Permacomputing Aesthethics

Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design, and Culture.
By Aymeric Mansoux, Dušan Barok, Brendan Howell, Ville-Matias Heikkilä

1. Introduction#

1. Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice centred around design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing in computational culture, and on creativity with scarce computational resources. As a result, permacomputing aims to provide a countervoice to digital practices that promote maximisation, hyper-consumption and waste.

2. Permacomputing seeks to encourage practices as an applied critique of contemporary computer technology that privileges maximalist aesthetics where more pixels, more frame rate, more computation and more power equals more potential at any cost and without any consequences. We believe that such a critical practice can be relevant to artists, designers and cultural practitioners working with computer and network technology who are interested in engaging with environmental issues. This is particularly relevant given the tendency in art, design and cultural production to rely on tools and techniques designed to maximise productivity and mass consumption.

3. We argue for the potential of permacomputing as a rich framework for exploring creative design constraints building on a long history of applying constraints in art, design and cultural practices. Because of the need to reconfigure the modes of production and organisation within computational practices, this calls for a different understanding of aesthetics, one that goes beyond the formal evaluation of how things look, but addresses how aesthetics can also be systems of relations, sensing and making sense that are already present in the process of making.

4. 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. As a long-term utopian project, permacomputing aims to “give computers a meaningful and sustainable place in a human civilisation that has a meaningful and sustainable place in the planetary biosphere”. |1

5. We believe that it is therefore necessary to approach the question of aesthetics beyond looking at the formal qualities of works, and to consider the aesthetics of permacomputing as systems of relations, sensing and making sense that take place in the process of making and working around and with computational constraints. For the field of art and cultural production, we argue that such permacomputing aesthetics could facilitate a transition from a system in which practitioners use the latest digital tools and media regardless of the environmental consequences, to a more strategic system in which digital tools and media of all generations, are carefully combined, crafted and used to form a less extractive practice.

2. Deceptive Maximalist Techno-Aesthetics#

6. Maximalist techno-aesthetics, that is, aesthetics that are the manifestation of technologies driven by the myth of perpetual growth and infinite resources, aesthetics based on the ever increasing complexity and resource consumption of digital devices that seek to justify growth through self-referential legitimisation, regardless of necessity or ability to even function properly. One of the most visible features of maximalist techno-aesthetics is the increasing density of information for its own sake: more pixels, more detail, more fidelity and more connectivity equals more potential, and yet this is very often broken and falls short of expectations. In the context of art, design and cultural production in general, this often translates into a constant rush and pressure to adopt new tools and techniques, while simultaneously accelerating the creation of new discourses around novel aesthetics that entirely avoid critique around these very new tools and techniques. |2

7. this issue is obfuscated by the dominant actors of the ICT industry in the form of an aspirational, accelerationist, techno-progressive discourse that essentially redirects consumers and manufacturers towards a growing space of possibility, towards unleashed potentials at our fingertips, towards a brighter future, or at least a future of science-fiction-like aesthetics. So-called seamless and transparent design, plastic virtual worlds, the Cloud, consciousness uploading, transhumanism, cryonics, democratising access to domestic workers via app-based anonymous delivery servants, Mars colonies, frictionless interfaces and digital workflows, virtual reality, lifecasting, hybrid and blended learning, avatars, omniscient AI, cashless societies, online shopping with near instant delivery by drones, and a lot of people staring at black mirrors in empty spaces with shiny floors while being surrounded by gorgeous wild nature behind glass. We are almost there, we can almost touch the future, whether it is utopia or dystopia, we will all live a techno-logical dream of ultimate material mastery. We just have to push a little harder, wait a little longer, we are almost there, the Big Tech companies are taking care of constantly prototyping and refining this near future where everything is solved.

