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Developing artistic/design research methodologies and workshop formats for regenerative digital practices
Connecting Otherwise is an artistic/design research project initiated by The Hmm and the research department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Instituut, alongside a consortium of invited stakeholders from the creative industries and research institutions such as Small File Media Festival, Hackers & Designers and Stichting LINK. It focuses on the development of interdisciplinary workshop formats exploring regenerative aesthetics and the materiality of digital technologies through hands-on and collective research approaches.
Drawing on feminist and decolonial hacking principles and critical making, the project’s aim is to make tangible and reimagine digital materiality while resisting extractive tendencies. Promoting regenerative design principles, it addresses the environmental impact of digital technologies and resource depletion, emphasizing art and design’s role in tackling these challenges. We believe the intersectional character of such challenges requires collective and interdisciplinary approaches to design and art making, which are rarely fostered conceptually and practically within the creative industries and educational institutions.
The workshops build upon the expertise of the collaborating partners, who bring together art, design, technology, and education and have been instrumental in bridging art and science, supporting artists and designers in contributing to interdisciplinary research environments.
Via a series of interconnected workshops the project will engage art and design professionals, educators, and students in material-based research around the social and environmental impact of digital technologies. Participants will explore circuit-making through community craft traditions, embrace ‘slowness’ and ‘lowness’ as frugal and regenerative principles for digital design and art making, and use weaving as a framework for exploring interconnected digital and territorial relationships. The aim is to creatively and critically examine the challenges that (future) art and design practitioners in the creative industries face when building and participating in contemporary digital culture in ways that are both sustainable and equitable.
This workgroup maps the often-invisible regenerative material and digital practices already embedded in existing cultural and creative networks. Through surveys and collaborative sessions, it surfaces latent forms
of circularity as well as gaps and challenges. As a counterpoint to technocratic diagrams like the butterfly
model, this counter-mapping centers lived knowledge, collective infrastructures, and emerging patterns of care, aiming to support transitions toward more cohesive, viable, and ecologically grounded creative practices.
This workgroup furthermore examines how research methodologies from across the work packages can be
shared with the consortium’s diverse communities and geographies. In traditional lab environments, documentation preserves experiments, ensures comparability, and leaves a research trace. But keeping
a record is also a means to claim ownership over the results. This worgroup aims to question this notion of
ownership over knowledge. An iteration of the open-source publishing tool Etherport will be integrated into the project to support collaborative documentation of workshop activities. Originally developed by Gijs de Heij and
the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) within the SIA-RAAK-funded research project Going Hybrid!, Etherport is actively maintained and used by various research communities such as the Institute of Network Cultures and Amateur Cities. With the INC set to close in 2026, Etherport is seeking a new hosting organization.
Aligned with the themes of this application, the Connecting Otherwise consortium supports the collective
maintenance of Etherport, and the diverse artist/design research communities it serves. In accordance
with circular principles, this WP adopts Etherport as a case study in regenerative, commons-based digital
infrastructure—prioritizing care and continuation over the creation of new tools. The aim is to develop
Etherport with a stronger focus on sustainability and accessibility, and for long-term integration into art and
design research. A workshop for GRA/SI students will support adoption and encourage broader use across
partner institutions. Additionally, by using the tool to document this project across different partner institutions,
we aim to encourage its broader use. With INC’s discontinuation it will be important for Etherport to establish a stable, distributed user base.
We plan to expand Etherport’s capabilities to specifically facilitate workshop documentation. This builds
on H&D’s work for the Energy Storage research group (co-led by Dorine van Meel, WP 2), where they developed
the LabJournal tool using similar technology.
The documentation tools will support the entire research process, enabling the development of a hybrid
publication. Insights from the various WPs will directly inform the evolution of the publishing infrastructure—
such as WP 3’s work on small file publishing will inform how images and media are compressed for lighter publication on Etherport.
Questions:
and their wider networks, and how can these be surfaced through artistic and community-
based counter-mapping methodologies?
of circularity, fostering more nuanced, politically engaged understandings in cultural and community contexts?
Logins, can we add users ourselves? can we add users to our organization?
Different levels of publicness of pads (shareability of editable pad links)
Differentiation (visually and structurally) of note pads (only visible online) and articles (visible online & pdf)
TOC: possible to add more information (author names, small abstracts), now its only titles of articles
2nd level hierachy of menu (website), 1. chapter, 2. articles
This workgroup builds upon eco-feminist principles and propositions for decolonial hardware, such as clay PCB microcontrollers and mud batteries. The material lens of clay and sand informs the exploration of alternative hardware practices, sourcing local materials to develop and speculate upon renewable, site-specific approaches to technology design.
