This lecture curated by Sanneke Huisman is part of the Media Arts Festival Arnhem (MAFA), which will take place from March 22 to 24, 2024. A festival with film programs, lectures, performances, experiments, workshops and conversations with artists in Focus Filmtheater, around the theme ‘LESS’. Part of the festival is a two-week exhibition in Museum Arnhem, also in March 2024.

MAFA is a collaboration between Focus Filmtheater, Museum Arnhem and ArtEZ Academy for Art & Design. 

Curator Sanneke Huisman will introduce the lecture.

Permacomputing, a blend of the words permaculture and computing, is a potential field of convergence between technology, cultural work, environmental research, and activism. In essence permacomputing aims to promote and experiment with a more sustainable relationship with computer and network technology.

At a time when computational culture seems to be increasingly characterised by electronic and energy waste, permacomputing instead encourages a more sustainable approach by maximising the life of hardware, minimising energy consumption and focusing on the use of already available computing devices and components.

Aymeric about this talk: ‘It’s one thing to talk about the negative impact of technology, it’s however a whole different thing to radically reinvent one’s practice, collective habits, and the infrastructures that support digital culture. While cultural work is often lauded for its capacity to illustrate and communicate societal issues, it also struggles, paradoxically, to challenge the problematic systems and tools that enable such capacity. Just like any other field or sector, art, design and culture production does not exist in a distant plane of existence but is also part of the problem, and is a hostage of big tech. In this presentation we will first discuss the complicated relationship between art and ICT, then move on to the limits of thinking in terms of alternatives, and finally introduce permacomputing, a nascent community of practice that is trying to collectively problematise all this mess. Fun!’

About Aymeric Mansoux

Aymeric Mansoux (he/him) has been messing around with computers and networks for far too long. He is lector (reader/professor of practice-oriented research) at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Hogeschool Rotterdam. Recent collaborations include What Remains, an 8-bit Nintendo game about whistleblowing and the manipulation of public opinion in relation to the climate crisis; LURK, a server infrastructure and collective to host discussions around net/computational art, culture, and politics; and the permacomputing wiki where a growing number of contributors document and discuss alternatives to extractive mainstream computation.