DATA CENTERS, VOD, META DATA, ENERGY

Gabe Weintraub and I are teaming up for our Product Autopsy class to explore the supply chain mapping, carbon accounting, cost accounting, social impact analysis of on-demand video and the growth and efficiences of massive data centers.  

Our initial research framework (super rough, hardly a framework yet really).  This is basically one day's worth of googling on data centers, video streaming, ISPs, and Netflix.  Netflix googling led to a super helpful email exchange which gave me a lot of the information I needed about Netflix's energy efficiencies.  

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-o3hlz4diyEeYSqs4Ldx_XJ-gcyEYOeVgpbsHbf4e-I/edit?ts=5614aa9d#slide=id.gcabd7e50c_0_8

I am excited to meet the challenge of telling a cohesive, compelling story about data in concrete, physical terms as it dovetails with my interests in systems, automation, Big Data, humanity's obsession with archives and record-keeping, energy apportionment in the time of capitalism and its antecedents, and notions of information as intangible and tangible.  The latter somehow echoes my fascination with particle-wave duality and it would be nice to ferret out this connection - if not in this immediate project, for my science-fiction world-building schema. 

This also is a nice complement to my Stratosphere of Surveillance class research/storytelling path (re Big Data).  Also relevant to my work in Testing Tomorrows (Big Data) and Future Interfaces (Big Data). Nice! 

 

ROUGH SCHEMATIC OF FILM AS PRODUCT

For my Product Autopsy class I switched from a niche technical pen to investigating feature films as a product.   This is a wholistic, ideological schematic of the way an individual film is produced, distributed, and consumed through to it's endlife.  It's incomplete but is still just a template.  I plan to use a production book (the summary of the budget and production post-op produced by the Line Producer) to dive more deeply into the individual components of a specific production (e.g. how many pounds of cheese; who is the distributor of production hardware?)

I imagine that a defining factor as I dig deeper into my research will involve reverse engineering from the end-life of the product - which is interesting as film doesn't necessarily have an end-life - these days being archived and distributed and consumed digitally.  My interest in examining film as product is really the cultural impact it has on consumers as film is largely psychological and much of it is oriented around selling product placement advertising and related press activities using actors as spokesperson/salespeople.  Film has also historically had a political agenda component to it in many individual cases. I'm interested in how film, its language and lore, has the capacity to change mass behavior - including the way many other goods and services are consumed and regarded.  Film has the power to shape mental models. 



PRODUCT AUTOPSY: HMWK 01

I chose Sakura Color Products' Micron Pigma technical archiving pen to propose as a product autopsy. The reasons being: 

  • it is my very favorite type of pen
  • the corporation is Japanese which historically/allegedly points to well-respected manufacturing and design practices. 
  • cursory googling research brought me both promising specificity and mystery as far as how and where it is manufactured.