Does 'Stump' create awareness of printing paper comsumption?

To illustrate of the worlds' negligent overuse of paper, Natalie Jeremijenko ingeniously brings our personal wastefulness into focus. By combining her backgounds in science, engineering and art she produced a synthetic virus called Stump (1999) available on CD-ROM (Tribe and Jana).

Stump calculates printer-paper use into a rough equivalent of virtual pulp. This pulp accumulates into virtual tree rings. After a medium-sized tree ring caches, a page is automatically printed to remind users of their heedless destruction of a living natural resource; our trees. The printed pages are eventually stacked to form an ever-increasing stump size. Stump demonstrates the environmental baby-toe print made each time we print a document 'growing' into a yeti-sized carbon footprint. For those of us unaware of our gluttonous consumption, Stump could put us on a paper-consumption diet that could lead to a lighter carbon footprint and a healthier planet.

While sincerely intentioned and a brilliant environmental display,

the printing of the tree ring pages produced by the program are

an oversight of Jereminjenko's project. Adding more to world paper consumption until an actual paper tree, or at least a stump, is produced seems anti-reductionist. Perhaps an advance version will have the virtual 'stump' instead of a real one.

Since no action has been taken to add Stump to computer basic start-up programs it is unlikely there will be tremendous impact on enlightenment of most print-copy users. Perhaps Apple could take the enlightened initiative (LOL). Purchasing Stump independently also seems problematic. Although it was produced as a CD-ROM in 2000 for voluntary participants to upload, I found no outlets to purchase a copy.

Stump is printed on a

full-sized page of paper.

(Brucker-Cohen)

References:

Brucker-Cohen, New Media Meets the Environment, Green Museum.org, http://www.greenmuseum.org/c/new_media/. Accessed Sept. 05, 2009

Tribe, Mark and Reena Jana, New Media Art, Brown Univerisity, Profiles: Natalie Jeremijenko. https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Natalie+Jeremijenko