DECENTRALIZED AESTHETICS AND DIGITAL FREEDOM/PIKSEL 25
A hungry man arrives at a foreign village, asking its inhabitants for food. They refuse, claiming to have very little themselves. And so, the man places stones in a pot to make stone soup, telling the villagers it could taste much better, if only anyone had a few vegetables to spare. One villager steps forward, then another, until many arrive with onions, carrots, and potatoes –culminating in a communal feast far richer than what any individual possessed alone.
An old folk tale recounted by Jenny Pickett
Every year in Bergen, artists and scholars from across the world gather to perform, lecture, and exchange ideas under the banner of Piksel Fest. Their focus is experimental; the collision of digital and natural worlds, and the decentralization of tech. This November, we travelled to Bergen to meet the people driving this niche community, in an attempt to trace the political philosophy behind its aesthetics and installations.
We were first introduced to Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi, the artists behind APO-33; an interdisciplinary art and tech laboratory based in Nantes. During this year's festival run, they delivered a singular performance; a collective cooking experience, following a ratatouille recipe, in which kitchen utensils were plugged into a sound board, creating sonic feedback noise art.
The result was a layered experiment, blurring the lines between audience and artist; between everyday acts and performance.
But the deeper relevance, in the context of Piksel's open source ethos, is collective creation. Art, not as a product of individual genius but as an ever evolving recipe; with individual contributions as ingredients; to be replicated, modified, and remain unowned. The parallels to the open-source software movement are obvious–the idea extends far beyond the world of performance art. It raises essential questions across fields–from academia to the soup kitchen; a re-thinking of intellectual property, barrier of entry, and the fight for a commons: knowledge as a shared pool.
Origins
Piksel began taking form in 2003, originally as a gathering of developers and programmers. Founded by Gisle Frøysland, artist and musician active in the electronic art scene since the late 80s. At the time, the project operated under the Bergen Center for Electronic Art, before moving out to become its own organisation six years later. With no available video plugins in free software at the time, a mailing list was created to develop and standardise new systems, eventually bringing people to Bergen to work on these plugins together.
In 2013, Maite Cajaraville, also a veteran electronic artist with roots in Germany and Spain, performed in Bergen, where she met Gisle and eventually became a central organiser and curator of Piksel. Though the festival began with programming and digital development, it has grown into a haven for experimental electronic art, with free software and open technologies as integral aspects of its practice.
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Mission
Similar to its origin story, the festival's ethos has a lot to do with taking infrastructure into one's own hands. For Maite, owning the tools of artistic production is not only about democratizing access to technology; but also reclaiming aesthetic control from big tech's one-size-fits-all commercial software. As she tells us:
"Throughout the years you see a trend, and that's really interesting. Everyone is doing the same thing because these are the tools available on the market. But with free software you can actually own this thing, own it in the sense that you can make exactly what you want, no?"
The learning curve for home made software also leads to unexpected results; glitches, errors, an element of surprise that increases the opportunity for artistic novelty. The process in itself makes it difficult for aesthetics to be captured, dictated, and commercialised, keeping control in the hands of each individual artist. Aesthetic standardisation is a detriment to the plurality of visual expression, affirming a singular artistic norm, and therefore singular worldview; that of those who own the tools.
The roots of open software are academic in nature, emerging largely from university environments where systems were developed for scientific research and data mapping. When these tools are used with artistic intent, the result is an inevitable fusion of the two fields, science-informed aesthetic forms on one hand, and artistic perspectives entering scientific research on the other. The two disciplines, traditionally viewed as antithetical, now enrich and build upon each other.
A Growing Niche
With increasing big-tech monopolization, control, and censorship, as with Musk's acquisition of Twitter, counter-spaces tend to grow as users flee mainstream platforms. Fediverse is a long-standing example of counter-social media; a community driven network ensuring user data sovereignty, offering alternatives to X with Mastodon, and Meta's Instagram with Pixelfed.
"The younger generation will eventually realize that these platforms are tools of control. And I think that when this happens, there will be another revolution in free software."
