

Longer article: Laura U. Marks, Let's Deal with the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, Afterimage, https://online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/issue/47/2

Call for work, Small File Media Festival

2020-03-30T13:53:17-07:00

Call for work: First Annual Small File Media Festival
Submission Deadline: May 15, 2020

What do cat videos, facial recognition and porn all have in common? You can find them at the first annual Small File Media Festival!

The coronavirus pandemic is showing us how dependent people are on streaming media. Streaming media currently is responsible for about 3% of our global carbon footprint, 1% of that from pornography streaming alone. In the worst-case scenario that figure could arise to 20% by 2030. That’s a lot of coal for cat videos, Netflix, and porn !

Use your artistic voice to contribute to climate change action and cool down the planet. We make HD, 4K, and 5G look unnecessary, unsexy, and so last decade. Small files are intellectual, innovative, attractive, creative, and fun. We encourage the exploration of experimental processes through low energy technologies to deconstruct the fetishization of the pristine image.

If we can get together physically, the Small File Media Festival will be held August 10-12 in the beautiful cinema at Simon Fraser University in glorious Vancouver, Canada, and streamed in curated programs of tiny files. Selected works will be screened live and receive a rental fee. We will be featuring an “obsolete” media viewing platform for submissions with alternative technologies, and an anti-facial-recognition fashion show and workshops alongside the festival. Additionally, all accepted works will have the option of being curated and streamed online through energy conscious means.

If we can’t get together physically, we’ll stream curated programs of tiny files.

Come join us and celebrate the beauty of the small file!
Submit through smallfile@sfu.ca or visit us at smallfile.ca.

Guidelines:
File size restricted to 5 megabytes of fun! Size to aim for: 1 megabyte per minute Length: 1-5 minutes Must record/submit processing/encoding time
Looping media welcomed

Categories:
Aesthetic Invention Supersmall files (how low can you go!)
Narrative Documentary Porn Sports Cat videos Animation GIFs ‘Obsolete’ technologies Pre and post-apocalyptic media
Cross-platform works (one version for live screening, another for streaming. Please include one minute excerpt of the live work)
Anything Imaginable!

For tips on making small files, visit smallfile.ca

Coronavirus shows need for small-file media

2020-03-20T14:25:24-07:00

Because so many people are streaming media during the Coronavirus crisis, and under pressure from European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, YouTube has followed Netflix Europe in the decision to restrict quality to standard definition. It's great because it sets a precedent for enjoying non-HD movies. Thanks to fellow small-filer Jason Livingston for this.

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-netflix-degrade-video-quality-europe-bandwidth-1203540130/

Guidelines coming soon for the First Annual Small-File Media Festival!

Some solutions to streaming media's carbon footprint

2020-02-15T11:20:41-08:00

Things we can do individually:

Stream less media!

Enjoy non-streaming solutions like:

going to the movies!
embracing older technologies
watching actual television, listening to actual radio
taking the bus to the video store, like Vancouver's Black Dog Video
buying DVDs or borrowing them from the library
sharing files on USB
getting together with folks to watch movies, for example through Hoovie (thanks Yani Kong) This also handles another problem of device media, the loneliness epidemic

When you do stream:

stream at lowest resolution and trip out on those compression halos
skeptically follow Greenpeace's report card for streaming media companies (Netflix gets a D, YouTube an A, because Google, which owns YouTube, is relatively greener—still not very impressive in my opinion)
be willing to pay more for fast, high-resolution media
enjoy the elegance of streamlined media consumption. Bloated high-res files are so last decade!

Things we can do collectively:

demand regulation. As Greenpeace's report points out, telecoms, media providers, and other companies in the streaming-media economy actually want governments to force them to be more energy efficient. Yes, it will mean raising prices.
demand our governments speed the conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy

A later post will address what IT engineers can do.

Streaming media's carbon footprint

2020-02-15T10:43:00-08:00

The carbon footprint of streaming media is the elephant in environmentalism's room. Streaming refers to viewing or listening online to media content such as video on demand (e.g. Netflix, Amazon, Crave), porn, YouTube, games, online archives, music, video conferencing, and virtual and augmented reality. Although information and communication technology (ICT) is hoped to lower the energy usage and carbon footprint of other sectors, the energy for both the production and use of ICT (servers, networks, data centers, terminals) is using an increasingly disproportionate part of electricity. Current predictions show that these impacts will continue to rise unless extremely energy-efficient measures are put in place globally (Lorincz et al. 2019; The Shift Project, 2019, Andrae 2017). In a worst-case scenario, streaming media could be responsible for as much as 20.5% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 (Andrae 2017).

The main reason for this huge carbon footprint is that fossil fuels power many sites and hubs of streaming media. For example, South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world, and its largest energy source is coal (Greenpeace 2017). In the US, data centres concentrated in Virginia, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest use cheap power primarily derived from coal, even though they have plenty of hydro (Fehrenbacher 2012, Greenpeace 2017).

"Demand"* for higher image quality (such as 4K and 8K or 4000 and 8000-pixel 3D video) requires more bandwidth for data transfer, increasing the energy consumption of streaming video, and more antenna technology. Wireless media like mobile phones currently use a combination of second-, third-, and fourth-generation (2G, 3G, 4G) technology. Now 5G is being hyped to increase data capacity and speed up the rate of data transfer.

Researchers do not agree about the energy usage of 5G. A popular 2015 study on electricity usage of wireless networks by Andrae and Edler (2015) predicts that between 2020 and 2030, in the expected-case scenario, 4G and 5G use will climb from 40 to 70 and from nil to 91 terawatt hours (TWH) respectively. In the worst case, 4G use will rise to 917 TWH and 5G will spike to 1,648 TWH. The main variables for these enormous discrepancies are mobile data traffic, energy intensity, and improvement in energy efficiency. Thus, if demand for large streaming files increases and efficiency does not increase enough, the planet will explode in a ball of flames. However, other researchers argue that 5G’s energy usage can be minimized, for example by switching off base stations outside peak hours (Alsharif et al. 2019, Popescu 2018).

What can media users, media makers, scholars, citizens, engineers, and governments do about this massive threat to our planet? A lot of things! See the next post.

*"Demand" is in quotes because people's sudden desire to receive streaming media on devices is a first-class example of a manufactured need, pushed by media corporations and telecoms in order to sell more product and make the older ones obsolete.