Since its founding in 2007, the Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP has used surveillance, TV networks, and digital archives to examine how we move through and record the world. In addition to their film and video projects, the wildly prolific studio runs a rooftop cinema in Mumbai and maintains several online video archives, including the largest digital archive of Indian film.
Technology
What can a 100-pixel video teach us about storytelling around the world?
CAMP’s first major US museum exhibition is on view now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through July 20th and includes three video projects spanning two decades of work. The exhibit’s three films repurposed private television sets into interactive neighborhood portrayals, collected cellphone footage recorded by sailors navigating the Indian Ocean, and reimagined how a CCTV camera could be utilized for exploration rather than control. In one film, CAMP collected cellphone videos that sailors shared at ports via bluetooth; in another, passersby on street level control a surveillance camera 35 stories above.
I chatted with two of CAMP’s founders, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, about the importance of maintaining an open digital archive, the slippery definition of piracy, and how footage that never makes it into a finished film is often the most illuminating.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your film, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, offers a portrait of sailors navigating the Indian Ocean, using cellphone videos to document their journeys and daily lives. Can you talk about how that project came to be and how this partnership with the sailors began?
Ashok Sukumaran: Around the global financial crisis, in 2009, we were walking around the city of Sharjah in the UAE. Sharjah is a creek city, like Dubai. Before oil was discovered, the creeks were the main city center focus. And these boats were these kind of weird, out-of-time wooden ships, and many of them were going to Somali ports. So, we asked them, “How come there were no issues with pirates?” Because everything we were hearing about Somalia at that time was about piracy. They said, “No, no, there’s a difference between going to the Somali town carrying everything they need and driving past it with a ton of oil.”
Shaina Anand: Almost all of these giant wooden boats were built in these twin towns in the Gulf of Kutch, in Gujarat, and they were massive. They were 800–2,000-ton giant wooden crafts.
AS: There’s a kind of language of the port. The Iranians, the UAE folks, the Somali, and of course, Indians and Pakistanis speak a kind of common language, which is close to a Hindustani mix of Farsi and Urdu. So, we were able to talk to everyone, to some extent, and we discovered a kind of music video genre that was really inspiring. This was the 2000s, with early Nokia phones, and sailors would shoot video and add music to it. Then their memory cards would run out [and they’d get deleted]. Some of the videos were 100 by 200 pixels.
SA: It was really important to us to try to trace the genealogy of the cellphone video, and it obviously was changing so fast. [The videos were] 10 frames a second, or 13 frames a second, in odd, square formats. It was rapidly changing.
For us, what was striking was that this image emerged in the middle of nowhere, out at sea, when a brethren boat or a comrade boat was filming on a phone. When our film had its festival run at the National Theatre in London, one of the film programmers came and told me, “It gives us such joy to see those images on the best screen in London.” And it gave us the same joy, too. That there is an equality, then.
Many people misread this “low-res image” and [call it] “a poor image,” and we’re like, that is not what it is at all.
How were the videos originally transferred and shared among sailors?
SA: It was a very physical process because these were not found on the internet. We were physically sitting down with people and saying, “What’s on your phone? Can I have a look at it? What did you film?” These [videos] were exchanged over Bluetooth, so they were not uploaded to YouTube, but they were literally transferred by putting the phones together.
AS: [When the boats] anchor for a bit at these smaller islands along the Gulf of Aden or Gulf of Persia, they’re still always in pairs or threes. They travel together for safety. That’s also the time for leisure and piping in those songs.
There’s something sweet about this moment of being bored at sea and using that space to create something.
SA: In a lot of our work, you see this idea that the subject of the film is usually behind the camera. They’re usually running the thing, and they are looking out at whatever interests them. At sea, you have a lot of time, even though it’s busy when it’s loading and unloading. But at sea, a lot of people are basically hanging out and taking pictures of the things that they can see. Then the music adds the emotional tenor. All the music in the film was found with the video; we didn’t add any music ourselves.
AS: And then if your phone has 2GB memory, that’s the ephemera bit. The video gets deleted, but it’s found on another boat on someone else’s phone.
