Stephen"Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture"
Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. At the heart of permacomputing are design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing, as well as being creative with available computational resources. As a result, permacomputing aesthetics provides a transformative countervoice to digital aesthetics
that promote maximisation, hyperconsumerism, and waste. In terms of implications for design, this means that next to a more formal understanding of aesthetics—how things look—there is also an urgency for permacomputing to critically engage with how things work, how they are created, how they are situated, the conditions of their creation and their component materials.
In this paper, we argue for the potential of permacomputing as a rich framework for exploring creative design
constraints building on a long history applying constraints in art, design and cultural practices. This lineage highlights that the use of self-imposed constraints or the repurposing of obsolete devices in permacomputing cannot be conflated with restorative nostalgia, but is instead substantiated and post-digital in nature. However, we also argue that the greatest challenge for permacomputing is the potential lack of
immanent critique and situatedness in the use of these design constraints. In times when intersectional approaches are increasingly needed to meaningfully engage with contemporary issues, the failure to contextualise the conditions of permacomputing could be at odds with its transformative agenda and limit its practice to a form of cultural appropriation, an aestheticisation of poverty, an artistic genre, a hobby or a
privileged subcultural style.
https://bleu255.com/~aymeric/dump/limits2023-paper50.pdf
Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. At the heart of permacomputing are design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing, as well as being creative with available computational resources. As a result, permacomputing aesthetics provides a transformative countervoice to digital aesthetics
that promote maximisation, hyperconsumerism, and waste. In terms of implications for design, this means that next to a more formal understanding of aesthetics—how things look—there is also an urgency for permacomputing to critically engage with how things work, how they are created, how they are situated, the conditions of their creation and their component materials.
In this paper, we argue for the potential of permacomputing as a rich framework for exploring creative design
constraints building on a long history applying constraints in art, design and cultural practices. This lineage highlights that the use of self-imposed constraints or the repurposing of obsolete devices in permacomputing cannot be conflated with restorative nostalgia, but is instead substantiated and post-digital in nature. However, we also argue that the greatest challenge for permacomputing is the potential lack of
immanent critique and situatedness in the use of these design constraints. In times when intersectional approaches are increasingly needed to meaningfully engage with contemporary issues, the failure to contextualise the conditions of permacomputing could be at odds with its transformative agenda and limit its practice to a form of cultural appropriation, an aestheticisation of poverty, an artistic genre, a hobby or a
privileged subcultural style.
https://bleu255.com/~aymeric/dump/limits2023-paper50.pdf
Stephen