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

TL;DR

The exhibition Butterfly explores the interconnectedness of global and local ecological, digital, material, and virtual systems, emphasizing the need to view infrastructure as dynamic ecosystems requiring care.

Contribution

It advances the discourse by shifting focus from theoretical speculation to practical activation and intervention in ecological and digital infrastructures.

Findings

Highlights the entanglement of data, energy, and industry in ecological contexts.

Proposes viewing infrastructures as ecosystems needing care.

Encourages rethinking digital futures with ecological sensibilities.

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.