We come now to the next presentation. I'm Eric Monceau. It's called Permacomputing in the Arts. Hello. OK. Hello. It's not on the, no. I got here. It's working there. I am. OK, cool. Hi. Hi, everyone. Hi, hi everyone. So my name is Emre Kmanso and I am going to talk about permacomputing indeed, following up on the previous presentation and deepening it more from the perspective of cultural production and especially for people working in the cultural sector. So right now I am busy leading research at the Willem de Kooning Academy, leading an unsustainable research group literally and we have a very lightweight website as you can see. It may stay like this, it may just disappear as well. I also co-founded LER. We have our 10-year anniversary this year. It's a kind of community of communities of nice people. I think that's the best way to describe it. I'm also quite involved in this permacomputing thing. I wanted to start with these profound words that I found on my bed when I arrived in Linz. Be eco-friendly, be art. Because it was... Yes. Well, hey. So, because it kind of linked very, very strongly to what I wanted to talk about today, which is the fact that yes, there is this position in which artists, designers and cultural workers tend to distance themselves from these societal issues and are able to create interventions and help us illustrate or reflect on these things, but very little. In fact, there is a realization that the cultural sector is completely part of the of the problem in itself. And so that's what we're going to be discussing in this first part. First of all, I think what everyone knows about is that the history of new media art is based on this sort of exponential growth of just wanting more, more, more resolution, more things. It was discussed earlier. That's what we call usually this maximalist techno-aesthetics. But this is something that we understand quite well because it relates to technology from the perspective of being an instrument and slash or a media. What we don't discuss so much, however, is this sort of parallel of media art history in its relationship with the tech industry. And so in media art, there is a sort of parallel of media art history in its relationship with the tech industry. And so in media art, there is a sort of big bang moment that is the experiments in art and technology from 1966, which was this sort of, yeah, this moment of engineers working with artists hand in hand, creating synergy and working towards this sort of beautiful techno-positivist form of innovation between art and the tech industry. That kind of paves the way for all the discourse and the language that we are still living on today. And from this point on, what we see for when you have Apple launching a new product, making use of the band U2 to kind of serve for a certain credibility in the art world, is not really new. And you can also question the fact like how much the industry, the technology industry, or ICT industry, has shaped some artist practices. In the case of video art, or the second stage or late stage of video art, Sony, Sharp, GVC, Barco and these manufacturers had a very, very strong impact on shaping the aesthetic of this field, but also forming it through commission and then also festivals and venues. Talking about festivals, the late 90s were interesting because that's the moment where we start to see these sort of strange hybrid places that were both a wild competition of creative work and mixed with commercial fairs. 3D rendering scene and post-production, has started to really embrace this sort of innovation between artists and designers. So Pixar, that everyone knows because they make this cute little animation, was originally a computer science project. It turned into a small startup with the help of several people from the Hollywood industry trying to sell software and hardware. But down the line, these places were also platforms for educational managers and deans of art schools to come and do some shopping to try to figure out what can we put in our art school to make sure that we get students, and so what kind of hardware and software do we need to provide? And today this is completely normalized. Art is a very important market for the ICT industry, including big tech, who is very good at basically just appropriating history of media art, generative art in this case, and rebranding it entirely under another name that is more suited to the agenda. That was at the time where they were pushing for code literacy and trying to really engage in this whole period that we had recently or semi-recently where everyone had to learn to code. Otherwise, if you don't code, somehow you're going to die. And so they were very, very good at rebranding these sort of 20 years of generative and process-based art to just push a very specific industrial agenda. And now you even have, let's say, game-developing companies like Epic, who is known for the Unreal Engine, 3D Engine, and so the game Fortnite, who casually does keynote at important art school conferences to explain how their games are important for inclusive storytelling and all sorts of bullshit, simply because they have understood that it's their way to get into, let's say, this sort of ever-growing market and feed into this need for artists to work with more recent and more productive and powerful and impressive media tools. And there is of course a much