The project acknowledges the materiality and weight of this data, its carbon footprint, the hardware required to transmit, receive and view it, how these are produced, consumed and disposed of and asks what alternative practices currently exist that try to reduce its impact on the planet.

ICT’s carbon footprint is estimated to make up 3% to 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The networked image plays a central role in this, as it has become a commodity that is responsible for 80% of network traffic. Streaming media is currently (2021) responsible for 1% of global greenhouse emissions.

The project refuses the rhetoric of progress and a dismissal of alternatives based on scalability and universality and instead focuses on alternatives, existing practices that aim at providing situated solutions.

In partnership with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, based at the London South Bank University, Marloes de Valk was appointed as a Doctoral Researcher to study the potentials of alternative media ecologies on community-run servers and networks. She will engage with and analyse practices surrounding non-profit, artistic and activist servers, maintained by communities to suit their specific, often local needs, using existing networking tools and protocols as well as developing their own.

The title of the project references Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book 'The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins', published by Princeton University Press in 2015.

Selected Activities & Publications

Presentation of ‘A Tale of Two Data Centres’ at the Master Experimental Publishing at the Piet Zwart Institute, 2024

Presentation of ‘A Tale of Two Data Centres’ at FIBER’s reassemble lab ‘Practising Permacomputing’, 2023

Presentation of ‘A Tale of Two Data Centres’ during The Hmm’s Data Centre Tour, 2023

Delete by Default, article on unthinking.photography. Jon Uriarte, 2023

The Tangible Cloud Oracle at the Tangible Cloud, exhibition at Gallery KBK, Brussels, March 2023

Small File Photo Festival, The Photographers' Gallery and online exhibition, 2023

rosa’s Ecofeminist Dictionary, in: Sunthinking. Marloes de Valk, 2022

Permacomputing. In: Counter-N. Marloes de Valk and Ville-Matias Heikkilä, 2022

rosa’s Ecofeminist Dictionary. In: A Traversal
Network of Feminist Servers. Rotterdam: Varia, pp. 167–176. Marloes de Valk, 2022

A Paper Archive: Documenting the Live Performance
Capitalist Magic, in: Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference. New
York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1–6. Marloes de Valk, 2022.

Damaged Earth Catalogue - A wiki mapping alternative terms and communities of practice working on sustainability and social justice, critically responding to the classic Whole Earth Catalogue.

Green Hacks: Optimising images for web - Rekka Bellum. Produced for The Photographers' Gallery's Green Hacks – a series of artist-made how-to videos unpacking practical tips to educate, inform and inspire their community.

Douglas Schuler, Marloes de Valk, Shreya Urvashi and Scott Rose. 2022.
A Pattern Language for the LIMITS Community: We Make the Road by Walking, a Messy Ethnography. In LIMITS’22: Workshop on Computing within Limits.

Talk and workshop at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz, 16-18 June 2022.
https://art-meets.radical-openness.org/

Workshop at Tangible Cloud, Green Fabric, Brussels, 18-21 May 2022.
https://tangible-cloud.be/

Performance and talk at NØ LAB: Post-despair, la Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 28 April 2022. https://gaite-lyrique.net/evenement/no-lab-post-despair

Talk at FIBER Reassemble Lab: Natural Intelligence, Towards Renewable and Regenerative Digital Infrastructures, Amsterdam, 10 March 2022.
https://www.fiber-space.nl/project/natural-intelligence/

Green Hacks: How to install custom firmware - Mathijs van Oosterhoudt. Produced for The Photographers' Gallery's Green Hacks – a series of artist-made how-to videos unpacking practical tips to educate, inform and inspire their community.

Talk at On the Edge #1, with Laura Marks and Olia Lialina, Merz Academy, Stuttgart. 7 December 2021.
https://www.merz-akademie.de/en/veranstaltungen/on-the-edge-1/

Presentation of paper A pluriverse of local worlds: a review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices, LIMITS'21, 14 June 2021. https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/

Marloes de Valk, A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices (2021) in Workshop on Computing within Limits

Marloes de Valk, Refusing the Burden of Computation: Edge Computing and Sustainable ICT (2021) in APRJA: Research Refusal

Marloes de Valk interview with Joana Moll on 4004, her new commission by The Photographers' Gallery digital programmes and the role of artists and the art world in the transition to a less polluting society. Read it on unthinking.photography 

Marloes de Valk interview with Nestor Siré on the development of alternative networks that arose in Cuba, visual culture on SNET, as well as the social and physical aspect of digital networks. Read Part I & Part II on unthinking.photography