Relational Aesthesis in Permacomputing Practice: Building a Solar Powered Website from Reclaimed Materials
This research explores the practical challenges and transformative potential of permacomputing for individuals and communities seeking more sustainable and responsible ways to engage with digital infrastructure, contributing to an emerging field.
The authors moved a personal website from a data center to a self-hosted solar-powered server built from reclaimed electronics. This project revealed the difficulties of moving away from a maximalist techno-aesthetic while reusing existing technologies, highlighting the potential for community building and making digital infrastructures visible to foster responsible technology use.
Permacomputing is a nascent concept and community of practice concerned with developing alternative computing systems grounded in principles of resilience, reuse, sufficiency, and ecological limits. However, research engaging with permacomputing remains in an early stage of development, raising concerns about whether permacomputing can move beyond reflective critique to become a meaningful alternative practice. Through a research-through-design case study, we documented our experience moving a personal website from a data centre in Texas to a self-hosted solar-powered server built from reclaimed electronics. Guided by permacomputing principles and relational aesthesis, we explore what it takes for permacomputing to reconfigure material and perceptual relations. Our findings reveal the frictions of moving away from a maximalist techno-aesthetic while attempting to re-use already existing technologies, potential ways to overcome these challenges through building a community of practice, and the transformative potential of visibilizing and visceralizing digital infrastructures to cultivate more responsible ways of relating to technology. This paper contributes to emerging research on permacomputing and its aesthetics by bringing it into dialogue with theories of non-place and relational aesthesis. Rather than functioning as a purely symbolic gesture, permacomputing practices can cultivate greater collective autonomy, agency, and responsibility in how communities engage and create meaning within digital infrastructures. In the context of socio-ecological crises and anti-colonial transformation, our research offers a situated approach to building and relating to computing technologies in the ashes of dominant technological paradigms.