Future Everything - Compost Computer

FutureEverything is a cultural agency crafting new ways of living with technology for human and planetary flourishing.

Powered by Compost

Located at MUD in Manchester' s Platt Fields Market Garden, the server running this website is powered by the composting practice of their community gardeners.

Compost Computer is a ground-breaking prototype that transforms bio-energy from compost into electricity. Literally regrounding technology in people and land. The project is a collaboration between FutureEverything and University of the Arts London' s Critical Climate Computingresearch group, and realised with Sow The City and MUD Manchester. It demonstrates how re-imagining local internet systems with an eco-social focus can significantly reduce emissions and materials, while providing localised power infrastructure.

This project is the first in a new strand of tech prototyping and is informed by FutureEverything' s Nature Directed initiative.

REGENERATIVE TECHNOLOGIES - INSPIRATION AND ACTION FOR THE FUTURE

Compost Computer is part of a growing global movement of artists, activists and technologists experimenting with low carbon, low material and regenerative systems. The project aims to catalyse and equip others to devise their own eco-approaches to web and energy infrastructure while raising awareness about the real material dimensions of technology, exploring links between growing and computing.

Through our prototyping strand FutureEverything is pathfinding new technologies that challenge the dominant rhetoric of computing - from AI to the internet - as infinite and immaterial, revealing their real-world entanglements with ecological crisis, extractive systems, and social inequality.

Working in collaboration with communities, creative technologists and our more-than-human kin, our prototyping strand innovates regenerative and easily replicable technologies - grounded in people and place and framed by our Nature Directed practices. The resulting innovations tackle real-world issues, and are a source of inspiration and action for the future.

A GUIDE TO REPLICATING THE COMPOST COMPUTER

Compost Computer resituates technology back in the earth and permacultural growing practices. At its core is an off-grid, proof-of-concept biomatter-powered server located at MUD - Platt Fields Market Gardens, a public urban green space in the heart of Manchester. Fuelled by local compost, it generates bio-energy from decomposing organic waste to run a public website, built using low-carbon, low-material, and lightweight code. This innovative technology was developed and built by Critical Climate Computing members Shinji Toya and Mariana Marangoni, who pioneered many new techniques in this process, such as the context-aware image reduction tool.

Inspiring and equipping others to use and adapt this technology for their own contexts is at the heart of this project. CCC co-founders Wesley Goatley and Eva Verhoeven have put together two open-source digital toolkits containing code, methodologies, and detailed guidance for anyone wishing to replicate or build upon their bioserver and low-carbon website models and approaches.

The first toolkit offers a step by step guide to building a Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC)-powered webserver, a low-cost, low-power solution for hosting websites using compost as a renewable power source. The kit has everything you need to get started: materials lists, process instructions, troubleshooting tips, and a glossary with recommended readings for further exploration. The second kit contains principles and practices for designing and maintaining a low-carbon website, including hosting options, code language and techniques to reduce data, file sizes and general carbon impact.

COMING UP FOR COMPOST COMPUTER

The legacy of the Compost Computer is already expanding internationally. FutureEverything and the Critical Climate Computing group are pursuing new collaborations to expand the microsite into a full compost powered website and further test the impact of bio-battery on the health of the compost.

Longterm, our vision is to build a decentralised meshtastic network of compost powered servers working in collaboration with a global network of creators and activists.

CREDITS

The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
through the Design Museum's Future Observatory programme.