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by Alice Yuan Zhang

This is the last installment of our newsletter series looking closely at each piece in the naive-yearly.are.na publication. Thank you for following along!

But before you go: name five ingredients that make up your computer. What is the lifespan of your battery? How is your data managed and stored?

These are some of the questions that Alice Yuan Zhang poses in her “Bioregional Computing Quiz,” and when I first heard them at Naive Yearly, I was struck by how few of the answers I knew. Alice’s work — as an artist, a writer, an organizer — will often do this to you: gently expose existing infrastructure and material we take for granted, and also reveal the networks of community and care we could better take advantage of. I think about her mother’s recipe for checking on a friend often. And after the conference, Alice said something that would be one of the most lasting sentences from my experience there, which I'll leave for you now:

“maybe the work is just staying with the questions.”  

— Meg

Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz compiled by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman, and Victoria Stockley, 1981. 

The “Where You At?" Bioregional Quiz was originally published in the 1981 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, a spinoff of the Whole Earth Catalog. Faced with a list of questions about total rainfall, length of growing season, and resident species, the reader is challenged to take account of their local knowledge. Total up how many questions are answerable, and you get a score of how in touch you are with the ecosystem around you — how much you’re “paying attention.”

The concept of bioregionalism originated with the counterculture movement in the 1970s, around the same time that the Blue Marble photo was taken by NASA. The magazine welcomed both ambitions across its pages, showcasing propositions from earth sheltered homes to homebuilt aircrafts. Together, they emanate an American brand of self-sufficiency. Rather than compromise on the intrigues of progress, these noble ideas sought to democratize the expanding Pandora’s box of technologies while staying true to place.

To date, this distance between “head in the clouds” and “feet on the ground” has only widened. Enter the internet, a constantly exploding web of information that seems to float in abstract availability all around us. Its form has evolved drastically, from clunky machines sending byte-sized packets over the telephone line to sleek devices in hand running AI-enhanced search. As cables disappear into the sea and ships catch signal from satellites in space, the makings of infrastructure shift ever more out of the consumer’s sight and mind.

Inspired by the sobering effect of the original quiz, I wrote my own set of questions to form a sequel. My “bioregional computing quiz” prompts the reader to consider the ingredients of computation, where they may come from and where they will go. It acknowledges the often vast physical voyage of digital information and invites exploration of more localized data and tools. Along the periphery, it asks about the ways one may be able to reach others in their area if the internet goes down, and the impact of transmission waves on local wildlife.

Bioregional Computing Quiz written by author, 2023. 

As I contemplate where my own garbage goes, both food packaging and electronic waste, I wonder if the imperative of “paying attention” has become inadequate to overcome the sheer complexity that facilitates a digital lifestyle. It is daunting enough to grapple with how drinking water gets routed from “precipitation to tap,” but altogether a different challenge to look for a semiconductor with the aperture of a bioregion. Unlike the original quiz, which calls forth entities like water, grasses, soil and wildflowers that have always woven together the fabric of earth and only recently become reorganized by industrialization, my version attempts to wrestle with a topology of algorithms, currents, bits and bytes that have been inherently developed through a top-down trajectory — borne of militaristic intent, devised and patented within the towers of academia, and eventually brought to the masses by a handful of private corporations.

What then becomes of our tracing exercise? I believe in the power of questions. For me, these “what,” “where,” and “how” questions bring about more questions, toward “what if”: What if data didn’t have to travel so far, especially when communicating with others around you? What if search algorithms prioritized results that were closer-to-home? What if devices could be locally sourced and re-assembled? What if the traversals of the World Wide Web can also strengthen the affinity of the local web?

Besides the information superhighway, what other routes can we re-familiarize with that may be calmer, more contextualized, and critical in a moment of crisis? Perhaps somewhere along the way, we may find ourselves at home among a more meaningful meadow of hyperlinks, where the ground will re-emerge to greet the clouds anew.

Adjacent explorations:

Max Fowler, Peachcloud & Bioregional Computing

Austin Wade Smith, “Bioregional Computing” Are.na channel

Panayotis Antoniadis, The Organic Internet

Benjamin Earl, Coding In-Situ / Are.na channel

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Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 is a Chinese-American media artist, researcher, and cultural organizer currently living in Berlin. Her transdisciplinary practice bridges ecology and technology, working to empower decolonial praxis and heal alongside marginalized communities through ancestral remembering, interspecies pedagogy, and networked solidarity. She is a research resident at 0x Salon studying decentralized community technologies, resident artist at a living commons called Moos.garden, and founding steward of virtual care lab.

This is a special version of the newsletter, which features one piece from naive-yearly.are.na and ran all week. 

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Stay true, 

The Are.na Team