Six months without the internet

Nastja Säde Rönkkö, an interdisciplinary artist from Finland, spent six months without access to the internet to study the effects of offline existence.

Based in Somerset House Studios, Rönkkö swapped emails for letter writing, likes and comments for a series of seminars, and documented her experience through video, photography and text. 6 Months Without – the culmination of Rönkkö's offline residency – is now showing as part of 24/7: A Wake-up Call for our Non-Stop World, a group exhibition exploring the non-stop rhythms of modern living.

In this interview, Rönkkö discusses the artistic and environmental motivation behind her project, epistolary joy and turning experience into art.

On your website, Ellen Mara de Wachter writes that, “Far from constituting an abdication from any kind of contemporary social contract, 6 Months Without generated a network of meaningful relationships across the world.” I’m interested in your positioning of the project as an act of engagement as opposed to withdrawal. Can you say more about this?

During the six months I had an out of office auto reply in my email, briefly explaining the outline of the project, as well as its wider context. The email also had my studio address at Somerset House and the times I would be in it, encouraging people to visit me or to send letters. The response was overwhelming; I got hundreds of letters from all over the world. The letters were from strangers as well as from friends and family. I think the idea of being connected to each other in other ways than social media, or instant online connection, clearly touched something in people. With some people we exchanged only one or two letters but with others we actively wrote to each other for six months. Another way to be engaged was this seminar programme we were running, inviting people to talk about everything from the feminist internet to the enormous environmental impact of technology. So there were multiple layers of engagement with different people, communities and subjects. Just none of them happened online.

It was also important to realise the project in London, in a big city. I didn’t want it to become some kind of offline retreat where I would go into the woods and close myself off from everything and everyone for half a year. That wasn’t interesting to me. The interesting part was trying to find alternative ways to engage with different areas of our society while being offline.

6 Months Without seems to sit at the intersection of performance art, environmental activism and scientific experiment. How do you conceive of the project and what do you hope it’ll make people reflect on?

I saw it as a sort of a very long durational performance that lasted for half a year. The performance was documented weekly by video, photographs and writing. I saved everything from the six months: letters, books, newspapers. I have displayed that paraphernalia as documentation of that period. It was also a participatory piece (writing letters, organising seminars and conversations with people) and an attempt to think about how profoundly the internet and the mode of being available 24/7 has changed our world and society. It has changed what it means to be a human, in a heartbeat. The internet only just turned 30 and think about what it’s done to us in such a short time. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it has totally challenged what it means to be human, how we function in society, the way we connect to each other and how we perceive ourselves. Also, the environmental damage that technology causes, and the contribution of the internet on climate crises is enormous. According to different sources (it’s really quite complex to calculate it accordingly), the annual carbon footprint of the internet is at least the same or bigger than all the flights of the world combined in a year. I feel like we talk a lot about how bad eating meat or flying is but nobody really wants to talk about how bad watching YouTube videos or binging on Netflix is for the environment. It’s almost like the taboo of our times. 

The “digital detox” has become an increasingly popular term for short periods of individual online abstinence. But it’s a term that still feels inherently capitalistic – in the sense that those periods offline are designed to re-energise us for when we’re back on. To what extent does 6 Months Without propose sustainable solutions to the current system?

We ran a seminar programme where we invited people to contribute to various themes around the digital life. For example, the second seminar attempted to redefine the meaning and functioning of technology from something that only considers Western rational logic and knowledge as valuable and scientific into something that includes other modes of knowing and being. We had some amazing people like Melody Patry who spoke about what we need to do to protect the internet and those who use it, as well as Tamar Clarke-Brown who spoke about her project CBT (coding : braiding : transmission) which explores the relationship between body and digital spaces in an attempt to understand how new technologies build identities.

The seminars were attempting to imagine alternative ways of being together and through that, propose solutions to the current system. We were thinking – how can we challenge the ways we use digital technology and social media? How can we challenge the ever-growing power of those in charge of emerging technologies, and the way they are using us for their own interests through data collection, social media addiction, fake news, internet governance and such? What kind of political strength and opportunities for resistance might there be in slow (offline) living? 

In a practical, everyday level I think a good way to start is to limit your use of the internet and social media. Things that sound simple but are difficult, like sleep with your phone in the other room, or leave it home when you go somewhere for few hours, don’t use social media during weekdays. It could be anything really, but requires a lot of self-discipline.