Cyrus Thibault Lognonné
Biography
Cyrus Lognonné-Khalatbari is an artist, designer and PhD candidate of the joint program between the Geneva Arts and Design University (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). Inside his PhD, Cyrus bridges ethnographic fieldwork, Science and Technology Studies (STS) with arts and design methodologies in order to address, at the level of the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), the ecological implications of computing power and the digital. Cyrus’ research has been published by journals and publishers such as Diseña, Valiz, TETI and has been funded by the French Embassy in Switzerland and the European Union.Research
PhD Thesis
Struggles and Resilience in GPU Miniaturization: From Taipei’s Overclockers to Accra’s Urban MinersDirection :
Jérôme Baudry: professeur assistant tenure track | EPFL, LHS
Nicolas Nova (1977-2024): Professeur HES | HEAD – Genève (HES-SO)
Our algorithmic media landscape is driven by the miniaturization of smartness, a process centered on embedding artificial intelligence into increasingly compact and efficient devices. At the core of this transformation lies the graphical processing unit (GPU), a hardware originally designed for graphics acceleration but now integral to AI and computational parallelization. My PhD examines the political economy of GPU miniaturization by bridging two communities situated at opposite ends of its lifecycle: liquid-nitrogen overclockers in Taipei, Taiwan, who push computational limits through extreme cooling practices, and urban miners in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, who recycle and repurpose discarded GPUs. By tracing their material, environmental, and knowledge infrastructures, my PhD challenges dominant narratives of AI immateriality and universality, revealing smartness as deeply embedded in geological, thermal, and cultural processes. As a research-through-design PhD, it also addresses these elemental practices of labour by combining academic research and fieldwork with hands-on critical and speculative design projects. Disentangling smartness and its miniaturization through situated practices and embodiments placed in dialogue with qualitative data and analysis, the research fosters alternative modes of inquiry. By doing so, it invites us to speculate in more-ended ways about the past, present and near-future of computing power and its entanglements.