May 13 2024 French national newspaper Le Monde published an article by journalist Nastasia Hadjadji based on an interview with CSNI researcher Marloes de Valk about her doctoral research. The article Permacomputing: la discrète communauté qui défend des outils numériques libres, sobres et décroissants* discusses the work of a growing community of people exploring computational degrowth to diminish the negative environmental impact of digital technology. They resist the idea that the digital world is a cornucopia, a limitless and immaterial space. Instead they experiment with the creative potential of self-imposed constraints, inspired by the practice of permaculture, through a focus on repair, reuse, sobriety and accessibility.
The article features one of the outcomes of de Valk’s research at CSNI, the Damaged Earth Catalog, an online publication that helped popularise the term permacomputing and the game What Remains, made in 2019 for the 1986 NES game console, created by her and a team of four artists and programmers under the name of Iodine Dynamics.** It also discusses the work of Aymeric Mansoux, researcher at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the work of artist, researcher and activist collective Varia, the work of Solar Protocol, the project A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers, and more.
Read the full article on Le Monde’s website
(https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2024/05/13/permacomputing-la-discrete-communaute-qui-experimente-un-numerique-sobre-et-decroissant_6232934_4408996.html).
* Permacomputing: the discreet community that defends free, sober and degrowing digital tools.
** unpaywalled version: https://archive.is/bNNdz
Image caption: Still from What Remains (2019), a Nintendo Entertainment
System game developed by Iodine Dynamics (Arnaud Guillon, Chun Lee,
Dustin Long, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk).