"Slow Hot Computer is a website that makes your computer run slow and hot. It may be used to decrease productivity.
The site works by running “processor intensive tasks”, that is, it downloads an image file over and over again until the user’s computer slows to a near halt while remaining minimally usable. The work is part of a series of projects by the artist that allow users to play with forms of digital sabotage. Today, our digital devices are also someone else’s factory for wealth generation. As means of production, they are a choke point where pressures can be applied. Like all forms of workplace sabotage these tools can be used to hamper profit, and therefore clarify for their users how value is produced. Most importantly, they may fosters a new imagination and a sense of the possibilities that exist for new tactics to claim power. But, what does it mean when you do your paid work on the same machines that mediate your home life; the same machines you use to communicate with friends and family? To produce labor inefficiencies on these machines might also mean producing social, familial or romantic inefficiencies. In this sense, an act of digital sabotage might also be an act of self-sabotage, because in order to hamper your work you might have to voluntarily and willingly hamper yourself.
The artist frames self-sabotage as a tool for political action. The “self” being disrupted is one shaped by digital platforms, reduced to data, tracked, and sold, all under the promise of individual expression. It’s a version of the self that should be challenged and obstructed at every opportunity.“
