13 May 23
Funded by the Swiss National Research Fund, Discarded Digital is a field research project conducted by Nicolas Nova, Anaïs Bloch and Thibault Le Page about the use/re-use/repurposing of digital technologies from the recent past. Both an inquiry into the second (and probably third) life of digital rubbish and an exploration of alternatives to e-waste recycling businesses this project aims at (1) documenting lesser known practices in the field of art, design and preservation, (2) grasping the kind of artifacts that emerged from them, and (3) understanding the skills they rely on and the knowledge they produce.
What ideological, social and biophysical factors have precipitated the current environmental crises? What leverage is available for transformative practices and imaginaries to overcome the continuous growth of our energy consumption? The Post Growth Toolkit invites us to challenge the dominant narratives about growth and progress, and re-envision social metabolism through an understanding of the energy it requires, reconnecting human survival with the living, material qualities of the biosphere, drawing on ecofeminism, indigenous knowledge, environmental accounting and historical materialism.