The Dithering is a mediation on climate apathy presenting excerpts from the inaugural IPCC Climate Assessment within the context of an emulated Macintosh II desktop.
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 an obsolete desktop operating system from the same time period as a useful framing of the techno-cultural moment in which climate predictions were 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. Relevant to this project is 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.
