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

there will come soft rains...

Is this what it feels like to be Mrs. McClellan? Is there a chance of showers?

Mrs. McClellan is an absent character in a chapter of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (a cautionary tale), "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950). While the human characters are no longer present, the smart house lives on. Eerily, it continues to serve the absent humans, laying out food, reading poems, and providing hourly reminders of the lives no longer lived within the house. It is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of technological ambivalence and anxiety, the agency of non-human agents, and a space in which humans and non-humans lived together, albeit one in which (as usual) the non-humans serve the humans.

Several artists have based their works on this story. Particularly notable works include:

This page is referenced by:

readme.txt
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.

[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.

there will come soft rains...

This page is referenced by:

Part 1: “Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities”

Part 2: “3Dology and Hypermapping”

Part 3: fleshLAB hypermap

Postscript

This page references: