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• 1 media/bluelab.jpg 2017-06-25T14:32:12-07:00 readme.txt 82 image_header 472245 2018-11-29T15:49:27-08:00

  Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched? Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no. —Henri Lefebvre, 1974[1]

  
  I’m sitting in a computer chair (what’s a computer chair, anyway, and how do I know this is one?). It has a black, plastic frame, an upholstered cushioned seat, mesh back, and a kind of pinwheel base atop five small wheels. I’m at a white laminate table. A desktop computer (a PC, not a Mac) stares back, mirroring my body in its own computery way. To my left, a 3D printer whizzes its robotic arm across a robotic plate, spewing out hot, colorful plastic like an automated glue gun. The smell of sweet plastic fills the warm, poorly-ventilated room.
  
  Through the windows that line the walls of the makerspace (making it quite performative), I look away from the precise layers being laid by the glue-gun robot, up into a larger computer lab: grease-soaked fast food bags (from the student union food court across the way) scattered among computer monitors among undergraduates watching YouTube videos or writing papers. All of these sticky computers and tired people and plastic printers and stained carpeting living in the same space. It hits me all at once and I ask myself: how did I get here? How did here get here? Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks, a song plays.
  
  This project explores maker culture, 3D printing, speculative making, sites of technoencounter (a concept explained in more detail to come), digital humanities methodologies and epistemologies, object-based writing practices, and human-computer interaction. It is an academic maker statement based on my piece, fleshLAB. As David Byrne asks in “Once in a Lifetime,” this project asks of many things, “how did I [or it] get here?” On one hand, it explores the politics of the emplaced technoencounter, zooming in on the earth; North America; The United States; the university; the computer lab; the makerspace; a conjectural technoencounter. But, it is also about the “water flowing underground.” Rather, how spaces and the things that come to populate them materialize via discursive, political practices of interpellation.
  
  I created fleshLAB to explore this interpellation to seek out new insights into the research I was undertaking by experimenting with the process of making. At the time, I had been exploring the University archives attempting to uncover how computer labs were institutionalized on campus: their funding streams, the spaces from which they emerge and those they displace, the kinds of practices imagined in these spaces, functional and aesthetic design, and anything else I could find about the cultural imaginary of computer labs. Overall, my goal was to explore the many contours of what I call the technoencounter, which I define as the emplaced contact zone created specifically for humans to experience, access, or use technology, and the resulting effects of that contact.
  
  To do this, I expanded my research from the archival to the realm of speculative making (discussed in much more detail to follow), a concept closely related to Matt Ratto’s critical making.[2] Ratto defines critical making as, “a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration.”[3] My project follows in this line of thinking, similar to other maker, design, and artistic pursuits, in which “practitioner theorists” apply design-thinking to the humanities[4] and “make arguments with things.”[5] While this project is an attempt to make arguments with things, it’s also an attempt to think with things, to learn with things, and then to write about them. In that way, fleshLAB is not just a critical, speculative object, but more specifically, an object made for scholarly inquiry, which operates as research methodology and epistemology.[6] It is a way of pursuing humanities questions and writing humanities scholarship through scholarly making.
  
  In educational settings, 3D printing and other maker practices often “tout innovation yet deemphasize critical thinking, social analysis, and the arts.”[7] In this discourse, the student is often positioned as the entrepreneurial maker and the thing that is made, a commodity. I offer my work, fleshLAB, created as an act of speculative making, of touchable speculation, as an example of how 3D printing can be used differently—perhaps, subversively—than the established norm framed by innovative entrepreneurialism. I identify neither with self-named makers who pursue corporate or government interests, nor those who are so critical of the maker movement that they become reluctant to identify with it. This "third position," defined by Vossoughi, Hooper, and Escudé, “seek[s] to examine critiques of the maker movement in order to begin articulating an alternative conceptual and pedagogical framework.”[8]  While the academic makerspace often privileges and promotes entrepreneurial pursuits, it can also allow for other practices. These practices produce things that are not bought and sold, things that are weird, things that hope to encourage critical thought. Here, I use 3D printing and maker practices to create touchable speculation.
  
  fleshLAB is a speculative technoencounter based on a non-speculative one: the computer lab. It explores ontology, power, and interaction. I envision the lab from my undergrad years, but from my experiences of several campuses, they are mostly indistinguishable: a series of identical white laminate tables, a series of identical burgundy-fabric, black plastic “computer” chairs, a series of identical Macs, and on the other side, the rows of identical PCs.[9] [10] All the computers lined up waiting for us (who?). Their keyboards and mice designed to call out to human fingers (“touch me!”). This is the moment in which I flip the script and imagine the computer as the “user” and the human as the “used.”[11] Based on this speculative question, fleshLAB illuminates how our human-human encounters inform our encounters with the non-human, while our encounters with the non-human also inform our encounters with one another. fleshLAB is the result of a critical process of decision-making centered on the social construction and design of space, the computer, and the user.
  
