Yesterday, the United Nations held a press conference at their headquarters to discuss the CO2 Cube, which will serve as an architectural centerpiece to this month’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen Mean streets download. The project, which is a collaboration between artist Alfio Bonanno, the UN, YouTube, Obscura Digital, and Millennium ART is intended to provide a visual representation of how how much CO2 humans produce and pump into the atmosphere on a regular basis.

To that end, the cube, which is 27′ x 27′ x 27′, is supposed to represent the size of a gaseous ton of carbon dioxide. And while that’s enormous–practically three stories tall–Millennium ART Executive Director Mia Hanak says that it’s only a fraction of the waste that each of us produces annually. “Most people in industrialized societies release one ton of CO2 per month,” she said. For Americans, the number is double.

Travis Threlkel, the Chief Creative Director of Obscure Digital, and Ramya Raghavan, YouTube’s Nonprofits and Activism Manager, were on hand to describe some of the technical elements of the cube. Based on the video presentation we were given, it’s pretty impressive. The cube itself is made of shipping containers stacked on top of one another, which serves the dual purpose of emphasizing consumption and sustainability (the crates will go back into use after the cube is dismantled). But that’s only part of the story: the really intriguing part is what is going to be displayed on the cubes.

“It’s a fusion of data sets, personal video, and art,” said Threlkel. Throughout the exhibit, live interactive computer displays are going to be screened on each side of the cube. In the demo video that Threlkel showed us, the displayed images included other three-dimensional visual representations of how much CO2 each country pumps into the atmosphere, but at the actual conference the amount of visual data will be expanded to include YouTube videos by the winners of the Raise Your Voice contest, and whatever the organizers of the exhibit desire. The displays can be adjusted live, from phone applications that will only be available to those directly involved in coordinating the event.

Threlkel described the combination of video and architecture as representing a four-dimensional hypercube. “It’s symbolic of another way of visualizing the environment,” he said.

Right now the plan is for the cube to rest on the water in front of Copenhagen’s Tycho Brahe Planetarium. After that, it will either be disassembled or, possibly, go on tour across several American cities and to the Shanghai World Expo.

The big question, of course, is how much of an impact it will actually have. Given that the entire project is carbon neutral–the organization Terrapass is calculating the amount of carbon emitted in putting the entire thing together so that it can be offset in other ways–and given that Hanak estimates the project cost only around $250,000 (not including a healthy degree of self-financing from all the involved parties, except for the UN), it seems likely that the project’s impact (as subjective a metric as that may be) will outweigh its various costs.

Meanwhile, over 90 world leaders will be inching towards what will hopefully be, if not a substantial commitment to global emissions reduction, then a historic step in that direction.

By the way: There’s an NYU connection here. NYU Local found out about yesterday’s press conference through Kate Fritz, a Gallatin senior who is working for MillenniumART on university and student outreach. She’s headed to Copenhagen a few days before the conference to watch the construction of the Cube, and then will be attending negotiations with an NGO access pass up until finals.

“It’s a dream,” said Fritz, whose focus at Gallatin is on environmental policy and political theory. “It sort of fell into my lap.”

We’re all about repping the NYU student body’s blogosphere contingent, so it’s worth noting that she’ll be blogging and photoblogging the conference here. And we’ll obviously covering the conference from a distance here.