Maite reminds that on a civilizational level, humanity's relationship to computing machines and especially mobile phones, is in its rudimentary phase. The longer the technology exists, the more questions must be addressed surrounding the meaning of data, the ownership of tools, and the longevity of digital memory.
The recurring obstacle in the way of decentralized infrastructure is cost and effort. Server maintenance, mass platform migration, and community longevity demand technical skill and sustained effort. Centralized platforms tend to obscure material and environmental costs, while decentralized systems tend to make infrastructure all too visible, leading to emerging discussions about permanence and necessity. If servers are energetically expensive; why must everything be available at all times?
"Like, OK, if we sleep at night, the server also sleeps at night. Why do we need the server open? Maybe that could be the future of technology."Marina Otero Verzier's film Compost Computacional screened during Piksel25, addresses the environmental cost of digital infrastructures, and raises the question of memory. She proposes that since the storage of information implies significant energetic cost, differentiation between crucial memory for future generations and superfluous data is a necessary and cost-effective endeavor. Rather than assuming perpetual availability, material conditions point to a more intentional use of digitality, aligning tech with reasonable needs over abstract notions of continuity.
On AI
The incendiary discourse surrounding AI in art often lacks a broader material analysis, with total rejection on one side and uncritical endorsement on the other. What's often missing from the conversation is the collectivist potential of such technology–in the form of a decentralized community driven amenity.
"I think artists should be the first to embrace new technologies in general and also AI. So it's more about avoiding the limitations that the tech companies are trying to put on us, and exploring it through open source and free software to make art with it"
As with any tech-frontier, AI is a battlefield for control. With corporate enclosure looming on the horizon, artists, as Gisle states, should reclaim the technology, understand it, and resist its limitations through open source alternatives. Though open source does not necessarily mean ethically sourced, and data training remains an enormous financial and energetic expenditure, engineers are actively developing data-efficient learning, in the aim of reducing costly requirements for machine-training.
The open technology movement has always relied on cheap, democratized hardware. As Maite notes; the explosion of open hardware, from microcontrollers, to sensors, to Raspberry Pi, has already proven itself an equalizing force around the world, democratizing the creative process. Simply put, difficult now does not mean impossible forever. Notably, there does exist a network of decentralized server hosting, with collectives such as APO33 and Stadtwerkstatt in Linz, hosting for artists.
Solar4Rain
The project takes the form of two interconnected stations, one installed at Llerena's cultural center and the other at Piksel Studio in Bergen. Equipped with sensors, the systems register daily weather conditions–solar energy in Llerena via solar panels, and rainfall in Bergen through water pipes. Each city hosts a plant: when rain falls in Bergen, water is released to the plant in Llerena; when the sun shines in Llerena, a light activates to sustain the plant in Bergen. The exchange occurs continuously over the internet, with the weather portal always open.
" The question behind Solar4Rain, with its stage and perma-computing, is how we can find harmony between nature, humankind, and technology?"
The nature of the exchange is non-extractive, driven solely by need. Plants seldom demand more energy than necessary to sustain themselves, opening the door to a model of relation beyond ownership, accumulation, and control; who owns natural resources, and why hoard resources we don't actually need? How does the intersection of non-human life and technology inform human models of exchange? Solar4Rain conceptually pushes imagination towards a non-exploitative form of communication.
"There's also an emotional component, a sense of solidarity. The 6,000 people in Llerena all know me, and when it rains; they get a sense of how my day is going."
A related approach can be seen in Benediktas Gylys "The Portal", connecting NYC's Flatiron Plaza with Dublin, Ireland via a live video stream. By offering an unfiltered view of distant strangers, the project aims to break down abstractions of foreignness and estrangement, revealing how technological mediation can produce empathy. A simple idea with instant impact, reminiscent of the internet's potential in fostering an unmediated understanding of the global other.
Though these projects do not resolve all the contradictions in technological mediation, they certainly point towards an alternative; ethical relational models are possible when designed around constraint and reciprocity.