SA: And within these communities, the videos are quite traceable because the boats are known. There are a thousand boats, but people would instantly recognize, “That’s so and so.” Even by looking at the shape of the boat in a 100-pixel video, they would know which boat it was.
You talked a little bit about how these videos were really ephemeral; they got erased very quickly. So much of your work seems to be about a commitment to maintaining an archive.
AS: We set up CAMP in 2007, with our collaborators who were lawyers and coders and cinephiles, and then, all of us together, good friends. We set up Pad.ma, our first online archive, and the lawyers were working around copyright law and trying to challenge them legally, pushing fair use. We didn’t want to valorize piracy, but we realized how, for countries in Asia, piracy was vital.
You didn’t even think of [buying software from] Microsoft. You bought the parts of a computer with help from the person selling them, saying, “Okay, so much RAM, this motherboard,” and so on, and then loaded what you wanted.
SA: The whole Indian tech sector was built on piracy, or what’s called piracy. People were not able to pay the fees. With Pad.ma, we basically initiated this idea of a footage archive or a collection of material that was not films, but things that were shot by people during film projects that never made it into the cut. For political reasons, for economic reasons, for the reasons that the films were only 30 or 60 minutes long and they had filmed for years, all those kinds of things. The idea was that Pad.ma was a footage archive that allowed you to deeply access that material.
So it’s an archive of scraps — the things around the edges that maybe weren’t shown elsewhere.
SA: Yeah, but here, the scraps are 20 times the size of the finished thing.
AS: I think that’s the important thing. You had 100 hours of footage for a 60-minute film. That was really the reason for building a non-state archive, and we’re the custodians and collaborators who think the 99 hours may be more important. It’s not those old remnant scraps.
It’s the other way around.
AS: It’s the other way around. I mean, you have a one-hour interview, and two minutes might make it into a film.
SA: You had all these examples of European avant-garde filmmakers coming to India making films and then doing these edits of what they thought they were seeing. But the footage is saying much more than their particular edit at the time. It can be very revealing of what was actually going on and how they filmed.
So the archives contain a huge amount of data.
SA: I mean, we have committed to that. We raised money from various sources for the projects. Indiancine.ma, which is a sister project, that’s like the whole of Indian cinema as a metadata archive. AS: There were magical things in 2008 on the platform. One was that the timeline had cut detection. So, you can actually go to a cut just by using your left and right arrow keys. And you don’t have that even in [Adobe] Premiere. You could also densely annotate. So you have researchers working, you have activists, you have film scholars, and they may take from the archive. But in that process, they’ve given back their expertise or their views of the archive.
Can you talk more about your work with participatory filmmaking?
AS: On one level, what had been occupying my head space was this critique of how documentary images are taken, or why this relationship between subject, author, and technology is so dumb.
I would keep saying, “look at the image,” and we can say a white guy filmed it, or we can know this really important Indian filmmaker filmed it, or you can say a top feminist filmmaker filmed it, or a queer person filmed it or a person from that community. But something’s a bit off in that form as well. Not just [in terms of] who’s speaking for who and all of that.
Another of your projects in the exhibit, Khirkeeyaan, which created video portals between neighbors and community centers using CCTV, seems like a place where the subject has a lot of authority over their image.
AS: Between 2005 and 2006, CCTV cameras started to proliferate all over. And they were cheap. So, the electronic market where we’d go to buy computer stuff now had become a CCTV market.
It was $10 for those static cameras. You could get that quad box, like a four-channel mixer. They were everywhere really fast: the grocery store, the dive bar, the beauty salon, the abortion clinic. Wherever I went, I was seeing these tiny things.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
SA: When you put the camera on top of the TV and you allow the two systems to meet, you can just look into the television, and then that’s part of the cable television network. By default, these systems are kind of oppositional. One is a broadcast system, or one is a sucking and one is a closed thing, and if you join them together, they start to talk to each other or—
Download and upload simultaneously.
AS: Exactly, which was the key property of video. That there was feedback. It was immediate.
SA: It was live, and unlike film, you don’t have to process it. They were ambient. They would go on for 24 hours. You were able to say that your household TV is now a portal.
