Credits

This was a team effort

These are the people, and institutions

that made this project possible:

Michael Mandiberg

email: michaelATmandibergD0Tcom

Concept, Programming, Aesthetics, Sweat Equity

P. Timon McPhearson Ph.D.

Ecological Advisor
Earth Institute, Columbia University

Carlo Montagnino

Junior Programmer

Evan Moran

Designer

 

 

 

Thanks to: Everyone at Eyebeam, but especially Steve Lambert, Amanda McDonald Crowley, James Powderly, Robert Ransick, Evan Roth, and the Eyebeam Sustainability Research Group. Lauren Cornell, and Marisa Olsen of Rhizome.org. My colleages in the Department of Media Culture, Cynthia Chris, Jeanine Corbet, David Gerstner, Edward D. Miller, Sherry Millner, Jason Simon, Matthew Solomon, Valerie Tevere, Cindy Wong, Ying Zhu, the incredible Janet Manfredonia, Dean Francisco Soto and Provost David Podell. Anthony Lieuallen for his Greasemonkey Compiler. And, of course, Julia Steinmetz

 

Real Costs was made possible by

 

Eyebeam Artist Residency

 

Rhizome Commissions Program

 

City University of New York

PSC-CUNY Research Grant

 

College of Staten Island

Dean's Summer Student Research Assistant

Student-Faculty Research Support Grant

Department of Media Culture: continuing support

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Real Costs works:

Experience the project by installing the Real Costs plug-in into your Firefox application. Currently, this plug-in pulls each flight origination and destination information from the page, calculates and reinserts the CO2 produced. It compares the CO2 produced for that flight to making that trip by bus or train, and to the average CO2 produced per capita for the average US and world citizen. It is configured to work on the websites of the largest North American air carriers (major global air carriers to be added shortly.) A list of these carriers and documentation of all scientific calculations is available on the project Wiki.

Why Real Costs matters:

The objective of the Real Costs is to increase awareness of the environmental impact of certain day to day choices in the life of the Internet user. By presenting this environmental impact information in the place where decisions are being made, it will hopefully create an impact on the viewer, encourages a sense of individual agency, and provides a set of alternatives and immediate actions. In the process the user/viewer might even be transformed from passive consumer to engaged citizen.