School of Media Studies, The New School, Spring 2014
Course Website
Supported by a 2013 Research Seed Grant from The New School Green Fund
> TECHTRASH
In the context of macroecological and financial crises that have dramatically shifted attention toward the management of multiple forms of garbage, excess and inefficiency, Urban Media Lab: Waste explores the cultural logics and politics of waste in contemporary urban life. Registered in terms of space (blight, sprawl, vacancy), time (waiting, boredom, drudgery), resources (refuse, trash), and increasingly in terms of digital information technologies (e-waste, obsolescence, “delete”), waste marks the residue, the left-over, the cast-off, the remainder, the damaged, the unclassifiable, the useless. Especially at a time when our virtual and material worlds are designed to streamline and optimize urban life at all scales – from operative landscapes to responsive systems to productivity software – our cultural definitions and regulations of waste are central to the ordering of our environments and ourselves.
The Spring 2014 Urban Media Lab focuses specifically on hi-tech waste through the dual lenses of data and device as a form of urban trash and as a fundamental component of broader cycles of information production, distribution, and consumption in the global cultural economy. In stark contrast to the mythology of the cloud that dominates commercial representations of digital communication, there is a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of information consumption through the energy footprints of data exchange and storage centers and the rising tide of digital devices that are as conspicuously discarded as they are consumed. With the support of a New School Green Fund award, seminar participants will investigate the profound material and spatial dimensions of the life cycles of information, and they will collaborate on a public project that visualizes the various possible waste streams of a single device.
Urban Media Lab is a project-based seminar focused around a specific urban condition. Approaching the city as an irreducible density of people, built environments, and information architectures, students explore a single topic from multiple disciplinary and media perspectives, and they collaborate on a final project for publication and/or exhibition. The seminar is structured around a combination of theoretical inquiry and site-specific case studies, and students are encouraged to use New York City as a laboratory for their expanded research and intervention. Past Urban Media Labs have focused on Strangers, Waste, and Traffic.