  To materialize this technoencounter, I used 3D computer-aided design (CAD) and printing in combination with other materials and practices, often claimed by maker culture, to translate what I see in my own mental space (where does that exist? Is that the ultimate site of virtuality?) into the physical world.[12] The processes and labor required to assemble fleshLAB rely on human-computer-machine interactions and various other things: a MakerBot Replicator, PLA filament, CAD software (Fuse, Mixamo, MeshMixer), thingiverse and its users, color printer, soldering iron, solder, breadboard, jumper wires, breadboard power supply, 5v power current, foam board, exacto knife, pencil, ruler, two USB cables, LEDs, a binary clock kit, my laptop, the computer in the makerspace, Microsoft Word, Gimp, a USB keyboard, USB mouse, Elmer’s glue, wire strippers, scissors, screws and a screwdriver, and an acrylic box from The Container Store. Creation is a collaborative process. Materiality is a culmination of process.
  
  Through the process of making fleshLAB, I came to understand that working in and with the 3D presents unique ways of thinking, doing, and being. Using 3D printing to make speculative 3D objects has revealed a different kind of theoretical undertaking, what I call throughout this project “3Dology.” 3Dology seeks to name, often for the simple sake of brevity, the practices and resulting objects of 3D computer-aided design, modeling, and printing. Yet, it also centers using those practices as research method, and the 3D objects created as objects of study. In my pursuits, 3Dology presents new paths to pursue humanities questions in relation to thinking, thinging (making the thing as a way of knowing), and writing. In relation to thinking, what can be learned or known in 3D that can’t be in 2D? What does its central connection to the spatial and material reveal? In relation to thinging, what does making the central object of study reveal as a non-traditional research method? And then, simply, how do you write about this process, this thing?
  
  This Scalar project, Touchable Speculation, is an attempt to answer those questions. It exists to turn fleshLAB from a stand-alone object to the heart of a scholarly project. In this way, the ontology or naming of an object depends on its intention. fleshLAB is not designed to exist alone as an “evocative object,”[13] but to serve as the basis upon which to explore humanities research and write humanities scholarship. Touchable Speculation exists to share how I made, learned from, and wrote about fleshLAB for the purpose of illuminating the impact of the digital upon the human. It is epistolary, a story within a story, told through various mediums (or media, if you prefer).
  
  
  Touchable Speculation operates in three major parts, with an introduction (readme.txt) and conclusion (postscript):

  Part 1: “Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities”

  This section explores the scholarly value of the speculative, making, and their intersection in DH, largely in relation to 3Dology, as they relate specifically to this project.

  Part 2: “3Dology and Hypermapping”

  This section discusses the particularity of scholarly pursuits based on things, largely in terms of epistemology, and research and writing methodology. Digital publishing platforms, such as Scalar, and annotation tools work particularly well as writing platforms for 3Dology. Specifically, I use what I call “hypermapping” to demonstrate how to map or layer ideas upon an image of a 3D object. Where hypertext affords the functionality of layered or branching writing, hypermapping affords media layering (including images, videos, song, text, etc.) upon other objects, both those that exist in virtual and in real space. Hypermapping is helpful in object-based scholarly writing as it offers a way to centralize the object, avoiding becoming referential within or secondary to the written companion.

  Part 3: fleshLAB hypermap

  This section presents fleshLAB via a hypermap. Like a traditional artist statement, this hypermap allows me to provide a walk-through of each element of the piece, as well as the kinds of questions, answers, and ideas revealed by the process of making and thinking with the piece. fleshLAB operates as a primary text/research object upon which I overlay my own scholarly writing that considers the technoencounter and what it reveals about the human. This section also includes a gallery of additional images.

  Postscript 

  (as expected, something of an end)
  
  Onward: To navigate through this project, please click the “Table of Contents” menu button at the top-left corner of the screen. You may also follow the path as laid out by clicking on the button below the endnotes to continue to the next page, or by clicking the navigation buttons in the margins.
   

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  [1] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1974).

  [2] Matt Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 252–260, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.583819.

