Have you ever been interested in ways of applying commoning, ecology, and degrowth to your creative practice? In this interview, Ana Meisel interviews Batool Desouky, a computational artist who is reimagining computation through analog processes, community organizing, and combinatorics.

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Ana Meisel: Where are we right now?

Batool Desouky: We’re in London, England, in the Walthamstow Marshes, tucked under a tree. It’s also a bird observation area and a reservoir. I haven’t been on the observation decks but I’ve seen the blackboard in the café with recently observed birds. I live not far from here, in Seven Sisters, so it’s a five-minute bus ride.

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AM: How do you describe yourself as an artist?

BD: I describe myself as a computational artist. It helps focus my practice to the realm of computing. Even though I work with analog and physical materials—drawings, physical computing—it is always guided by algorithmic concerns and processes. 

I’m also a part of In-grid, a collective formed in 2019 that works in and around digital infrastructures. We work on community-facing projects, including parties and events in club venues, bringing performance and interactive practices into those spaces.

AM: What are you researching now?

BD: Labor—specifically the ways in which low-level technical processes attempt to automate labor, and how algorithms become implicated in labor extraction through automation. I'm tying with historical research on magical workings, and the techincal processes of making talismans.

Currently, we are working a lot on ServPub, which is an experimental platform for computational publishing. It’s a research project done in collaboration with several other collectives experienced in collective infrastructure and feminist server spaces. We built a London server node—supported by Systerserver, a feminist server project, offering services to its network of feminist, queer and antipatriarchal folks to host Servpub and a collective writing platform that we called wiki4print. It is based on earlier versions of this tools; Wiki-to-print by Creative Crowds, wiki2print by Hackers & Designers and wiki-to-pdf by TITiPI.

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AM: How did you start thinking about technology in a permacomputing or environmental way?

BD: I hadn’t thought of my work as “locality-focused,” until you mentioned it, but but that’s true, the servers literally live in our bedrooms. My entry point into permacomputing was researching an algorithm related to ordering sequences (combinatorics). That led me to magic squares, and then to Arabic mathematical and magic traditions, which conceptualise number structures relationally instead of through classification and division.

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AM: Do you follow a specific methodology?

BD: I like following research until I find a point where it intersects with material conditions—land, time, embodied labor. I try to trace things back to where they make physical, consequential sense. For ServPub, the technical documentation and actual physical build of the server are central.

AM: Do you have advice on divesting from big tech?

BD: Yes, I’m developing a summer school about this. A great resource is Neon’s Counter-Cloud Audit. The first step is emotional: accept that it’s okay to leave platforms like Google. The next step is to remove your files from cloud drives, and store them locally. Understand what you’re storing and why. Use video only when needed—it saves power.

AM: Are these technological practices political acts?

BD: Yes. Especially now, as corporations increasingly secure government contracts. Political acts aren’t only “anti-establishment," sometimes they’re about resisting corporate power that overshadows public institutions.

AM: Do you think your work deals with “radical” approaches to technology?

BD: Yes, in the sense of going to the roots which is literally the etymology of “radical.” I think a lot about origins and material grounding.

AM: Do you find tension between accessibility and exposing infrastructure?

BD: Definitely. Even the word “server” scares people. We try to demystify our work by bringing the physical Raspberry Pi with us when we give public workshops on the servpub infrastructure . Our documentation also takes into account common human-made errors, like lost SSH keys or coordination issue,s which reveal the real structure behind the system. Our hosted pages are extremely simple HTML.

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AM:What are some tools you love right now?

BD: Obsidian. Deeply obsessed. It supports markdown, plugins, calendars, PDF annotation, Git repos… everything. I love that you can apply custom CSS to change the interface. I haven’t tried SilverBullet yet, but I will.

AM: What is something you wish were more normalised in tech culture?

BD: Hardware storage! Localising work. Developing an intimate relationship with your own machine. Students now use any random laptop and rely on cloud accounts. It erodes connection with their own tools. Hardware should become precious again.

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Ana Meisel is a Polish-German web developer based in London, UK, who runs internet art gallery External Pages and is one-third of the research group Superkilogirls.

Batool Desouky is a computational artist and creative technologist. Their work is cultivated through a practice-based research on the technical and historical ties between computation and Arabic indigenous occult traditions. They work in code, drawing, physical computing and writing to explore alternative and decolonial histories of the narrative of technology.