Bell and Dourish refer to this phenomenon where “motivations and frames are often written not merely in the future tense, describing events and settings to come, but portray a proximate future, one just around the corner.”[23] But while we are stuck in this modern adaptation of Zeno’s paradoxes, we continue to record, collect and archive a mesmerising amount of digital data in which we forget ourselves, and why we are doing such things in the first place. In fact, this field of possibility acts as a hypnotic distraction that prevents one from engaging with what is essentially a worldview driven more by consumerism, data colonialism,[85] and an undemocratic niche of longtermist visions. This is why we think that these maximalist techno-aesthetics are not only broken, but also deceptive. The more distraction there is, the more the ICT industry can offer dysfunctional but very attractive technical solutions to problems that are really political, social or economic in nature. The negative social and environmental effects of this distraction can already be seen, for example, in bandwidth imperialism, the high resource demands of AI art,[49] and more generally in data saturation as a tactic of Big Tech expansion and a means of creating dependency on their services and infrastructures.

8. While ICT industry leaders often remind us that we live in the age of computational miracles, these miracles are not more than a carrot to keep us running on an ever more demanding, polluting, divisive, draining and alienating treadmill, powered by the world’s scarce resources and for the benefit of a very few. Is this the best we can do with computer and network technology?

9. When we talk about permacomputing aesthetics, it is not just about technical implementation, or about countering a broken maximalism with an exact opposite, such as an equally broken minimalism. It is about reimagining, dreaming, and experimenting with alternative ways of engaging with computer and network technology.[9] Artists, designers and cultural workers are often praised for their capacity to communicate, illustrate and raise awareness around social issues. It is up to us to begin to critically examine the ways we are dependent on the ICT industry, to rethink the ways in which they produce things, and to begin to address this on a practical and concrete level in our fields. Reflecting on the broken relationship between the technical and the aesthetic in the techno-aesthetics of maximalist computational works, and because we believe that the core of the problem lies in this deceptive promise of unlimited computational resources fueling all sorts of potential futures, we believe that a discussion of the grounding, and material limits and constraints of cultural production could be a promising site of activation. |3

3. Art, Design, and Cultural Work Under Constraints#

10. Self-imposed constraints are perhaps the most widely known and cited when it comes to demonstrating, with more or less honesty, that less is more. They can be formal: the literary rules of the writers of the OuLiPo collective; conceptual writing in general;minimalism in music and visual art; any notated work to be performed, executed, installed, manifested again, such as poetry, music, graphic scores, conceptual art, performance art, installation art, software and computational art. They can also be self-imposed by the choice of technology used: early computer artists in the late 1960s and early 70s working out programs for plotters without screens; the use of simple samplers, cassette tapes and basic turntables in alternative, underground and instrumental hip hop; subsets of the demoscene subculture that focus on making extremely small audiovisual programs or deliberately use old and limited hardware platforms.

Self-imposed constraints in art and design can also arise from the choice of ‘poor’ materials: arte povera in Italy in the 1960s, using materials such as wood, earth, scrap metal and industrial waste; making furniture from common sizes of construction wood or from found industrial materials; making household objects from available small trees and branches in Slöjd.[83] More generally, self-imposed constraints in this context become facilitators and amplifiers of creativity, so it is also possible to refer to them as fabric, or to redirect the discussion by emphasising the process. |3-4

4. Permacomputing Aesthetics#

11. What distinguishes permacomputing from other approaches is the way in which it makes constraints visible and usable through its connection to material circumscription. The qualities of materials are also a driving force through which aesthetic choices are made, as much as how the aesthetics are produced through the selection of specific material maxima, so as to reflect environmental and cultural values. These choices might include: working with e-waste, working with limited availability of hardware and energy, using small files and low network bandwidths, considering computing devices as heirlooms, using natural materials, repairability or designing with local, regional and subcultural aesthetics and materials in mind. Unlike Simondon’s techno-aesthetics, which may eventually iteratively find a pleasing equilibrium between functional technique and aesthetics, permacomputing’s techno-aesthetics are much more perilous because a third component is forced in: an informed and contextualised intention to address the social, cultural, environmental and economic externalities of maximalist computer and network technologies.

12. Permacomputing aesthetics should not be misunderstood as belonging to an aesthetics of obstruction, for it is less concerned with the performative and symbolic dimension of its approach,[10] and is instead rooted in questioning the nature of its underlying process and the generative insecurity of its awkwardness.[78] For this reason, we believe that the aesthetics of permacomputing works always serve as an entry point to make visible and understand a situated intention in the creative process.

