The VU’s Environmental Humanities Center and Chair for Media and Culture are jointly organizing a lunch lecture that may be of interest to Network Institute members:

“An Energy History and Future of Computing”
by Dr. Anne Pasek

When: Tuesday, 10 March 2026, 12:00–13:15
Where: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, New University Building, room NU-3B19.

This EHC Amsterdam lunch lecture will survey two trajectories for computing in the Global North.
The first, grounded in an energy history of major players in the tech sector, explores how energy efficiency has been both a driving economic force of our digital present and an insufficient means to mitigate its rapidly growing environmental impacts.
The second, drawn from artists and hackers experimenting in degrowth computing, ‘small tech,’ and solar-powered networks, explores how energy constraints are producing an alternative and dissonant path.
Thinking these trajectories together, the talk will outline a politics and practice of digital energetics.

Dr. Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of climate communication, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She studies how carbon becomes communicable in different communities and media forms, to different political and material effects.
She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University, as well as the Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment.

This on-site event is free of charge and open to the public.
Interested in joining? Please register here.