- The paper demonstrates that a reclaimed Samsung Galaxy A03 powered by a 20W solar panel delivered 339.07 requests per second—outperforming GitHub Pages at 241.36—for static website content, though informal uptime was approximately 70%.
- The paper uses research-through-design to show how installation failures, platform restrictions, power limits, and maintenance work expose the hidden technical and social dependencies of supposedly seamless digital infrastructure.
- The paper proposes relational aesthesis, combining visible hardware, live energy data, and embodied interaction to shift permacomputing from symbolic green design toward practical agency, responsibility, care, and community-supported resilience.
Overview and motivation
This paper, presented at LIMITS '26 (2605.30706), reports a research-through-design (RtD) case study in which the authors migrated a personal website from GitHub Pages—hosted in a Texas data centre—to a self-hosted solar-powered server built from reclaimed electronics. The work is motivated by a concern that permacomputing, despite its growing community of practice, risks remaining at the level of reflective critique or symbolic gesture rather than becoming a materially transformative alternative. The authors frame this risk through the distinction between aesthetics as representation and aesthesis as embodied, sensory perception, drawing on decolonial design scholarship (Tlostanova) and on Marc Augé's concept of non-place to characterize how maximalist techno-aesthetics render digital infrastructure placeless and immaterial.
The paper's central claim is that permacomputing becomes transformative only when its aesthetics are enacted through material practice and perceptual experience: when infrastructural dependencies are made visible ("visibilization") and felt ("visceralization"), users' relations to technology shift from passive consumption toward agency, responsibility, and care.
Theoretical framing
Three theoretical strands structure the argument. First, following Simondon's techno-aesthetics and Mansoux et al.'s account of "maximalist techno-aesthetics," the authors argue that dominant computing assumes limitless computational capacity and designs interfaces to appear seamless, frictionless, and immaterial, thereby obscuring environmental and labour conditions. Second, Augé's non-place—and Sharma's extension of it to biopolitical regulation by invisible labour—provides an analytic for placeless infrastructure; the paper extends this concept to digital infrastructures such as cloud hosting. Third, Tlostanova's notion of aesthesis grounds the claim that transforming computing requires reconfiguring perception itself, not merely swapping hardware. The synthesis—"relational aesthesis"—positions reuse, repair, and constraint-based design as perceptual interventions rather than purely technical strategies.
Method and artifact
The first three authors conducted an iterative RtD process over roughly two months, guided by permacomputing principles including "care for all hardware," "integrate biological and renewable resources," "expose the seams," and "(almost) everything has a place." Reflection was documented through shared journaling, messaging, and collective analysis sessions; the fourth author contributed critical feedback at milestones.
The build history is instructive in its failures. An initial ESP32C6 microcontroller approach was abandoned due to poor NodeMCU support. postmarketOS was explored to extend smartphone lifespans, but neither a Samsung Galaxy S III Mini nor a Galaxy A03 was compatible (regional model differences proved decisive). The final working configuration used Termux on a Samsung Galaxy A03 with the lighttpd web server, deployed via SSH, powered by a 20W second-hand solar panel, a step-down voltage converter, and a 5000mAh battery pack. Components were largely reclaimed: the panel came from a prior project involving discarded luxury car speakers and a laptop battery; other parts were borrowed from teaching labs or sourced from personal "electronics graveyards."
A notable strength of the paper is its quantitative self-assessment. Load testing (16 threads, 32 concurrent connections over 30 seconds) showed the prototype outperforming GitHub Pages on static content delivery:
| Metric |
GitHub Pages |
Solar website |
| Average requests/second |
241.36 |
339.07 |
| Average data transferred/second |
1.93 MB |
2.03 MB |
The authors estimate the setup could serve a dozen or more static sites without degradation. This is a strong result: a repurposed budget smartphone running off-grid solar delivered better throughput than a commercial hosting platform for this workload. However, uptime was approximately 70% based on informal, non-systematic observation—a limitation the authors acknowledge plainly, attributing downtime to the small battery capacity relative to the phone's power draw. Availability was explicitly deprioritized given the personal-website use case.