darker side is that beyond this we also have another type of tech industry that is getting very close to the art and cultural sector, simply because it serves this sort of techno-optimist agenda of softening, let's say, certain discourse about tech that could be somehow problematic. In the meantime, we have a lot of artists who are just super happy using these tools. And I guess good for them. And we also have other artists who radically go into another direction and try to re-embrace let's say more analog practices but you can really see like how the tech industry has completely captured all these practices because for instance like analog practitioners will often use instagram as a way to exist to make your their portfolio and to even like sign their work and in the zine scene for instance a lot of zine producers are using adobe cloud tools using social media to share their pdf and so on so forth so looks very analog, but it's within a sort of a sandbox that has been constructed by the ICT industry. So on one hand, we have this instrument plus media situation that we do understand quite well because we are practitioners and we can understand this because they are our tools and our materials. And on the other hand, there is a question of instrumentalization and situatedness of our own practices that is really, really under-discussed. And I think the whole field of media art, to give it a general name, is constantly struggling, oscillating between these two. Of course, for some people that's not really a problem, and I want to tell them that this is fine. And I actually mean it in the sense that I'm not trying to convince anyone here who are really enjoying working with their newest shiny toy. I mean, good for you. The point that I'm trying to make is that for those, however, who feel that something is a little bit off and that's really, really more and more operating within, let's say, an area of cognitive dissonance, that they are not the only one and that this is really a problem that we need to address as, you know, a collective somehow. So, why is it important? Is it important because the relationship between art and ICT is really, we want to think that when we are engaging with tech, we are being critical, that we want to have this sort of way of working to take apart the black boxes. We all know the term, we all know the artistic statement, the stuff we write to get into festivals, and so on and so forth. But very often, we may end up as being the useful idiot of an industry that is completely becoming, you know, a field that is completely becoming uncritical of its own practice. So, now comes the difficult question, like, what's the alternative? What can we do? And this is where things get even more complicated because this whole way of thinking in terms of alternative is not going anywhere. So the classic way of introducing alternative historically in the media art has been through the discourse and the practices of free, libre and open source software. For a long long long time it has been like the classic argument to say okay we have bad black boxes and then we have good transparent open boxes. And somehow this argument is anyone who is a bit familiar with the history of free, lib, and open source software knows that it does not work like this. And somehow it's still sticking. But as a result, this librist thinking that really comes from early free software activists is still sticking. So we don't use Adobe. We're going to use Gimp or Krita. We don't use Twitter or X. We're going to go on the Fediverse or using Mastodon. But at no point in time we are questioning, you know, like more profound digital question about image making and photography like the previous presenter was doing. And when it comes to social media, yes, for instance, with Lurk, I'm co-hosting a Mastodon instance, but I really have profound doubt about social media as a concept in itself. I am not convinced it is not a harmful piece of software or concept for software production. And we also see how this problem of manufactured, pseudo-manufactured fake problem end up in art and design education where a lot of the struggle, for instance, with AI is developed from the perspective of how do we teach it properly. We have to talk about the ethics. We have to talk about all this stuff and all this stuff. And now we are allowed to prompt because we talked about all the serious stuff. But the problem is that the real hard question is how do we problematize such technology in art and design education? And it's a hard, hard, hard question. So, of course, we can't really spend too much time on it. Going back to beautiful stuff. So, I like this image, and I like the Deep Dream project when it was introduced like 10 years ago by Google because it really captures also something that is happening in terms of capturing our gaze in the sense that when Google basically went public with this project, they were basically for the first time becoming public with a lot of research that they had done on machine learning. They didn't talk about what they were doing, what was the plan, what they were going to apply it to, what the kind of already connection with, let's say, military project or a specific corporation surveillance program. No, they just made nice images. So they used the visual art as a way to somehow distract us, giving away a toolkit to make more nice, funny pictures, so