We envision clay and sand—and their transformation into ceramic components and microchips used in
computers—not only as a basis for new aesthetics and imaginaries for future technologies, but also
as a medium whose natural degradation invites us to critically reflect on aspects of permanence and
planned obsolescence in technological design. The inherent fragility and disintegration of such materials
over time become part of the speculative framework: a way to explore hardware that decomposes, returns
to the earth, and resists the logic of disposability and extractive durability that defines most technological
production today.
This approach sparks discussions around fair-trade, ethical, and biodegradable hardware in the pursuit of
environmental justice. By integrating ancient, community-centered craft traditions into circuit-making
as an artistic practice, we challenge colonial legacies, interfere with market-driven imperatives, and open
pathways for imagining technological futures that are materially finite yet socially and ecologically attuned.
Question:
This workgroup aims to shift the prevailing paradigm of technological advancement from “move fast, break things” and “always on, always available” towards approaching slowness (slow loading time, slow processing) and lowness (low energy, low tech, low bandwidth, low resolution, low fidelity) as generative and creative lenses through which to engage with digital technology. As such, this WP is carried by a concern about “bandwidth imperialism,” a term coined by our collaborators from the Small File Media Festival, and questions ideals such as net neutrality and equal access to high-speed internet. These ideals are globally unattainable because they are based on a first-world view of digital access. This view doesn’t match the reality of the use of digital technology in a large part of the world.
Question:
This workgroup aims to investigate the colonial implications embedded in network technologies through the materiality of fiber and the practice of weaving. Grounded in the histories and material traditions of the Kalinago Territory and the broader Caribbean, the research examines how indigenous weaving practices, basketry, and fiber arts can inform more regenerative, non-extractive approaches to technological infrastructures. Engaging with textile structure offers a tangible entry point into the often intangible realities of digital infrastructure. Through cross-disciplinary artistic methods, it seeks to uncover new ways of conceptualizing networks, circularity, and resilience, using bio-based materials and ancestral techniques to imagine ecological alternatives to current digital and material systems.
Questions:
How can the materiality of fiber and the practice of weaving reveal colonial implications embedded in network technologies?
In what ways can a situated perspective on fibers inspire alternative, more equitable and regenerative forms and aesthetics of digital connectivity?
Hardware and Eco-Feminist Art. Hacking and Artistic Practices Towards Ethical Technology
Patrícia J. Reis / Stefanie Wuschitz
https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7862-8/hardware-and-eco-feminist-art/?c=310000017
Complicit Chips reader
https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Complicit_Chips_Reader
https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Complicit_Chips
Computing within Limits
Marloes de Valk: A pluriverse of local worlds: a review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices
https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/papers/limits21-devalk.pdf
The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*),
Lauren Berlant
After progress: Notes for an ecology of perhaps
Savransky
The Symbolic Order of Technological Progress
Dani Ploeger
SANJANA PAUL, Principles for Environmental Justice in Technology: Toward a Regenerative Future for Computing
https://computingwithinlimits.org/2025/papers/limits2025-paul-justice.pdf
Iness Ben Guirat, Jan Tobias Mühlberg, Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs https://computingwithinlimits.org/2025/papers/limits2025-benguirat-resistance.pdf
Computing, Complexity and Degrowth : Systemic Considerations for Digital De-escalation
https://computingwithinlimits.org/2024/papers/limits2024-girard-deescalation.pdf
A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers
https://atnofs.constantvzw.org/
Download pdf https://hypha.ro/files/ATNOFS-screen.pdf
Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski, Bandwidth Imperialism and Small-File Media
https://post45.org/2021/04/bandwidth-imperialism-and-small-file-media/
Conference / workshop / online
https://computingwithinlimits.org/2026/
Climate Justice Code / Casco
Mbembe, Earthly Community
Damaged earth catalog
https://damaged.bleu255.com/
Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh. 2019. Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, Oakland
Aymeric Manxous https://www.collectiefeigendom.nl/en/ownership/digital-collective-ownership
Femke Snelting, Eva Weinmeyr https://parsejournal.com/article/ecologies-of-dissemination-editorial/
https://parsejournal.com/article/reuse-cases/**
Femke Snelting, Eva Weinmeyr, Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse
https://hackersanddesigners.nl/prototypes-for-a-lighter-internet-with-tumo.html