How to Compost a Machine, 19.11 2026

How to Compost a Machine
A performance lecture on archives and infrastructure by compost.cc
18:00, Thursday, 19 November 2026
Medientheater, Georgenstraße 47 10117 Berlin, ground floor left side.

How should we save the bits we care about? What should we do with devices we no longer use?

This performance lecture introduces compost.cc, a permacomputing and digital commons network aimed at collectively preserving endangered or hard-to-access cultural archives. compost.cc runs on second-hand devices that have been rescued and transformed into servers. We first consider the limitations of institutional archives, data storage-as-a-service, and other modes of preservation and historical practice that tend to treat infrastructure as an afterthought. We argue that data sovereignty demands closer contact with the machines that store our data. We ground our position in compost.cc’s inaugural collection: documentation of Chile’s Project Cybersyn (1971–73), scanned but not previously available online. By redistributing the governance of this displaced archive—Cybersyn’s papers scattered outside of the country after the 1973 coup—we consider compost.cc as a media art inquiry into the arkhē as an operational zone of dispute. In relating our conceptual motivations and the technical implementation, we ask how critical archaeologies of technology might engage their own conditions of production.

The performance lecture is part of a double program. Join us 16:00 the following day, Friday 20 November for the workshop “Bring Your Own E-Waste (Leave with an archival server)“ at /rosa, Heidelberger Str. 28 12059 Berlin Neukölln/Alt-Treptow.

Bio: compost.cc is a media art project by Zachary Furste and Diego Gómez-Venegas. It gathers discarded laptops, phones, and tablets and repurposes them as servers for endangered cultural archives. Current collections include documentation of Chile’s Project Cybersyn (1971–73) and Screen Walks, an archive of live-streamed walks through the digital spaces where artists work. Through workshops, performances, device archaeology forms, ID cards, labels, websites, and terminal interfaces, compost.cc brings the preservation of these archives into contact with the machines that host them. Each forgotten device is already a singular artifact, its commodity form concentrating histories of extraction, manufacture, labor, and circulation. Built from the phones and laptops tucked away in closets, the project draws the technics of preservation within reach.