that we don't have time to talk about all the stuff around these interesting aesthetics. And yeah, that's the wrong side, because there should be also another little thingy on the top about the question of extraction in terms of both hardware resources, but also the question of data labeling and annotation. So anyway, so the problem with that is that we are stuck in a complete paralysis, because we have managed to create this sort of perfect storm in which we have tech that creates this sort of mesmerizing aesthetics. Then we are all the time interacting with each other through push button mechanics that do have a massive impact cognitively in terms of how we are creating dependence and excitement and goal and reward mechanism with devices and interfaces that can amplify and augment this process. And we also stuck into this idea of proximate future that I learned about from Brendan, which is this concept of we're never quite there yet, but we just have to work a little bit harder and we will be there. Everything is going to be solved. All the problems of the world will be solved but not quite. So you know that's the self-driving car that's self-drive but not completely. And so that's also like the news that you read about breakthrough in sort of lab, scientific lab in which they managed to do like something ridiculous that cannot scale or anything but then you have a lot of media attention around it. But this media attention or this discourse that it creates is a way for us to be confident that we are walking towards something that's going to be totally awesome. Another issue, and this is one that is more specific to, let's say, the cultural sector, This is one that is more specific to, let's say, the cultural sector. It's that we have managed to get stuck into this way of working that is, yeah, it's like the formula to make a career in media art. And you're laughing, but you know it. You know what I mean. You pick an issue, then you just have to twist it to make it a little bit weird. Or another option is to document and map it, and then you exhibit the result, and then you move on and you rinse, repeat, rewash, extract. I'm not saying that to be all fancy and critical because I've done that, everyone is doing it. This is how we were taught how to do it, this is how we shaped our practice. It's not going anywhere because we are stuck in the form of hyper commodification of our capacity and our intelligence and our creative abilities that does not serve anyone. It's going to serve maybe like some carriers for those who are grinding like maniacs and will be able to somehow manage to make a little bit of a living out of this formula but in practice it's just not helping. And so because we are completely stuck into a cultural sector that needs this form of work to be able to creep it and to recycle through different cycles. So now we're entering the scientific part of the presentation. So this is the avant-garde. So people, you never know. You don't know who they are. You never learn about them. There's not going to be any documentation. They just help create some sort of momentum. On the x-axis, we've got the time, and on the y-axis, we've got hype, so the hype quantity. Usually, the avant-garde is somehow creating a sort of context for which more privileged cultural workers are able to benefit from. By more privileged cultural workers, I mean people who do have maybe like generational or individual wealth, or maybe just talented at writing funding applications, or it could be people who are very well networked, like old boys network phenomena or stuff like this. In this process, the original discourse is somehow softened, but also there is a lot of invisibilization taking place in this sort of increasing visibility. Once this happens, the cultural institution arrives, and they are able to capitalize on this sort of context that has been created to apply for funding. A lot of this funding is going to be spent and I don't mean here but in many situations on communication, on management on production, on coordination and very very little will actually basically go back into the practitioner themselves. Then we do have after some point in the form of academic extraction because there is enough stuff that happens and so it becomes quite interesting to look into this to well basically create more derivative discourse or work around what has been hyped. Then you enter this sort of discourse party time where the cheese souffle is starting to fall apart a little bit, but it's a very important one because this is the moment where a lot of critique is happening. A critique that can be useful and important, but it's also important in its role to maintain a process of creative destruction and seeds future reflection for future hype to basically emerge from this cycle. And usually you have art and design academies at the end who decide to implement, change their curriculum on something that is not relevant anymore. So now how can we somehow work around this context? And this comes close to this permacomputing issue, or issue, or idea. One thing I didn't mention is that through this sort of different cycle of hype and novelty, there are also a lot of people who are doing work in the cultural sector or the field of art and cultural production, who are quite close to practices of political activism, and who have been working on this issue like