The series The Dithering (You Are Here) extends Dev Harlan’s work with emulated desktops to contextualize climate apathy within the history of techtopian imaginaries which have largely been dismissive or hostile towards climate science. The work begins with an exploration of the first IPCC Assessment Report, published in 1990, whose pages have been reconstructed within an emulated 90’s era Macintosh system. Harlan has also labored to produce code under this system which generates thought provoking algorithmic artworks incorporating strange attractor models, satellite imagery and text. Mining ethical quandaries at the intersection of technology and climate he plots epithets and thought regimes as hypothetical trajectories in which “You Are Here” marks a moving waypoint for the ever fraught present.
The first IPCC Climate Report was published in 1990. It contained many climate predictions that remain accurate, and yet in the 35 years since its publication there has been a tragically inadequate response to the ongoing climate crisis, which author Kim Stanley Robinson described as the “decades of dithering” in the speculative sci-fi novel 2312. This project aims to explore this first IPCC document and related climate science of the 1990s within the context of a desktop operating system from the same time period as a useful framing of the techno-cultural moment in which it was largely ignored.
Dithering also has a specific meaning within computer graphics as an algorithm for reducing color depth of an image while still preserving legibility. The artwork is produced in 1bit color and relies on the well known Atkinson dithering algorithm developed by Apple to produce acceptable 1-bit images on its black and white computer systems of the 1980s. The Dithering offers a double meaning, the technical sense in which scientific images must be reduced in color depth to be legible, and the ethical sense in which inaction and squabbling by government, industry and society has produced irreparable harm to the Earth system.
