Design: Eva Bevec

DATE: Saturday, 30 May 2026 | 18.00–19.00
LOCATION: Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

This year, we are dedicating Adela’s Digital Dish to community-driven and sustainable visions of the web. By exploring the potential of low-tech, slow, obsolete, unrealised and humble technologies, we will open up social, creative and infrastructural protocols for community computing and sustainable networking beyond the operationalised and extractivist web.

Kristoffer Tjalve, co-founder of the Internet Phone Book, Tiny Awards and Naive Yearly, will present his vision of a living web that remains poetic, personal, whimsical and deeply human. He will guide us through his paths in the internet forest, where artists, designers, archivists and technologists continue to test the limits of the web.

Designer and artist Marie Verdeil’s work explores how obsolete or discarded devices can be repurposed as web servers and tools for alternative forms of online publishing and community engagement. Through examples of artistic and research practices, she will raise questions about technological autonomy, hardware limitations, planned obsolescence and the possibilities for a more sustainable and mindful approach to the internet and digital technologies.

The presentations will be followed by a discussion with the guests, moderated by researcher, journalist and editor Lea Sande.

Kristoffer Tjalve

Kristoffer Tjalve: I grew up in the forest. The internet is one too, but it ain’t dark.

I’m sceptical of the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet; the idea that claims how the internet is such a terrible place that everyone is hiding from each other, thus making the internet (forest) appear dead. Instead, I advocate for the Alive Internet Theory. The open web is as vast, messy and beautiful as ever. Artists, designers, archivists and technologists continue to test the limits of the web as a medium and material. And it’s all out there, in the public. You just have to know where to look.

In my contribution, I’ll take you by the hand and show you my own paths around the forest. We will visit web rings, alternative social networks and solar-powered websites. Walking link by link through the forest as a tangible and positive alternative to doom talk, to provide a richer language for talking about the web. A language which recognises how the web is still poetic, personal, strange and so deeply human. Because the forest is a web, and the web a forest: an entangled ecosystem of interdependence.

Photo: Ana Santl Andersen

Kristoffer Tjalve is the owner-operator of Cloudlord.management, an internet surreal estate holding company, and co-founder of the Internet Phone Book, Tiny Awards, Naive Yearly and other initiatives to keep the web spirit alive. He works as an independent organiser from his studio in Athens, Greece. He is dedicated to the web as a medium, material and philosophy, and works across formats, from websites to awards, conferences and printed publications. His practice centres on nurturing environments where emerging practitioners and narratives flourish.

Marie Verdeil

Marie Verdeil: Rethinking our relationship to the web

Smartphones, smartwatches, smart devices: nowadays, we carry battery-powered, network-enabled, tiny, yet powerful computers around in our pockets. While most of these devices get retired just a few years after being purchased, often because of planned obsolescence, there still is a lot of value to be found in them, practically in computing capabilities but also metaphorically, as a means to imagine computing otherwise. Artists and researchers have been experimenting with transforming those retired devices into web-servers, as a portal to online publication, but also as a practice of working within the limits of existing hardware creatively.

Photo: Dasha Ilina

Marie Verdeil is a French designer and artist based in Brussels. Her transdisciplinary projects – websites, workshops, installations, publications, tools – advocate for an autonomous, transparent, environmentally aware and critical approach to technology. Since graduating from the Design Academy Eindhoven (2022), she uses design to imagine desirable futures that are aligned with planetary limits.