Performing smallness in Barcelona
Later this month, I’ll be taking a slow journey to Barcelona – looping through France via Lyon and LUMA Arles, before joining my collaborator Tim in Tarragona. We’ll be presenting at Híbrides, a three-day event exploring ‘small embodied data,’ sharing our ongoing exploration of how software might perform ‘smallness.’
‘Code, Cards and Compost: Performing Smallness in Software’
This talk explores ‘smallness’ in software through two tools: Humus, a forgetful, Rust-based ‘composting database’, and Querent.py, a Python system for tarot practice built on Humus. Developed by ‘doing ethnography through writing software’ across our home cities (York, Tarragona), these tools embody alternative temporalities and data practices. Tarot, a system structuring intuition while overflowing its own bounds, informs our approach to data representation, revealing tensions between intuitive knowledge and computational schemas in enacting smallness.
By focusing on situated development and local deployment, we show how small software can engender different affordances, supporting more intuitive ways of knowing. This ongoing work explores practical ways to achieve smallness, contributing to discussions about AI, small data sets, and degrowth. Our tools challenge conventional notions of data persistence and retrieval, offering a glimpse of alternative technological possibilities.
What started as a skill exchange – Python tutorials for a crash course in ethnographic methods – has developed into something more experimental. Our remote collaboration has been unfolding through Jitsi calls and GitHub commits, with shared terminal sessions becoming a kind of digital field site. The codebase becomes a palimpsest extruded through time, with snippets serving as both technical specification and communicative gesture.
Central to this work is the link between physical practice and digital interfaces. From card-shuffling to coding to Tim’s guitar-playing, we’re exploring how software might honour rather than abstract away from embodied practice. Our tools reflect this philosophy: Querent.py is designed to augment the use of a physical tarot deck, while Humus embraces forgetting and decay as fundamental operations. Similarly, our approach to smallness isn’t just about scale – it’s about fostering more proximal, ‘thick’ interactions between users and their data. By rejecting complex solutions, we’re enacting what Tim calls “a refusal of largeness.” The line between small and large might shift, but the act of drawing that line is itself a performance of smallness.
We’re treating the development process itself as an ethnographic field site, taking software as both a method and our object of study. Using a homebrew command line tool to document how choices about programming languages, data structures, and interaction shape our understanding, we’re exploring what it means to ‘do ethnography through software.’ Sometimes this kind of philosophical carpentry means building wide-aperture funnels to catch and regulate your users’ attention1; sometimes it’s just about choosing the right tool for the job.
Ping-ponging our way through this development cycle, Tim is bringing his craft and pragmatism to temper my more speculative, increasingly cybernetic2 tendencies. His recent work on the project’s sequencing helped clarify how Humus and Querent.py demonstrate alternative versions of computation – small and situated, resisting accumulation. At Híbrides, we’ll share these early experiments in ‘small’ software development and local computing, opening and holding space for future work.