Redundant Technology

Redundant Technology is a term stemming from artist collective the Redundant Technology Initiative (RTI), which was started in Sheffield, 1997. The RTI gathered computers destined for the dump and used them in exhibitions following a classic guerilla strategy—use weakness as strength. They had no money to engage with technology, so they made that the point of their engagement with it. They not only applied this positive reinterpretation to economic and social circumstances, but to environmental ones too. They reinterpreted electronic waste as resource, diverting e-waste destined for landfills, turning old computers into aesthetic material, an opportunity for learning and, if successful, a functional workstation. Likewise, their reinterpretation of unemployment addressed unemployed people as time-rich learners, volunteers, activists and artists ¹.

Their formula of exhibiting donated and found technological waste caught them in a virtuous circle ². Each exhibition led to more donations which led to more exhibitions, which quickly left them with too many computers to handle. This urged them to start a creative media lab called Access Space in 2001; a lab open to anyone to learn, create and communicate online ³. Access Space combined recycling old machines with skill sharing, teaching others how to use them so that they ended up actually being used, prefiguring a lot of current practices such as Low-Tech, Permacomputing, and Salvage Computing⁴.

"Recycle Your Computers with Lowtech!" ⁵

The RTI proposed creative and playful use of discarded technology to explore what older machines can do, rather than focusing on what they can't. They take an explicit anti-artwashing stance through their rejection of art demonstrating the newest and most expensive computers as sales demonstrations. They embraced the limits of old devices and ask:

"What are computers for anyway? Just to work and buy stuff? Low cost computers can communicate all over the world, we're more interested in expressing ourselves." ⁶

In 1999 the Lowtech Manifesto was written by James Wallbank, initiator of the RTI. The text was based on a talk he gave at The Next 5 Minutes conference in Amsterdam that year. He describes Lowtech as technology that is cheap or free, points out that high technology doesn't mean high creativity and states that the restrictions of a medium can sometimes lead to the most creative solutions. It's anti-consumerist, anti-artwashing and promotes accessibility and independence through open formats, open source software and repairability. It promotes the use of plain text and images on the web because its simple, cheap and quick, prefiguring Small Technology ⁷.

"A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is anarchic and subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club, with a $1000 entrance fee?" ⁸

The ideas of the RTI spread further through their 2005 Grow Your Own Media Lab project ⁹. They worked with other community organisations across the UK to see if they could adopt some of Access Space's successful tactics, which led to the start of other labs such as the Mediashed, initiated in 2006 by Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji and Richard Wright of artist collective Mongrel, in Southend on Sea ¹⁰. A lot has changed since then. Access to Internet became more ubiquitous due to the appearance of smart phones and publishing content online became the norm since the advent of Web 2.0 and social media platforms. Yet the practices promoted by Access Space and the RTI never lost relevance and collectives working to reduce the harmful environmental and social impact of IT today return to many of the ideas shared by them.

Artist Heath Bunting characterised RTI's work as 'NINJA Economics'. Not only because RTI engaged NINJAs (No Income, No Job or Assets)¹¹:

"we also practised a kind of self-taught economic martial art—tumbling backwards in response to attack, gaining the initiative and pulling the attacker (in this case, our economic circumstances) with us."¹²

While wealth inequality and environmental decline keep increasing, RTI's guerilla tactics are more relevant than ever.