Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture
Bibliography
Mansoux, Aymeric, Brendan Howell, Dušan Barok, and Ville-Matias Heikkilä. “Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture.” In Ninth Computing within Limits 2023. Virtual: LIMITS, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21428/bf6fb269.6690fc2e.
Abstract
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. It 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.
Notes
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture
Read [@mansouxPermacomputingAestheticsPotential2023]
I liked the paper tremendously, especially in tone and clarity. I was left with the feeling that something was amiss, and after some delving I believe it to be the discourse on aesthetics. The term causes me troubles all the time, never quite being able to grasp its meaning or application.
The text is basically a juxtaposition of permacomputing aesthetics against maximalist techno-aesthetics. The former is a perspective of active engagement with one’s environment.
“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.” (Mansoux et al., 2023, p. 1)
Maximalist techno-aesthetics on the other hands are a capitalists tool to promise and sell a future that never arrives. Everything we acquire becomes just a bug-ridden preview for a sure to come updated version.
“aesthetics that are the manifestation of technologies driven by the myth of perpetual growth and infinite resources, aesthetics based on the everincreasing 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.” (Mansoux et al., 2023, p. 2)
What I experienced as amiss was the differentiation whom these aesthetics are for. Whereas permacomputing aesthetics are introduced as a perspective for “artists, designers and cultural workers” (Mansoux et al., 2023, p. 3) it is most likely consumers who, driven by maximalist techno-aesthetics, cause and suffer the effects of a neocapitalist digitality. The question would be, what role and responsibility does permacomputing for the non-artists, non-designers, and non-cultural-workers, for the people who just want to lay back and enjoy a feed? Can it be of pedagogic nature, inspirational, become a cultural shaping force? Can it change the material conditions of the consumerist landscape?