  [3] Ratto, 252. It is important to note that Ratto largely discusses the process of critical making, at least in my understanding, in terms of collaborative or group process, by which teams of people explore concepts via making as a group activity. My use of critical making, both the term and the process, is not limited to group process, but also includes individual pursuits of making as conceptual exploration. My process, though not through group collaboration with other humans, felt conversational in terms of a dialogue among myself, things, tools, and ideas, and also involved human-computer collaboration.

  [4] Burdick et al. cited in Charity Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday.,” Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 8, no. 1 (2013): 97, https://doi.org/10.1353/txc.2013.0000.

  [5] Charity Hancock et al., 97.

  [6] Ratto and Hancock et al. discuss the many terms, such as reflective design, research-orientated design, etc., used to name making as means of conceptual process, and not just as means of the creation of the resultant object unto itself. In my use, critical making is any kind of making used for conceptual exploration, which can include speculative, reflective, scholarly, and academic making. In my work, these forms of making converge, overlap, and possess rather misty boundaries.

  [7] Shirin Vossoughi, Paul A K Hooper, and Meg Escudé, “Making Through the Lens of Culture Visions for Educational Equity,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 2 (2016): 224, https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.86.2.206.

  [8] Vossoughi, Hooper, and Escudé, 210.

  [9] The uniform design of computers is likely because 1) institutions buy their computers in bulk at the same time, and 2) over decades of their production, the overall design of computers has changed very little. It is likely that computer manufacturers rely on pre-existing, already-familiar affordances to ensure that people will buy and be happy with their computers. Computers are a product of paradigmatic design. Imagine the variance in design if computers were designed for each individual user.

  [10] My archival research explores alternative designs of the computer lab. Among many of these past visions of the future, see the projects posted by the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, for example: “Designing the Classroom of the Future” project video: “Videos – HCIL,” accessed December 12, 2016, http://hcil.umd.edu/videos/.

  [11] The title of the project reflects naming by affordance (computers compute) and the ways things are perceived in terms of their use-value to humans. “Flesh” seems more acceptable than “human,” because human is a contested ontology. Often, computers require the use of fleshy hands (and not the gloved hand, for instance). Another possible title could be touchLAB, which centralizes the act of encounter, rather than the materiality of that encounter. The two, of course, operate in tandem.

  [12]  Nick Lambert remarks on the similarities of human mental imagery and the computer image space. He suggests, “the intangible characteristics of computer graphics bear some resemblance to the brain’s ability to construct mental images." Further, he considers how computer graphics and virtual space (re)shape and effect mental imagery. See: Nick Lambert, “From Imaginal to Digital: Mental Imagery and the Computer Image Space,” Leonardo 44, no. 5 (September 13, 2011): 439–43, https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_00245.

  [13] Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” 253.
• 1 media/labspin.gif 2018-11-28T17:30:51-08:00 Speculative + Making = Genealogies, Context, and Naming Matters 17 image_header 2018-11-29T15:17:19-08:00

  “At one time, Ts’ui Pên must have said; ‘I am going into seclusion to write a book,’ and at another, ‘I am retiring to construct a maze.’ Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” —Jorge Luis Borges, “Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941)

  In the next section, “Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities,” I detail my specific usage and interpretation of the terms speculative, making, and their combination in relation to my choice to classify fleshLAB as speculative making. I largely frame the speculative in relation to Johanna Drucker’s work on speculative computing and speculative approaches in creative endeavors, such as art and fiction. I frame making in relation to what has come to be called the mainstream “maker movement,” especially the branch that has been adopted, institutionalized, and (often) reformulated in university education, and Matt Ratto’s critical making. Beyond this framing, these terms and practices are part of a much more expansive genealogy, one that spans many genres of making, of design.
  
  Though certainly conceptual, hands-on practices do not occur solely within academic spaces, nor solely within the fields I will discuss below, I am most interested in the development of these practices and concepts within academic research, scholarship, and pedagogy. Though expansive, interdisciplinary, and diverse, these approaches, in my view, share a commitment to learning with and from things and a desire to pursue these epistemologically-rich sites through hands-on exploration of material objects. Often, this approach manifests in two major scholarly areas: 1) design practice and research and 2) the "maker turn" within the digital humanities (DH).
  
  Though these practices may share several terms and approaches, they have come to be through different contexts and genealogies because of their various locations across the interdisciplinary fields of the humanities and of design. In some ways, you could say they share a common ancestor (a similar gene that has transmuted across fields and expressed itself in various ways), or put differently, a common vision (a similar perspective done differently as a result of disciplinary forces and trajectories). The practices and projects may take on similar qualities, but are often created by people who may have taken very different paths, use different tools, cite different archives, work in different parts of a campus, and attend different conferences.
  