AS: The key thing was that this wasn’t the internet. The cables were all 100 meters each. For a long time, until it got replaced by dish antennas, coaxial cable just used to snake across our cities. The cable would come to your house from the window sill, where the coax would be wrapped around, and there’d be a little booster. It would go from neighborhood to neighborhood, building to building, terrace to terrace. [With Khirkeeyaan], the network was neighborly, but these neighbors were meeting each other for the first time.
Was there anything that kind of surprised you about the way that this network was used?
AS: What always surprises me, and continues to, is that when you set up your own kind of collaboration with the subjects, and then you exit, you’re not asking those leading questions of, “Tell me about your life,” or “Which village do you come from?” And poetry happens. I think, what was very affirmative for me, was just the confidence with which people sat and looked at their TV sets. You sit and look at your TV set all the time, but the TV set now had a hole in it, and it was looking back at you.
Another of your videos in the show, Bombay Tilts Down, uses a CCTV camera. Can you talk more about your work utilizing surveillance?
SA: CCTV, in a way, changes how we behave. It sort of infects, depending on who is watching us and how.
In Bombay Tilts Down, it was the simple idea that this gaze of the camera is already there. In the city, there are 5,000 of exactly the same kind of camera, and probably many more.
They’re all at least 4K, and now they’re 8K, but they are robotic controllable cameras that are designed to do facial recognition at a distance. Instead of being a guard, waiting for something to happen, we used it to film the city. And the range is incredible; it goes way beyond the property line of the thing it’s trying to protect. You can see 15 kilometers away with it, from the 35th floor.
So you installed the camera yourself.
SA: This one, yes. The people you see in Bombay Tilts Down are looking up at the camera because people could see the stream downstairs, and some of them were moving the camera around, calling the shots.
Microsoft may once again be struggling to keep up with its own climate goals, according to its 2026 sustainability report. As reported by GeekWire, the report states that Microsoft’s carbon emissions increased 25 percent in 2025, totalling 34 million metric tons “without select interventions.” Microsoft says this was “driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure,” as well as the company’s decision last February to stop purchasing “non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.”
Several years ago, Microsoft set itself a goal to be carbon negative by 2030, meaning it will need to remove more carbon emissions than it produces. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has faced setbacks toward accomplishing that goal, as its 2024 sustainability report showed a similar rise in climate pollution. This year’s report admits that, “While AI infrastructure is driving demand for energy, water, land, and materials, sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to meet demand.”
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That old phone sitting in your drawer may have more life left in it than you think. You may look at it and see a dead battery, an outdated camera or a screen that no longer feels worth using. Google and researchers at the University of California San Diego see something else: a tiny computer that may still have useful processing power.
Their idea is called phone cluster computing. Instead of treating retired smartphones as electronic waste, researchers remove the motherboard and redeploy it as part of a low-carbon computing system.
Google says UC San Diego plans to launch a data center built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones in fall 2026. The goal is to provide low-cost cloud computing for students and researchers while reducing the need for newly manufactured server hardware.
That means the next chapter for an old phone may not be a junk drawer. It may be a server rack.
YOU COULD GET PAID FROM GOOGLE’S ANDROID DATA LAWSUIT
Researchers plan to launch a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego in fall 2026 to support students and research workloads. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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What is phone cluster computing?
Phone cluster computing takes retired smartphones and turns their core hardware into a computing platform. The process starts by stripping each phone down to the motherboard. That board holds the processor, memory and storage. The display, battery, cameras, chassis and other phone-specific parts are removed.
That step is important because a full phone does not belong in a data center. Batteries can create safety issues. Screens and cameras waste space. The motherboard is the part that still offers computing value.
Once the board is removed, researchers load a general-purpose Linux system onto it. Android already runs on Linux at its core, but Android is built for mobile apps and personal devices. A data center needs something more flexible for cloud workloads. After that, the phone boards can be grouped into clusters. Many small boards then work together like a collection of tiny servers.
Why Google wants old Pixel phones for cloud computing
The AI boom has created a huge appetite for computing power. Data centers need more chips, more electricity and more cooling. At the same time, billions of phones fall out of use around the world.
This Google-backed project takes that conversation in a different direction by asking whether some useful computing can come from hardware we already made.
The project focuses on embodied carbon. That means the emissions created before a device ever turns on. Mining, manufacturing and shipping all add to that carbon footprint.
