Carbon Technostructure: Neural Fog

Carbon Technostructure traces the material weight of immaterial systems. A modified plotter, glass panel, and steamer work in concert to render visible what typically remains unseen: the environmental cost of computational processes.
Steam condenses on glass, creating an ephemeral drawing surface. An empty marker moves across this temporary canvas, inscribing patterns derived from real-time energy data. These marks exist only as disruptions in condensation, fading as quickly as our attention to digital infrastructure’s environmental impact.

For this iteration, we run a GPU hosting an open-source language model. We prompt it to hallucinate representations of its own energy consumption—a recursive gesture that produces both poetic output and measurable load. The installation monitors this consumption, cross-referencing it with the carbon intensity of the local electrical grid and subsequently plots it.

Each vanishing drawing offers a glimpse of the carbon technostructure we’ve built, one calculation at a time.