Permacomputing in the Arts

It's one thing to talk about the negative impact of technology, it's however a whole different thing to radically reinvent one's practice, collective habits, and the infrastructures that support digital culture. While cultural work is often lauded for its capacity to illustrate and communicate societal issues, it also struggles, paradoxically, to challenge the problematic systems and tools that enable such capacity. Just like any other field or sector, art, design and culture production does not exist in a distant plane of existence but is also part of the problem, and is a hostage of big tech. In this presentation we will first discuss the complicated relationship between art and ICT, then move on to the limits of thinking in terms of alternatives, and finally introduce permacomputing, a nascent community of practice that is trying to collectively problematise all this mess.