  In “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” Hancock et al. specifically address the interconnectivity between the realms of conceptual design and hands-on, material-focused humanities research in their work on reflective design, a term developed by designer Donald Norman, which they apply to bibliography and textual studies. They utilize this experimental method specifically to defamiliarize the materiality of the book to explore the codex as transmuted from its typical material form.[1] Linking design to DH, they assert:

  “Reflective design complements the recent emphasis on critical making[2] in the digital humanities: the embodying of ideas or arguments in things. Ian Bogost’s carpentry,[3] Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology,[4] and Bruce Sterling’s design fiction[5] are all significant disciplinary touchstones. Part of the human-centered design philosophy of Donald Norman, reflective design foregrounds critical investigation over usability.”[6]

  
  Reflective design is one concept among many similar others based on the conceptual, hands-on exploration of the material form, and bibliocircuitry, one iteration of this cross-disciplinary practice.[7]  
  
  Similarly, making within academic fields, specifically (digital) humanities, is just as complex and nuanced, some aspects of which I discuss in more detail throughout this project. Making is not far off from design (i.e. as a form of creative fabrication), but presents perhaps a different, yet interconnected, set of historical and social connotations. The most compelling critiques of making come by way of the more specific critique of maker culture or the mainstream maker movement, and by extension, the dangers of their entry into education.
  
  Despite this, making can be and often is used within humanities frameworks to attempt to learn more about the material world as a way to identify hegemonic, often oppressive, mechanisms—a step required in the process to later remake the material world for the “better”—and, indeed, as a form of unmaking. For example, Hancock et al. suggest that reflective design is a method to transform the authors into “creative agents of change:” “…it is what helps us discover fault lines in the objects, artifacts, or systems being explored […] and in doing so allows us to imagine them otherwise: to see them as alterable rather than immutable; as possibility spaces rather than rigid, inherited structures.”[8]
  
  Design scholar and practitioner Anthony Dunne (whose work is discussed in more detail in the "speculative making" pop-out note above) suggests that design practice and research may “improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment […] to be subverted for more socially beneficial ends.”[9] Opening up the black box, whatever the obfuscated item may be, lets the light in to reveal the inner-workings, and empowers us to look inside to then remake through iteration. These modes of exploration may help us not only uncover that which needs re-designing, but also, the means in which to do so.
  
  As I have hoped to make clear by now, naming matters. Naming materializes through and around classification and is a significant aspect of the ideological development of these projects. The larger context of speculative and making provides a set of tools to classify, distinguish, and situate the spectrum of approaches drawing from these concepts. The terms practitioners select to identify themselves and their projects and practices define the work perhaps just as much as the work itself, often revealing the motivations, context, goals, and conceptual framings of the works, which in turn provides insight to how we might interpret or understand them.
  
  Though fleshLAB is certainly an act of speculative making, it is also, perhaps more broadly, an act of scholarly making. I prefer scholarly making as an umbrella term for its ability to include multiple academic branches, namely research, scholarship, and pedagogy. Scholarly making names research that centers hands-on, material explorations utilized for its unique epistemological value in research, and is enacted not only after the object of study is created, but also during. It redefines knowledge production that “counts” as scholarship beyond the academic article or book.[10] It is also useful to identify how making might be detached from its connotations to the maker movement, and the critiques of its uncritical adoption as defined above, and redefined accordingly. Finally, and more broadly, it suggests an additional mode of working within the material humanities. I, like Borges, wonder what might be revealed when we make books that are labyrinths and labyrinths that are books.
   

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  [1] Charity Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 8, no. 1 (2013): 75.

  [2] Hypertext links are used throughout this text. Instead of reproducing the hyperlinks within the quotation, I will maintain the URLs here as footnotes as they were embedded into the original. Link: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2012/03/full-interview-matt-ratto-on-critical-making/.

  [3] Link: http://www.bogost.com/blog/carpentry_vs_art_whats_the_dif.shtml.

  [4] Link: http://www.amazon.com/What-Media-Archaeology-Jussi-Parikka/dp/0745650260.

  [5] Link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html.

  [6] Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” 75.

  [7] Ibid., 79.

  [8] Ibid., 76, emphasis added.

  [9] Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge: MIT, 2008), xvi.

  [10] Bill Endres also discusses this issue in relation to academic employment practices, specifically tenure and promotion. See: Bill Endres, “A Literacy of Building: Making in the Digital Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 44–54.