These artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all

theverge.com:

In 2017, on a 10-meter-long sailboat off the coast of French Polynesia, Canadian artists Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bellum — also known as the two-person studio / collective Hundred Rabbits — realized that something had to change about the way they worked. Devine is a software developer who also makes music as Aliceffekt, and Rek is an illustrator and writer. Trying to download the latest Apple Xcode update, the pair had to place their iPhone in a bag and hoist it up the mast; the OS was around 10GB, but their SIM cards only had 5GB of data, and it took multiple attempts to get the job done. “At that moment, we began to feel like the modern development stack was utterly incompatible with our life,” the pair explain over email.

It was the beginning of something small but profound: the Uxn, a virtual ecosystem to make experimental tools and games that exists outside the revolving door of always-online tech anchored to subscriptions, needlessly complicated upgrades, and increasingly problematic forms of digital ownership. It is essentially an emulator, to translate the actions of one computer onto another, that can prolong the life of digital data tied to aging hardware and software. In line with the Rabbits’ love of storytelling, Rek even brought the Uxn to life as a tiny ox-like creature (often accompanied by the humanoid Varvara, who represents a portable computing system built on Uxn).

In 2016, Devine and Rek chose a life at sea after being inspired by “liveaboard” videos. They bought Pino, a 1982 Yamaha sailboat, and set about learning how to maintain their new craft. As their adventures expanded and they adjusted to living off solar panels, limited batteries, and donated secondhand devices, they learned to pare down