Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities
Discussing what characterizes both the digital humanities and speculative computing, Johanna Drucker warns against the idea that humanities + computers should center on the “formal logic” as the raison d’être of incorporating the digital into humanities pursuits. She argues, instead, for a humanities that foregrounds subjective interpretation as opposed to the misguided quest that privileges the formal logic of computational methods. She writes: "The field of digital humanities is not simply concerned with creating new electronic environments for access to traditional or born-digital materials. It is the study of ways of thinking differently about how we know what we know and how the interpretative task of the humanist is redefined in these changed conditions."[1] This stance foregrounds how DH work is a negotiation of processes among humans and computers, and how that technoencounter produces a field that could not be reached without that symbiotic relationship. Perhaps, then, DH is foundationally a cross-ontological collaboration. Though in that negotiation, who are we aiming to learn more about, the computer or the human?
Despite the rich potential of DH in her definition of it, Drucker draws a distinction between digital humanities and speculative computing: “The digital humanities community has been concerned with the creation of digital tools in humanities contexts. The emphasis in speculative computing is instead the production of humanities tools in digital contexts.”[2] This equation, yet with a slight reformation, provides the foundation for my work: the academic maker community has been concerned with the creation of things in humanities contexts, things like prints of 3D fossils or statues whose 3D form may not actually create any new humanities entry points bur rather digitally replicates old ones. The emphasis in speculative making is instead the production of humanities objects in maker contexts, which creates new humanities entry points to the digital via maker practices.
Though Drucker draws a distinction between speculative computing and DH, the definition of DH should be (and now often is) extended to include the interpretive, in which the computer’s proclivity for formal logic exists as just one of many DH methodologies. Gary Hall, in “The Digital Humanities Beyond Computing: A Postscript,” also takes up the relationship between the humanities and the computer in defining DH. Like Drucker, Hall asks, “to what extent is it possible to envision digital humanities that go beyond the disciplinary objects, affiliations, assumptions and methodological practices of computing and computer science?”[3] Instead of imagining what computer science can do for the humanities, the heart of DH is asking instead what the humanities can do for, and with, the computer.
Also operating in this vein of the new potentiality of doing humanities work in digital contexts, the authors of “Making Digital: Visual Approaches to the Digital Humanities” specifically address the significance of 3D technologies, including those of 3Dology, to DH and artistic practice. They write, “These technologies present the possibility of tactile engagement with data in a way that has never previously been possible,” and further, “A 3D printer can realize impossible objects, those which cannot be cast otherwise.”[4] The incorporation of digital capabilities not only makes information faster or more efficient, but rather, reaches beyond, into data not possible without them. 3Dology offers new entry points to materiality, affect, process, technoencounter, spatiality, methodology, and epistemology.
I consider fleshLAB an act of speculative making. Alexis Lothian and Jayna Brown suggest that speculative fiction and expressive arts “do not simply affirm or advocate for particular agendas, or concern themselves with blueprints for a perfect world,”[5] as many have various investments in or predilections for futurity. Yet, “they all consider speculation as the crucial enactment of the impossible.”[6] Again, the impossible undergirds both 3Dology and the speculative, which makes for a rich pairing. In my work, the act of speculation is not founded in futurity, as many often are, but rather, in ontology. This space is a glimpse into a world that never was and will never come to be. In this way, the project is also related to the temporal, if that which does manifest forecloses upon other futures, then “impossible” futures are just as much about temporality than plausible futures via their dichotomous relationship. This alterity is powerful because it reveals the logics of hegemonic realness, which inherently recede from view, especially without contrast.
The framing is particularly useful for my project because of its other connection to the economic. Lothian and Brown address this dual meaning via the crushing violence and radical potential of speculation:
Also considering the largely commercial motivations embedded in fabrication and (industrial) design, James Auger suggests that speculative design, as well as critical design, discursive design, design probes, and design fictions, “remove the constraints from the commercial sector that define normative design processes; use models and prototypes at the heart of the enquiry; and use fiction to present alternative products, systems or worlds.”[8] Though neither Lothian and Brown nor Auger address 3Dology or maker culture specifically, making in academia, likely drawing from the ethos of the mainstream "maker movement," is often framed as an activity geared toward achieving entrepreneurial prototypes and innovations whose end result is a commodity.In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces. Financial speculators gamble with everyone’s lives, and our times would seem to foreclose on any future at all for many. But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining.[7]
I consider fleshLAB an act of speculative making because of its specific use of maker practices, such as DIY electronics and 3D printing. I could not have made fleshLAB without the infrastructure and academic institutionalization of maker culture. I could not have made this piece without the access to these resources that my position as a student affords. I could not have made the piece without modified objects uploaded to 3D databases nor how-to manuals on maker websites.