forever. And it's kind of painful for this group and these communities to see some of their work being somehow capitalized upon by others, and then things being completely forgotten, disappearing, being irrelevant, and then suddenly becoming popular again. And this is exhausting. And when we talk about the, let's say, the question of, question of instance this sort of maximalist techno-aesthetic or the issues of e-waste or overconsumption and the problem the environmental problem with with tech and art this is not new this is really not new so this is the low-tech manifesto from James Wolbeink from 1999 that was presented at the Next 5 Minutes Festival in Amsterdam. And you can do a little bit of search and replace on this text and remove the stuff that kind of aged a little bit. And that could be posted on social media today, and people would be like, wow, this is super edgy. And this is sad because we've had this discussion over and over and over and over again. Artists practices related to permaculture have also existed also connecting with things like e-waste. And like this is a work from Nancy Moreau-Flude who very early on connected these two things together. And this is a bit of a documentation of one of her work, but the problem with this kind of cultural workers working in this space is that the work is not commodified in such a way that it can be exhibited or ended up in a book or documented or anything. These are much more complex interdisciplinary work that are close to basically social context and social practices. And as a result, they just dissolve because there is no support to actually maintain this kind of momentum. So when an artist is done or burning out, this is the end of these things and we forget about this stuff. And I have to say, personally, my interest into a lot of this topic do not come from a recent interest in them, but I learned about questions of intersectional feminism, questions about ecology, about colonality, these kind of things. I learned about this while I was part of this, let's say, subculture of artist slash hacker slash activist. And I learned about that 20, 25 years ago. And not to say that the discourse that we had at the time was as sharp as it is right now, but a lot of stuff that we took for granted or that was a little bit more tacit or implicit, maybe we should have made it a little bit more explicit. And so it's a little bit painful when you see, again, you see this sort of wave coming back and forth. And if you are interested to know in particular with a critic of tech, you can check the wiki of Marlous de Valk, the Damaged Earth Catalog, where she started to basically create a sort of mapping of some important, let's say, trend that happened in this sort of critical space of the ICT industry, all linked to, let's say, post-contr-cultural cybernetic context. And in this context, there is permacomputing. So permacomputing was coined by Velamatias Eikila, who is a hacker and active member of the Demoscenum. And we posted online a sort of a collection of a small text, a small thought about the topic. And somehow it stuck. So why it's sticking? There are several theories about it. I'm not going to go into them now. We don't have the time. But somehow this stuff is sticking. And it's growing. So some people are getting invested in it. And so we started the wiki two years ago and the whole process is really open. It's really a massive work in progress. And this is the latest way that we are formulating it. Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer network technology, inspired by permaculture. There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing especially wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism. PAMA Computing is also an Ethiopian ideal that needs a lot of rethinking, rebuilding, and technical design work to put in practice. This is why a lot of material on this wiki is highly technical. More importantly, there is no PAMA computing kit to buy. See PAMA computing as an invitation to collectively and radically rethink computational culture. It is not a tech solution searching for a problem. And that basically comes to this point where, what do we do then? If we don't have a kit, if we don't have the right operating system to install, if we don't have the software that we use, if I cannot buy the sort of ethical Raspberry Pi that's going to make my work... So what? And I don't know. Nobody knows. That's the whole thing. We have no clue. It's really like an open space. This is really part of this idea. We need to have a space for this collective problematization to happen. And that's what we're trying to do with power computing. Now we also have three steps to success. So this is a little bit like the roadmap to try to, despite the fact that this is an open invitation. Five here. So we try to, despite the fact that this is an open invitation, five here. Step one, or part one, is the collective problematization. So how can we achieve this goal of collective problematization? Well, we run basically a public list. There are 300 people on this list. It's sometimes quiet quiet sometimes less quiet We have chat rooms and the two chat rooms one on IRC one on XMPP. There is 160 People in total the XMPP room is super chatty the wiki there are 15 people. This number is completely wrong I don't know where this is coming from There are 24 people contributing to the