Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping

infrastructures/feedingtubes

We’re all plugged in in some way, though often not via wires. The survival of both computer and human bodies requires a constant flux of materialized input and output, of transmediation. The body is not merely a receptacle of various elements (bone/blood/tissue; metal/glass/plastic), but rather an assemblage of materialized actions. The body is a political process. For both computers and humans, we can trace the cord back to the wall and beyond to imagine the processes that structure materiality.

Further, I have chosen to leave the underbelly exposed to show how fleshLAB is wired and powered. The blackboxing of infrastructure alienates people from understanding how computers function, and in the process, the materiality of the device recedes from view. I want to confront the viewer with the hard realities of infrastructure.[1] Many of the scholars attempting to make (re)visible the infrastructures and resources needed to maintain human computing habits focus on the problem of the popularization of the “cloud.” In Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum writes:

For all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was. In basest terms, it is made of pulses of light. Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they’re not magic […] In undertaking this journey, I’ve tried to wash away the technological alluvium of contemporary life in order to see—fresh in the sunlight—the physical essence of our digital world.[2] 

This desire to reveal the infrastructure and physical ramifications of our digital consumption is similar to the trash bin that reminds me that “there is no away.” This drive to “reconnect” with the material after years of living within the virtual-turn is also one of the major values of maker culture to begin with: to (re)connect with building things with our hands, or rather, to simply reconnect with the material world. Further, I wonder if the turn to 3D printing may also mark a fatigue of the digital. 3D printing’s popularity could be a result of overdigitization and the disappearance of material interaction. After all, we are not (yet...?) brains floating in vats jacked into fully digital worlds. 

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[1] For a rich exploration of the material ramifications of the Internet, see: Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network, vol. 1 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
[2] Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Ecco, 2013), 9–10.
 

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