Findings
Friction as revelation of infrastructural control
The most substantive empirical contribution is the systematic documentation of frictions encountered when operating outside dominant infrastructures. These included: ISP router apps lacking port-forwarding options (requiring an additional lab-sourced router configured with a DMZ); OS-level warnings framing F-Droid and Termux installation as unsafe and email-borne APKs blocked "for security reasons"; failed rooting attempts due to manufacturer firmware locks (one attempt infected a desktop computer with a virus); and postmarketOS's narrow device support compounded by regional hardware variants. The authors interpret these not as incidental obstacles but as evidence that dominant systems actively structure what modification is possible—an argument that seamlessness is produced by constraining agency elsewhere. Their reflexive position is nuanced: friction produced frustration ("the hoops you have to jump over makes it really discouraging") but also reframing ("maybe when there is friction, things are going my way"), alongside honest acknowledgment of time costs that forced abandonment of some approaches.
A second finding is that permacomputing practice was sustained by distributed collaboration—skill-sharing within the team, mentors, online forums, and material mutual aid. The authors argue robustness in alternative computing is a social achievement rather than an individual technical property, aligning their case with Solar Protocol's distributed model, where geographic diversity of solar nodes compensates for local intermittency. This reframes reliability as emergent from collective organization, a point with design implications beyond this single-server case.
Visibilizing and visceralizing infrastructure
Two aesthetic mechanisms are articulated. Visibilization operated at both hardware level (exposed components, LED indicators on the converter and battery pack) and interface level (real-time battery, weather, and server-status displays adapted from Low-Tech Magazine; tap-to-load images with file sizes). Visceralization describes embodied engagement: physically relocating the server across east-facing windows, backyard, and west-facing windows throughout the day to track sunlight; restarting drained devices during daylight hours so charging could resume; and moments of realization such as retrieving a video file directly from the device in the kitchen. The device also accumulated narrative—the reclaimed car speakers were retained despite no functional role because they carried the object's construction history. The authors connect these experiences to Augé: the system shifted from non-place to something "placefull," with meaning produced through conditions of engagement rather than inherent in the object.
The discussion's key move is defining "performative" permacomputing as aesthetic adoption without relational reconfiguration—and the origin story of the project is itself an instance: the website had adopted Low-Tech Magazine's solar visual template while remaining hosted in a Texas data centre. Against this, the authors contend that when aesthetics operate through embodied, material practice (relational aesthesis), they produce shifts in agency (direct intervention in system operation), responsibility (awareness that missed sunlight or inaction directly degraded performance), and attachment shaping design decisions (e.g., debating ESP32C6 versus reclaimed smartphone partly on grounds of functional visibility). They also note candidly that reclaimed proprietary devices remain partially opaque—visibility was achieved at the system level while software abstraction and platform restrictions persisted.
Limitations and open questions
Several limitations bear directly on the results. The uptime figure (~70%) rests on informal observation rather than systematic logging, and the traffic tests cover a single static site over a short window. The evaluation criteria were self-defined by the researchers, and findings derive from the authors' own reflective practice on an n-of-one deployment situated in a resource-rich context—the authors explicitly acknowledge the privilege of access to abundant second-hand hardware in "the West." Generalizability to higher-availability or multi-user services remains untested. Open questions the paper leaves include whether distributed architectures (Solar Protocol-style networks) can compensate for single-node intermittency at meaningful scale, and whether open-source initiatives like postmarketOS can broaden device support enough to make smartphone reclamation practical for non-experts, given that regional model fragmentation defeated two of three attempted devices here.
Conclusion
This paper contributes a worked example of permacomputing enacted rather than theorized, a demonstration that reclaimed consumer hardware under solar power can match or exceed commercial static hosting performance for lightweight workloads, and a conceptual framework—relational aesthesis extended with non-place theory—for understanding why such practices feel different from symbolic green computing. Its persuasive force lies less in the artifact's technical novelty than in its documentation of the frictions, dependencies, and social conditions under which alternative infrastructure becomes viable, supporting the claim that permacomputing's transformative potential depends on aesthetics being materially and perceptually enacted rather than merely represented.