13. In practice, permacomputing exists as two intertwined strands: first, an incentive to reuse and repurpose existing computer technology and materials to create new works; and second, a list of continuously evolving design principles, to guide that very reuse and repurposing, but also to inform the development of new software and hardware when reuse and repurposing are not possible or relevant. |4

14. It is important to draw on a definition of aesthetics as the relational and distributed capacity to register, perceive and make sense of the world.[33] For us, this means that aesthetics also leads to questions of responsibility, particularly when working with materials, tools and techniques whose very nature actively leaves traces of extraction and exploitation in their making, use and disposal. Permacomputing could therefore be an effective cultural counter-voice to a digital aesthetic that encourages maximisation, e.g. high bandwidth, high resolution, more computing power at any cost, for anything, sensing and capturing more, while making less and less sense, ultimately rendering us insensitive to the harm and damage we legitimise. Above all, permacomputing should be understood as something symptomatic of the fundamental and enduring disconnect between the mythical, foundational, liberatory and emancipatory visions of computing and networking on the one hand, and how contemporary computer and network technologies have failed to deliver this anticipated future. It is a response to the idealised fusion of the technical and the aesthetic in the maximalist techno-aesthetics discussed above, and its disfunction, which are subservient by-products of systems of extraction and exploitation. |6

5. Permacomputing and Nostalgia#

15. In societies vastly dominated by technological novelty, economic growth, and technosolutionism, the relationship with time is difficult to dissociate from consumerism. This time, however, is of a peculiar nature. It is the time of quantified and monitored labour, the time of management, organisation and production coordination, and the time of economic cycles. Continuous updates of video games, TV/online series presented in seasons or launches of technological products—all coordinated in the context of strategic moments of increased consumption. Eras and generations are defined, analysed and symbolised by emblematic products of mass consumption. Our short lifespans, treadmill working conditions and short attention spans do not help us see these patterns, and instead support a productive apparatus that favours obsolescence, neophilia, amnesia, non-historicity, as a means to consume and produce more things. In this context, it has been normalised that any use of so-called outdated computing devices that have exhausted their economic value, can only be of a nostalgic nature, because such use makes no sense from the perspective of systems of constant production, consumption, creative destruction and reproduction. In a society where consumerism, modernity and identity are all linked, out-of-date things can only refer to a past self, a past time.

16. Some activities around retro-computers and retro-aesthetics are in fact primarily forms of restorative nostalgia, in the way they allow a connection to a past home, a past self, through objects of mass consumption. This nostalgia favours the cult of simpler times; the good old days when things were less complex and often associated with a privileged childhood. Retro-computing or retro-gaming events may include screenings of old series, films or anime that more or less correspond to the participants’ childhood years. It is also common to find new faux memorabilia produced for playfully decorating adult rooms, and some console emulators go so far as to operate as VR simulations in which retro games can be played in a virtual teenage bedroom that has been carefully decorated to match the era of the device’s production. With the well-intentioned goal of creating a safe space for the literal emulation of a lost youth, such nostalgia runs the risk of fostering deeply conservative thinking and fetishising a past that never really existed. If anything, it prevents the problematisation of an already flawed computer culture and opens the doors to imagined communities. From a permacomputing perspective, it is impossible to long for a time when computer technology was better, because there never was such a day.

17. Here is an important aspect of retro-computing activities that can also challenge this argument: technical accessibility. It should not be underestimated that for many hackers, artists, designers and modders, the appeal of retro-computing lies in the relatively low-threshold capacity to augment, adapt or tinker with old equipment. From discrete components, socketed chips, annotated PCB layouts, and thick service manuals and schematics, retro-computing turns the maximalist notion of computational potential on its head. Even if everything is relative, and that black boxes of the past are just as closed as those of today, old machines are simply easier to take apart and understand.

