Maximilian Ernestus

A flight simulator on my dads old Atari, loading from a single floppy disk, sparked my first interest in computers and introduced me to this "world in a box." When I learned programming I first tried to make the computer do my school homework. Surprisingly, my teenage efforts to elicit general artificial intelligence from my ActionScript (Flash)- implemented neural networks in the 00s utterly failed. Nonetheless, the shift in perspective stuck: a computer can be an actor, not just a window. It can be a "box in the world" instead of a "world in a box."
This lead me to get my first Arduino (Duemilanove), and soon I bumped into 3D-printers (in 2011 at Timelab). Then I got distracted for about a decade by computer science, swarm robotics, reinforcement learning and airborne wind energy and AI safety while catching up on some dancing.

Today I see computers as means of production that may or may not be owned by their users, and as political artifacts that shape us as much as we shape them. Consequently, my practice involves writing rhetorical software to explore computers whose basic building blocks are points and lines instead of bits and bytes. Due to their more geometric nature, I hope to find more accessible models of computation that allow a larger fraction of its users to truly participate in shaping the technology that surrounds them, ultimately fostering a culture of permacomputing.