Discarded Digital: investigating the amateur re-use of digital rubbishes
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ENIAROF in Marseille
On Saturday April 30 and Sunday May 1, 2022, I’m attending the 32nd ENIAROF at the Pillard factory in Marseille. THE HYDRA MONSTER FUNFAIR, as mentioned on their website, is a popular digital Eniarof festival celebrating DIY and digital tinkering. ENIAROF is “Foraine” (funfair) spelled backwards. The “Pillard factory” is a former internal combustion engine…
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Chimeras
As part of a workshop given by artists Anne-Lise Tacheron and Daphnée Gharaee to various classes in the City of Lausanne, recycled toys are made available for modification and transformation. These workshops have given rise to the Chimère exhibition at the Forum de l’Hôtel de Ville, which I’m visiting in March 2022. It’s a workshop…
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Different levels of interventions
“Hacking” electronic toys isn’t homogeneous, as attested by these two examples, taken from (1) Game Boy Modding (a boo about to modify GameBoys) by Greg Farrell, (2) A fanzine by T.A.C.O. Team about toys hacking. While the formats of the two documents are close (using drawings and informal ways of describing things), there is a…
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Cosmodule, Lyon
Had a chance to visit the Cosmodule Art R&D Lab in Lyon yesterday. Not strictly focused on recycling electronics, but still highly interesting in the way some of their projects deal with old consoles, use video game spare parts (such as buttons, lights and motherboards) – both as an inspiration for creative projects, and as…
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Retrospeculative Design
This afternoon on the INPUT POKE SAVE Discord server that the UNIL-EPFL Gamelab put together, I attended a presentation by my colleague Douglas about is projects. Based on a series of examples, he used the term “retrospeculative Design” that he coined with Antonin Fourneau. A term that refers to the sort of design approach he…
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Permacomputing and recycled electronics
In the latest instalment of his newsletter, Robin Sloane mentions the notion of “permacomputing”: There’s an idea simmering out there, still fringe, coaxed forward by a network of artists and hobbyists: it’s called “permacomputing” and it asks the question, what would computers look like if they were really engineered to last, on serious time scales?…
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“Garbage Watch”
Garbage Watch is a wristwatch “built from the tech the world threw away in the trash”. “Launching in 2022, the waiting list is now open”.
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Making new games for old consoles
The Guardian has a piece about new games designed for consoles of the past. And more specifically, about this wave of new games released on “old-school cartridges”. As usual with this kind of piece, the topic of “authenticity” is mentioned, as a motivation. More interestingly, the “unexpected cool factor of physical media” is also highlighted,…
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Homebrew game characteristics
Listening to a talk by Melanie Swalwell about her recent book called “Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality”. Her definition of homebrew game characteristics are quite relevant to us in the project, as they clarify what it corresponds to:
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Playful repurposing of digital technology through sculpture
Game ? Advance, by Alex Custodio, is an inspiring project that repurposes digital artefacts through sculpture. The aim is both to provide a critique of “how hardware and software reproduce dominant ideologies around gender and power”, and to imagine an alternative history for Nintendo’s handheld. Alex Custodio addresses the following questions “What does it mean…