So if permacomputing could be aligned with retro-computing, it would be through some of the retro-computing subcultures that use so-called obsolete technology in radically different contexts because of its plasticity. In addition to technical considerations, permacomputing also resonates with the creative and environmental considerations of zombie media—a counterpoint to the notion of dead media—which acknowledges that “[m]edia kills nature as they remain as living deads”, and encourages the reappropriation of electronic waste, drawing an analogy with the processes of reuse found in remix culture.

When Jamaican music studio engineers began experimenting with obsolete and abandoned US audio equipment such as spring reverbs in the 1970s, they were not nostalgic for 60s surf music. Instead, these machines became a core component of an entirely new musical genre: dub music. In truth, permacomputing sees abandoned computing devices and e-waste as many different instruments waiting to be brought back to life, turned upside down and rediscovered to simply create new things. We believe that the end of a computer product’s lifecycle should be seen as a moment of celebration, a moment when its socioeconomic context can finally be reclaimed, rather than put behind a glass and condemned to run the same old code forever as a consumerist trophy or fetish.

18. it is essential for permacomputing to develop its critical practice by acknowledging both its relative and shifting position in an ever-changing landscape of new and old media. However, without falling into nostalgia and longing for a past that never was, and because of the way old computational devices take more time to do anything, permacomputing could easily be framed as a technological ally of the slow movement.[5] This connection would allow permacomputing to offer “alternative temporalities and experimenting with the affordances of slower tempos of computing and thus living”. More generally, making the connection between a constraint—working with old computers—and a value—slowness—suggests that there may even be much more to learn from old media, and this could further inform the permacomputing design principles and future permacomputing projects, regardless of their association with so-called obsolete technology. |7

6. The Limits of Constraints#

19. Worse still, the introduction of permacomputing into art and design education without proper contextualisation could lead to a form of romanticism close to the failure of the arts and crafts movement, which could end up reinforcing a bourgeois understanding of permacomputing craft as a luxurious and elitist product, thus preventing its radical potential as a popular cultural practice that could also exist outside of professional art and design circuits.

20. while it is meaningful to frame permacomputing aesthetics positively as a kind of post-digital aesthetics, it is also a more problematic way to admit that permacomputing is entangled with the systems of production and consumption it seeks to critique, rather than being able to truly offer an alternative from the ground up. Put differently, the richness of combining old and new media, or the ways of working with more technological restraint with current computing devices, can also obfuscate the dependencies that such ways of working have, on the very neophilia that permacomputing seeks to address.

21. This brings up another limit for permacomputing. How to deal with the discrepancy between the discourse and its actual practice when it comes to issues of climate justice? How to align the ambition, the narrative and its situatedness so that it remains truly inclusive and more than just a few sound bites whose circulation will benefit only a few in a highly competitive race to the bottom, in a cultural sector that seems always keen to emphasize a short sighted and privileged articulation of care?

22. Permacomputing is walking on thin ice and needs a lot of work to understand its own situatedness to avoid it ending up as a mere hobby for the most privileged, a romanticisation and aestheticisation of poverty, like many low-tech practices in high-income countries that end up as leisure activities. Understanding permacomputing’s own situatedness is also necessary as groundwork for addressing harm directly where it is initiated and cultivated. In other words, how to create a space for critical practices that address urgencies such as scarcity and the limits of extraction. |8

7. Conclusion#

23. There is a danger, therefore, that permacomputing aesthetics will remain just that: formal aesthetics that rely heavily on the cultural and stylistic appropriation of practices for which urgency and its constraints are necessities of life, not creative choices. This should in no way be taken as an excuse for giving up and embracing extractivism and wasteful practices, because sooner or later even the most protected regions will be profoundly affected with increasing material, social and economic consequences.

24. We have attempted to articulate how the field of art, design and cultural production could more meaningfully engage with environmental issues by sketching an aesthetic understanding of permacomputing that goes beyond questions of form, beauty and, more generally, the artistic mastery of emotion through the skilful use of materials and techniques. Instead, we have drawn on a more relational and distributed understanding of aesthetics to propose an alternative to the maximalist techno-aesthetics promoted by dominant actors in the ICT industry. |9