Further, I could not have created the intended result without the 3D printer. For instance, the speculative often foregrounds the uncanny—something that is purposefully unsettling, something both too close yet too far from the “real.” The uncanny of fleshLAB is largely captured by the rows of humans, likely the focal point of the piece. Without using 3Dology, I would not have been able to physically produce identical, plastic humans, and likely not with the same accuracy of scale needed when creating a miniature model that replicated the proportions of “real” life. The eeriness of fleshLAB, an intended affective resonance, is expressed via the constitution of the rows of humans. Just as formal logic has been imagined as a major strength computers lend to DH, as well as the ability to process large amounts of data at incredible speed, in 3Dology, they offer extreme accuracy in fabrication, and are generally more accessible than industrial fabrication tools. This accuracy allows for the manufacturing of impossible objects, and thus propels materiality and spatiality into new realms of academic and artistic exploration.
Speculative making is a heuristic methodology. The process of making something outside of the logics of the affirmative and hegemonic reveals questions we perhaps would not otherwise think to ask of a technoencounter. The requirements of creation, especially of a “world” that has no rules, yield discovery: the ideological processes that materialize in design and the construction of things and space uncover where and how ideology, and thus power, hides. It models how to ask similar questions of other spaces, places, and encounters. The hope is that once someone begins to think critically about alternative modes of materiality, of being, etc., they will also transfer those modes of inquiry to the “real” world. In this way, this approach can also be a tool for consciousness-raising. It makes palpable, even touchable, the “water flowing underground,” or the ideology flowing within materiality, spatiality, and our lived experiences of them.
The construction of a speculative or critical object confronts its maker with several choices. As I designed each aspect of this space, I had to reflect on the ways I have always already come to understand the object, space, etc. These are the same choices that designers of similar spaces have also had to make regarding the function, accessibility, and affordance of a space. It is my goal that fleshLAB will 1) demonstrate the countless decisions that culminate in the construction of space, thus revealing the ideology embedded in spatial materiality, and 2) encourage critical reflection of the spatial practices of computer use, our encounters with computers, and how those encounters both shape and reflect our encounters with each other, especially in terms of affordance and interaction.
The speculative object enables a multi-site, mediated process. It fosters critical thought regarding the object itself (an encounter), while also encouraging consideration of the space it critiques (the traditional computer lab). The jump between the speculative space and the “real” space is obvious and easier to make than works that are more distanced from perceived reality, such as abstract art. This bridging[9] between speculative and “real” is strengthened by 3D works, in which the 3D object matches the dimensionality of our own 3D world and thus requires less of a jump. Further, enacting this approach in 3D demonstrates how materiality itself is merely the manifestation of the ideological. It is ultimately an idea made material, touchable.
Combining the impossibility of both the speculative and 3Dology, impossible objects reveal questions like, why should such a thing be impossible? What are the conditions that have made these conditions (im)possible? In the end, explorations of the impossible reveal more about possibility than impossibility, and thus reveal the oppressive ideologies that restrict the possible. If possibility, materiality, and reality are revealed as process, a culmination of choices, then speculative making can operate as a form of world-making that imagines other elsewheres. It illuminates ways to achieve the impossible by revealing why and how it has been labeled as such.
[1] Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), xii.
[2] Ibid., 25–26.
[3] Gary Hall, “The Digital Humanities Beyond Computing: A Postscript,” Culture Machine 12 (2011): 3.
[4] Nicole Beale et al., “Making Digital: Visual Approaches to the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities 2, no. 3 (Summer 2013), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-3/making-digital-visual-approaches-to-the-digital-humanities/.
[5] Alexis Lothian and Jayna Brown, “Speculative Life: An Introduction,” Social Text Periscope, Speculative Life, 2012, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/speculative_life_introduction.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] James Auger, “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation,” Digital Creativity 24, no. 1 (2013): 11, doi:10.1080/14626268.2013.767276. Projects classified as speculative or critical design relate specifically to commodities, as they “challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life.” See: http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0
[9] For more on bridging in speculative design, see: Auger, “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation,” 12.
