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Goodbye World! is a computational installation which manifests those intangible contributors to global climate change – energy consumption, ubiquitous computation, and free market capitalism – as an infrastructure of power cords, ethernet cables, microcontrollers, and four taxidermized toy polar bears. A dynamic work, Goodbye World! continuously queries APIs to compare real-time temperature readings with 30-year averages across four key sites intimately connected to global climate change: Shenzhen, São Paulo, Seattle, and Svalbard. As temperature fluctuations become more extreme, the red glow of the polar bears' eyes intensifies. LCDs slowly scroll through the data and present the hard numbers, as the installation continually monitors its own resource usage, recording and displaying its data and energy consumption both locally and on the web.

An ironic play on the coding exercise “hello world!,” the installation is an ambient automaton situated within the very conditions which it attempts to elucidate. As Timothy Morton observes, planetary ecological crisis is difficult to comprehend: “the trouble with global warming is that it’s right here. It’s not behind a glass screen. It is the glass screen.” As media object, Goodbye World! invites the viewer to look behind the screen, beyond the looking glass, to closely examine its anatomy, an amalgam of circuitry and algorithms which implicates itself, entices its audience, and quietly contributes to the very crisis it considers.

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