PhD researcher
Marloes de Valk (NL) is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the threat of global warming and being spied on by the devices surrounding her. Surprised by the obsessive dedication with which we, even post-Snowden, share intimate details about ourselves to an often not too clearly defined group of others, astounded by the deafening noise we generate while socializing with the technology around us, she is looking to better understand why.
She is a PhD researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, in collaboration with The Photographer’s Gallery, looking into the material and social impact of the networked image on the climate crisis, with special attention to the entanglements between greenwashing – the misdirection of attention and efforts in tackling the crisis – and the increasing energy and resource consumption associated with the circulation of networked images. Typical of those in the post-despair stage, she experiments with sustainable ways of publishing her findings.
Marloes is a thesis supervisor on the MA Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She has participated in exhibitions internationally, teaches workshops, gives lectures (a.o. at Transmediale and Chaos Communication Congress) and has published articles on Free/Libre/Open Source Software, free culture, art and technology (a.o. in the Contemporary Music Review and Artnodes). In 2018 she was the winner of the Hash Award, an international production award granted by ZKM and Akademie Schloss Solitude. As a member of artist collective GOTO10, she has helped develop the puredyne GNU/Linux distribution and Make Art festival. Together with Aymeric Mansoux she is editor of the publication FLOSS+Art, published early 2009. She is part of Plutonian Corp., La Société Anonyme and Iodine dynamics.
Her latest projects include the game What Remains, created together with Iodine Dynamics, a darkly humorous, authentic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game about industry disinformation shaping public opinion and national policy on climate change and environmental protection. In 2020 she published Villains and Heroes, an interactive fiction in which you accidentally get invited to the costume party hosted by multi-billionaire Robert Mercer, shortly after the election of Trump in December 2016. As the story unfolds, you try to uncover the identity of the disguised guests – among who key players in a network of opaquely funded libertarian think tanks active in tax-deductible climate change denial and disinformation campaigns.