wiki, but I would say that it's like six, seven are the most active. There are now meetings, regular meetings in Berlin at a place called Offline. Also regular meetings at EFI Books in Philadelphia where people can meet together and discuss these things and then try to figure out what the hell are we trying to do. There are forums as well, web forums where a lot of things are being discussed. And on the Fediverse, if you follow the hashtag permacomputing, you will see people interacting with each other on this topic. We've started to organize events where we try to present works and discuss the topic collectively, another type of event. And we also do this sort of funny workshop. And this one is one that often given by Ola. Which is a way to try to bring up these issues and make them accessible. Because everyone is suffering and has something to say about these issues of tech. It's not just developers who should be holding the mic. The second aspect of permacomputing is how can we practice degrowth right now? And this goes into making projects like radically rethinking your work. So this is a work I've been involved with where it's about, it's a video game but we've been using only repurposed PCBs and chips to make it. People are trying to rethink how photography could be approached, and it's quite close to the previous presentation discussion, so I'm not going to go too much into the details of this. Workshops, and we were trying to develop, trying to bring back a sort of crossroad between ecologism and network infrastructures and self-hosting. Also a lot of work is being put into trying to address the issues of Chromebook, which in the Netherlands have been exploding in all sorts of primary and secondary schools where families are investing a lot of money in things that are basically bricks four years later but there are ways to recover them so we are really trying to document that as much as possible and then there is a third part which is very very very very important because the one is important to try to be aware of issues two is also important to start to really radically change how we do things as cultural workers, but also beyond the field of art and cultural production. But we cannot live in other people's e-waste forever. So we also need to start discussing what we want to do with computation and what we can do with that. So this is where there is a little bit more technical research in alternative, let's say, web network protocol. Also research into virtual machines and portability across a whole range of minimal hardware. Also research from what could be computation without screen. And this is from Michal Plodner, the whole research on also this link with nature. What is the link or meaningful link of working with computer differently in relationship to let's say environmental constraints. Talking about constraints, the way par computing works, to conclude almost, is that it basically sits in between this idea of self-imposed constraints and external constraints. External constraints because everything is finite, so we cannot stop basically, well we have to stop thinking that there is infinite resources and infinite possibilities to extract and to compute, but however we still live for many of us in situation that make us believe that there is no limit. So we need to introduce like self-imposed constraints as a form of political gesture and practice. So there is a bit of artificiality, but that's for us a meaningful way to try to bootstrap something different. If you want to know more, you can look up this amazing paper. I also want to very briefly mention other people's work. Because all the stuff I presented so far are from people who are explicitly using the word permacomputing in the presentation of their work or in their website, so on and so forth, or software. But of course permacomputing is only one out of many, many, many, many different attempts to try to do things differently. And this unbinary, for instance, in Belgium, is a reverse, an EOS reverse engineering lab that is doing quite amazing work into developing tools to actually work with EOS, because practically anyone who knows a little bit about electronics knows that past the 90s, working with chips can be quite complicated. Also the work of Marie Verde who is trying to rethink what is the role of a designer in a situation where different type of environmental constraints needs to be taken into account for media work. And of course, one that a lot of you may know already, which is the low-tech magazine that has been one of these, like I said in the previous graph, little thing going on forever, forever, forever, and still going on on this topic. So ultimately, what we're trying to do is to try to break this curse of novelty and try to stay focused and then try to figure out how to create alliances in our practices and trying to find a way to, as we have to make a living and we have to survive in this sort of highly competitive and harsh environment that is the cultural sector, how can we start to transform it radically one step at a time? If you want to get in touch or if it somehow resonates with you and you feel like that could be a cool group to hang out with, yes, you can get in touch. Some of us et un groupe cool à partager. Oui, vous pouvez vous en toucher. Certains d'entre nous sont ici pendant le festival, donc n'hésitez pas à vous abonner. Merci! you