Prototyping Pedagogy

Jentery Sayers | UVic | MLab | @jenterysayers
Literary Audio Symposium | Concordia | 5 December 2016
Slides Online: jentery.github.io/litaud/

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Image care of Danielle Morgan

How to teach and learn with technologies as negotiations, not just validation machines?

Validation machines say, "You're here." "It's there." "It happened."
"You're correct." "All of you have the same data."

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Thing is, every technology is already quite a few.
Consider a gramophone, e.g.

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Material Technology (It)

Shapin: "embedded in . . . construction and operation,"
where a "machine constitutes a resource that may be used
to factor out human agency in the intellectual product"

Image of Berliner's gramophone (1894) care of Audio Engineering Society
See Shapin's "Pump and Circumstance" (1984), Social Studies of Science
Also see Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)

Social Technology (We)

Shapin: "collective performance and collective witness,"
where "the production of knowledge [is] visible
as a collective enterprise"

Images of the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company store at 2315-2316, Sainte-Catherine St., Montréal
and the main display room of the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company store (1913) care of Library and Archives Canada
See Shapin's "Pump and Circumstance" (1984), Social Studies of Science
Also see Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)

Literary Technology (Text)

Shapin: "the expository means" that "supplement[] the
public space of the laboratory by extending a
valid witnessing experience to all readers of the text"

Not just a report; a social relation and aesthetic

Images from Scientific American (1896) care of Internet Archive
Patent (1887) care of Audio Engineering Society
See Shapin's "Pump and Circumstance" (1984) Social Studies of Science
Also see Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)

Problem: Media (e.g., Audio) Become Virtual Witnesses

Modest Observers (Merely Present)
Containers of Information (Ready for Processing)
Disinterested Matters of Fact (Simply Push the Button)
Prolix or Elaborate (Representing the Circumstances)
Managing Dispute, Securing Assent (Just Trust Them)

Shapin: obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication

Image care of Danielle Morgan
See Shapin's "Pump and Circumstance" (1984), Social Studies of Science
Also see Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)

How to add some texture to our literary technologies?

Repetition, Resistance, Feedback, Friction, Tension . . .
Or, Stitching, Stretching, Warping, Grasping, Bending . . .

Sedgwick: "How did it get that way? and What could I do with it?"

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See Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2003)

McPherson: In and
Through Objects

Image care of Cinema Journal (2009)

Rosner: Design
as Inquiry

Image care of Rosner's website

Shipka: Negotiating an Interplay

Image care of Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011)

Kraus: Conjectural
Criticism

Image care of Digital Humanities Quarterly (2009)

Anderson: Audio Fiction

Listen to "Our Time Is Up"

Image care of Anderson's website

Prototyping Pedagogy

Negotiating "We"/"I"/"Them"/"It" with "Text"/"Media"
Participatory Observer (Not Detached)
Emphasis on Boundary-Making (Not Function)
Matters of Contingency and Interface (Not Fact)
Entanglement of Language with Materials (Not Division)
Iteration and Inquiry (Not Delegation or Validation)
Multimodal Composition (Not Re-presentation)

Types of Prototypes
. . . with Examples

Hardware

Building, Bending, Hacking, Modding . . . (see Collins)

Image care of Jon Johnson

"Glitch Controls"

By Nina Belojevic + Jon Johnson

Rather than engaging videogames primarily through the screen,
hardware hacking offers a tacit form of interaction
often resistant to symbolic or graphical logic.

Image care of Jon Johnson
Image care of Nina Belojevic

Consequences for Research

Demands Attention to Manufacture (see Belojevic)
Prompts Tangible Awareness of Audience (see Johnson)
Critique through Repair Techniques (see Rosner and Ames)
Ground Glitch Theory in Material Particulars (see Kirschenbaum)

Image care of Nina Belojevic

Patches

Rehabilitating, Remaking, Conjecturing . . . (see Fuller)

Image care of Patrick Close

"From Grain to Glitch"

By Patrick Close

Continuous movement from the ephemeral click to the stochastic mass
to the pure sine tone and finally to white noise (and back again)

Study of Xenakis’s "sound particle":
any sound with a duration between 1 and 100 milliseconds
"What are the possible restrictive limits of human psychophysiology?"

Image care of Patrick Close
Image and Max patch care of Patrick Close

Consequences for Research

Executability of an Abstraction or Model (see McCarty)
Demonstrate and Share Concepts (see Drucker et al.)
Learning through Repetition and Process Modelling (see Close)
Understand Systems by Accelerating Relations (see Molleindustria)

Image care of Patrick Close

Indie Games

Designing, Drawing, Intermediating, Personalizing . . .
Games are zines (see Anthropy).

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Consequences for Research

Manifest Critique through Experimentation (see Flanagan)
Game as Gift and Value (see kopas)
Game Design over Programming (see Fullerton)
Test How Processes Are Persuasive (see Bogost)

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Design Fiction

Narrating, Speculating, Projecting, Performing . . .
Use of diegesis to suspend disbelief about change (see Sterling)

Image care of Nina Belojevic + Jon Johnson

"HyperLit"

By Nina Belojevic + Jon Johnson

Interactions encourage audiences to become aware of
how gamification renders them productive subjects.

Image care of Nina Belojevic + Jon Johnson
Video care of Nina Belojevic and Jon Johnson

Consequences for Writing

Imagine Tech Beyond Instrumentalism (see Lukens + DiSalvo)
Create Conditions for Narrative and Experience (see Roesler)
Hermeneut Inhabits the System (see Drucker + Nowviskie)
Literature as Source for Cultural Criticism and Humour

Image of Michael Stevens care of Nina Belojevic + Jon Johnson

Case Study: Prototyping Impressions of Sound

Problems-Based Approach

Contingencies (Not Reproduction or Reenactment)
Negotiations (Not Virtual Witness)
Feedback and Variance (Not Ideal Form)
Contexts of Use (Not Homogeneous Consumption)
Expanding the Lab (Not a Restricted Space)

Thank You

Jentery Sayers | UVic | MLab | @jenterysayers

Special thanks to Jason Camlot, Clara Nencu,
Vanessa Cannizzaro, Jessica Tucker, and Max Stein for hosting;
also to SSHRC for supporting this research;
and to Nina Belojevic, Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan,
Patrick Close, Katherine Goertz, Jon Johnson, Maasa Lebus,
Evan Locke, Danielle Morgan, and Victoria Murawski
for contributing to the MLab's research.