Marloes de Valk

Marloes de Valk (NL) is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the threat of global warming and being spied on by the devices surrounding her. Surprised by the obsessive dedication with which we, even post-Snowden, share intimate details about ourselves to an often not too clearly defined group of others, astounded by the deafening noise we generate while socializing with the technology around us, she is looking to better understand why.

She completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, in collaboration with The Photographer's Gallery, looking into how communities of practice are redefining technology on a damaged Earth.

Marloes is a thesis supervisor at the master Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She has participated in exhibitions internationally, teaches workshops, gives talks and has published articles on (un)sustainable technology, Free/Libre/Open Source Software, free culture and art. Together with Aymeric Mansoux she is editor of the publication FLOSS+Art (2009). She is a former member of artist collective GOTO10, and currently part of Plutonian Corp., La Société Anonyme and Iodine dynamics.

Her latest projects include the game What Remains, with Iodine Dynamics, a darkly humorous, authentic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game blending visual novel and adventure elements in a story translating real events from the 80s into an epic quest to save the world. In 2020 she published Villains and Heroes, an interactive fiction involving stealthy attempts to unmask a network of opaquely funded libertarian think tanks active in tax-deductible climate change denial and disinformation campaigns. (2025)

Publications

• FLOSS+Art (editor, with Aymeric Mansoux), Poitiers: Goto10, and London: Mute, 2008, 320 pp.

• Digital Artists' Handbook (with Goto10), 2009, 228 pp.

• "Tools to Fight Boredom: FLOSS and GNU/Linux for Artists Working in the Field of Generative Music and Software Art", Contemporary Music Review 28(1): "Generative Music", eds. Nick Collins and Andrew R. Brown, 2009, pp 89-101, PDF. [1]

• Are You Being Served? (Notebooks) (co-editor), Brussels: Constant, 2014.

• "Save Your Self", Herbst. Theorie zur Praxis, Graz, 2015.

• "What remains? The way we save ourselves", in Behind the Smart World: Saving, Deleting and Resurfacing Data, eds. Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle, Graz: servus.at, 2015, PDF.

• "How to Escape Reality in 10 Simple Steps", Schloss Post, 10 May 2017. [2] [3]

• "The Eradication of History or the Selling of Opportunities to Modify Behavior", Immaterial Labor Union 10: "Immateriality", eds. Lídia Pereira and Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ ιναυστραλια, May 2017, PDF.

• "A Contemporary Delphic Oracle: The Church of Big Data", Furtherfield, 4 Oct 2016. [4]

• "If You're Not Outraged...", NXS 2: "Synthetic Selves", Amsterdam: Goys & Birls, Nov 2017. [5]

• "Recycling Old Strategies and Devices: What Remains, an Art Project Addressing Disinformation Campaigns (Re)using Strategies to Delay Industry Regulation", Artnodes 24: "After Post-Truth", ed. Jorge Luis Marzo, Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Jul 2019, PDF.

• "Harness the Power of a Fluid Identity with 3 Simple Strategies", Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 24 Sep 2019.

• "If You Lived Here, You'd Be at Work Already", A Nourishing Network, Mar 2021.

• "A Pluriverse of Local Worlds: a Review of Computing within Limits Related Terminology and Practices", in Limits '21: Workshop on Computing within Limits, June 14-15, 2021, Jun 2021, PDF. [6]

• "Refusing the Burden of Computation: Edge Computing and Sustainable ICT", APRJA 10(1): "Research Refusal", Aug 2021, PDF, PDF. [7]

• "A Pattern Language for the LIMITS Community: We Make the Road by Walking, a Messy Ethnography" (with Douglas Schuler, Shreya Urvashi, and Scott Rose), in LIMITS’22: Workshop on Computing within Limits, Jun 2022, PDF.

• "Permacomputing" (with Ville-Matias Heikkilä), COUNTER-N, eds. Özgün Eylül İşcen and Shintaro Miyazaki, Dec 2022, PDF. [8]

• The Image at the End of the World: Communities of practice redefining technology on a damaged Earth, London: London South Bank University, 2025, 329 pp. PhD thesis.

• more

Interviews

• Annet Dekker, "Rock, Paper, Scissors and Floppy Disks. Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk", in Archive2020 – Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content, ed. Annet Dekker, Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2010, pp 20-29.

• Pau Waelder, "Software is the Artwork. Interview with Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk and Dave Griffiths", Vida, 23 Jan 2014.

• Annet Dekker, "The SKOR Codex Launched Into the Future. Interview with La Société Anonyme", Open!, Amsterdam, 17 Apr 2014, PDF.

• C.H., "Welcome to the Denial Machine", Schloss Post, 10 May 2017.

• Marloes de Valk, "Interview with Nestor Siré (Part I)", (Part 2), Unthinking Photography, Dec 2020.

Links

• Website
• Damaged Earth Catalog
• pi.kuri.mu
• Mastodon
• ORCID
• Profile on Piet Zwart Institute