If a phone motherboard already exists, reusing it can avoid some of the environmental cost tied to manufacturing new hardware. Google says the motherboard accounts for about half of a phone’s embodied carbon, which makes it the most valuable part to recover.
How retired smartphones become low-carbon servers
You cannot plug a pile of old phones into a rack and call it a data center. The process requires careful teardown, new software and a way to manage many boards at once. Google says the project uses containerized applications managed by Kubernetes. That helps coordinate the work across many devices.
The phones are organized into self-managing clusters of about 25 to 50 boards. Each board works as a small Linux machine. Together, they can handle tasks that would otherwise run on traditional cloud servers. That does not make one phone equal to one server. A server has many more processor cores, more memory and data center-grade hardware. A phone board has fewer resources and tighter limits. Still, some jobs do not need a giant machine. They need enough compute to run efficiently without wasting resources.
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Google and UC San Diego are testing a cloud computing system built from retired Pixel phone motherboards, giving old smartphones a possible second life. (Google)
Can old phone processors handle cloud workloads?
The technical case is stronger than you may expect. Google says the single-threaded performance of modern smartphone performance cores can match or beat the per-core performance of some modern multicore servers. In one comparison, a 2023 Pixel Fold was tested against an ASUS RS720A-E11 server using SPEC benchmarks. The Pixel Fold’s performance cores beat the baseline data center server core on many of the tests. That sounds impressive, but there is an important catch.
A smartphone board has a smaller memory limit and fewer cores. It also lacks the management tools and hardware durability that servers are built around. So the project needs the right workloads.
UC San Diego is starting with educational and research computing. That makes sense because many classroom tasks can run on small cloud instances. Google says early experiments showed that a 20-phone cluster could support peak submission rates for a class of more than 75 students. The grading latency also came in below the default AWS backend used in the comparison.
Why UC San Diego is testing a 2,000 Pixel phone data center
UC San Diego plans to use the 2,000-phone cluster to support computer science classes and research workloads. Google says the deployment could support about 100 classes at once. It also describes the system as providing about 50 server-equivalents worth of compute at a fraction of the usual cost.
For a university, that could be a major advantage. Cloud computing costs can rise quickly, especially when many students submit assignments at the same time. If a reused phone cluster can handle some of that load, schools may save money while reducing demand for newly manufactured servers.
This also gives researchers a chance to test phone-based computing at scale. A small lab demo can look promising. A 2,000-board deployment will show much more about reliability, maintenance and day-to-day performance.
Phone cluster computing still has big limits
Phone cluster computing sounds promising, but it still has a lot to prove. Your smartphone was made for daily use in your hand, not nonstop work inside a data center. Data center servers are built to run for years with steady cooling, fast repairs and constant monitoring. Phone motherboards come from devices made for pockets, backpacks and kitchen counters. That alone raises some big questions.
The boards could fail faster than expected. Cooling may also become a challenge once thousands of tiny processors run side by side. Then there is the labor problem, because someone has to safely remove batteries, screens and other parts before the boards can be reused. Cost will be the deciding factor. If teardown, maintenance and replacement work get too expensive, this idea may stay in the research lab.
Phone clusters also will not replace the massive GPU systems that power advanced AI training. They make more sense for smaller cloud jobs, classroom tools and research tasks that fit within smartphone hardware limits. That still leaves plenty of useful work. After all, not every cloud task needs the newest chip.
Why old smartphones could help cut e-waste
The world’s e-waste problem is growing fast. The Global E-waste Monitor projects that electronic waste could climb to 82 million tonnes by 2030, while formal collection and recycling rates are expected to fall to 20%. Old phones are a big part of that problem because many never make it to a proper recycling program. They sit in drawers, land in closets or get tossed out with valuable parts still inside. Even when a phone no longer feels useful to you, its processor, memory and storage may still have work left to do.
CyberGuy has covered related second-life ideas before, including old smartphones being turned into tiny data centers and repurposed EV batteries helping power AI data centers. The common theme is hard to ignore. Some of the hardware already in circulation may still have useful work left to do.
