Bring Your Own E-Waste, Leave with an Archival Server
20 November 2026 from 16:00 – open end
a workshop by compost.cc (Zachary Furste & Diego Gómez-Venegas)
About the event
This workshop invites participants to bring in an underused phone, tablet, e-reader, laptop, desktop, or wireless router and learn how to transform the device into a functioning component of a living, distributed archive. No experience or expertise necessary. The best candidates are laptops, Android phones and tablets, though other devices are possible. After discussing some basic goals of permacomputing and the compost.cc project, we’ll perform “device archaeology” to assess the new contributions. We’ll proceed together to restore devices that can be converted into functioning servers, both as compost.cc nodes and for any other personal or community infrastructure projects. Every attendee will have the option to bring home a functioning permacomputing server.
This workshop is part of a double program. Join us at 18:00 on the preceding day, Thursday 19 November for the lecture performance "How to Compost a Machine" at Humboldt University.
About
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.
RSVP
As capacity is limited, we kindly ask you to register for this event.