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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/8bitDH.png 2017-06-25T15:02:04-07:00 Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities 24 image_header 2019-01-28T00:09:43-08:00 I have chosen to position my work under the nomenclature of speculative making in the digital humanities. I imagine digital humanities work to share one or both of these characteristics: 1) the work explores the impact (social, cultural, economic, environmental, etc.) of digital technology, and/or 2) the work utilizes digital technologies in some epistemological and/or methodological capacity. This, however, does not mean “add a computer and stir,” but rather, that some element of the project would somehow be impossible without the exploration or use of the digital.
  
  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:

  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]

  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.
  
  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. 
   

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  [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.