A short interview video with Michael Mandiberg shot and Edited by Dan Eckstein (daneckstein.com) in March 2009, with Music from Au Revoir Simone at Eyebeam and Postmasters Gallery NYC.

From the dialog:

I’m Michael Mandiberg. I am an artist, designer, and educator, and I am a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, which is an Art and Technology Center in Chelsea, Manhattan.

As an artist I am pretty omnivorous. I have a background in photography, so it is pretty image based, but I was also a really really good bad high school poet. So I am particularly interested in words and their meaning, and their nuances and their poetic value. So I am always looking at the world around us visually, informationally, and culturally, and politically for inspiration

Some of my more recent work involves the laser cutter, cutting paper and books, making sculptures and drawings. The laser cutter takes the information from the computer file, and it uses a laser to cut that shape out of the material being cut, which in this case is a newspaper.

A few of my recent works are at The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, which is a show at Postmasters Gallery. One is called Old News, which is a stack of New York Times into which I am cutting daily the phrase “Old News” into it. The other is DATA BASE, which is an Oxford English Dictionary with the phrase “DATA BASE” cut into it.

The show itself is about the promise and the failed promise of technology, and its potential to connect people or not connect people.

How many website hits to date for Real Costs?

How many downloads of the software (.xpi)?

To be honest I hate counting hits and downloads. It inevitably reminds me of popularity contests and other things that are obsessive and psychologically dangerous.

That said i do think that these things are somewhat useful. In particular I am interested in tracking the number of times it has been bookmarked on delicious, though I think that my digg score is almost irrelevant because of the pure geekery that takes place on digg. I am a geek but my work is often too theoretical. I have been trying to make my new work more diggable so-to-speak.

If you know, how “global” is Real Costs? IE, do you know how many “countries” are represented in the panoply of hits you get on the site?

Again, I’m not so focused on hits, but I can say that the airplane sites that the script works on are truly global. Delta, Air France, El Al.

Or at least those were some of the sites that it worked on most recently. It is a constant struggle to keep my code current with the code of all of those airplane websites. Everytime they change their HTML/CSS I have to correct my code to reflect this

The scientist you worked with (P. Timon McPhearson Ph.D.), what was his role in the project?

Timon made sure my science was ad accurate as itcould be. He guided me to key information resources like WRi. And he researched detailed information on the amount of carbon a tree really offsets one of his colleagues who is a carbon sequestratuon researcher.

Where are you with the next version? Are other projects pressing, or are you still pretty committed to this project? Just curious, not going to write about this…..

I made a google mashup that calculates the cost of travel on dollars and carbon based on the car and the price of gas. I have been waiting to launch it.

Howmuchitcosts.us

Any other worthy factoids?

While air travel accounts for 2% of world carbon production, recent estimates put worldwide computer use at an equal 2%