FIVE DATA BROKER OPT-OUT MYTHS THAT LEAVE RETIREES EXPOSED
Google says reusing smartphone motherboards could cut hardware waste and reduce the carbon cost of building new data center servers. (Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)
How to safely recycle or reuse your old phone
This research does not mean you should toss your old phone into a random donation bin tomorrow. Before you recycle, donate, trade in or sell an old phone, you need to protect your data. Back up anything you want to keep. Then sign out of your accounts and securely wipe the device.
CyberGuy has a helpful guide on how to securely get rid of your old cell phone. Privacy comes first whenever you part with a device.
You can also consider trade-in programs, certified refurbishers or reputable electronics recycling programs. If the phone still works, buying refurbished can also keep devices in use longer. CyberGuy has covered what to know before buying refurbished electronics, which is helpful if you want to save money without taking a gamble. The key is to avoid letting old devices sit forgotten forever. A phone in a drawer helps no one.
What this means to you
That old phone in your drawer may not be as useless as it looks. Even if the battery is tired or the camera feels outdated, the processor inside may still have real value.
Now, you probably will not be mailing your old phone to a Google data center anytime soon. Still, this project points to a bigger shift in how we think about retired tech. Instead of sending every old device straight to recycling or letting it collect dust, companies, schools and researchers may find smarter ways to reuse the parts that still work.
There is also a money lesson here. If your current phone still runs well, you may not need to rush into an upgrade just because a newer model comes out. A battery replacement, trade-in or refurbished option could save you money while keeping perfectly good hardware in use longer. To me, that is the real takeaway. The phone you forgot about could possibly still have a job to do.
Watch the CyberGuy Live replay: Lock Down Your Phone in 30 Minutes
Your phone holds your email, passwords, photos, banking apps and personal data. In this free CyberGuy Live replay, Kurt the CyberGuy walks you step by step through simple phone security fixes you can do at your own pace. You’ll learn how to improve your privacy settings, spot the latest phone scams, use trusted security tools and walk away with a simple checklist to stay protected. Watch the replay and get our checklist here: CyberGuyLive.com.
Kurt’s key takeaways
Google and UC San Diego are testing how to turn retired Pixel phone motherboards into a low-carbon cloud computing platform. The project could give old smartphones a second life while reducing the need for newly manufactured servers. That is important as AI data centers keep demanding more computing power and more electricity. The first major test is expected in fall 2026 with a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego. If it works, the cluster could support students and researchers at a lower cost than traditional cloud infrastructure. However, this idea still has to prove it can handle the grind of daily use. Reliability, cooling, teardown labor and maintenance will determine whether phone cluster computing can grow beyond just research. To me, the most relatable part is sitting in your junk drawer. That old phone may seem useless, but its processor could still be powerful enough to help run cloud jobs. Maybe the future of computing starts with hardware we already forgot we owned.
Would you feel good knowing your old phone could help power cloud computing? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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If you’re looking for a relatively affordable way to cut down on cooling costs, Google’s Nest Thermostat can help. It’s packed with smart controls and energy-saving features, and right now it’s on sale in white for $79 ($50 off), which is its best price of the year, at Amazon.
The smart thermostat is quick to install and makes it easy to adjust your home’s temperature whether you’re relaxing in bed or on your way home thanks to the Google Home app. You can also create schedules and control it with your voice using Google Assistant, Alexa, or another Matter-compatible voice assistant.
Once it’s set up, the Nest Thermostat can automatically turn the temperature down when you’re away to help reduce unnecessary energy use, while Google’s Savings Finder feature suggests additional ways to save over time. It also monitors your HVAC system and can alert you if something doesn’t seem right, making it easier to stay on top of maintenance before small issues become bigger, more expensive ones. If you’re eligible, Nest Renew can also automatically shift some of your heating and cooling to times when electricity is cleaner or cheaper.
That said, this is Google’s entry-level model from 2020, so you do miss out on some of the premium features found on the latest Nest Learning Thermostat. Unlike the flagship version, it won’t learn your schedule automatically over time, for example, and lacks support for Nest Temperature Sensors that let you prioritize the temperature in a specific room. Even so, if all you want is an easy way to adjust your home’s temperature remotely and potentially lower your energy bills, the Nest Thermostat is still a solid investment at this price.
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