DIGITAL COMPOST LAB
»Digital Compost Lab« explores how we can rethink digital excess as a regenerative resource.
Vinay Khare
Photos: Katharina Ley
Developed by Vinay Khare during his SBYD Tech Residency, the Digital Compost Lab investigates how we can make intangible digital decay tangible and meaningful while fostering a culture of mindful digital consumption. Through participatory interactions, digital media is transformed into evolving soundscapes, glitch art and cross-medium expressions, rethinking waste as a beginning rather than an endpoint.
In a world of constant production, digital overproduction leaves invisible yet tangible traces, from server emissions to cognitive overload. The project is informed by the contrast between the cyclical biosphere, where waste becomes nourishment, and the largely linear anthroposphere, where production accumulates.
The Digital Compost Lab is situated within this context and asks how we might rethink digital excess as a regenerative resource. Using analogue technologies such as cassettes and tape loops, as well as older technical processes, the work highlights the physical and temporal qualities of data that are often overlooked in the modern digital age. The work was presented at Museum Folkwang.
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This residency was part of SBYD, through which Folkwang University awards grants to international artists and designers invited to Essen to realise their own projects on site. In 2025, the programme’s third round was announced in India. In collaboration with Museum Folkwang and the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore.