Prototyping Pasts + Futures T+S 200 | UVic | Fall 2017

Keywords for Prototyping

Below are quotations and questions to contextualize our keywords for prototyping. Please note that the quoted material is not intended to either define or provide origin stories for the terms at hand. Rather, it is meant to prompt conversations about the praxis of prototyping. If you are interested in the sources and some related reading, then let me know. I'm happy to help.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Wolfgang Ernst: "The crucial question for media archaeology, then, resides in whether, in [the] interplay between technology and culture, the new kind of historical imagination that emerged was an effect of new media or whether such media were invented because the epistemological setting of the age demanded them. Or, to put it another way, was there a smooth evolutionary progression from etching to lithography to photography, or was there rather a dramatic break as a result of the difference between genuinely technological media, such as photography, and earlier cultural technologies? . . . What I am advancing is a media-critical antiquarianism. There has always been a double bind in antiquarian data processing between distance and empathy, resulting from the gap between the physical presence and the discursive absence of the past. Antiquarians have tried to bridge this gap by touching and tasting the immediate, material object. For antiquarians, history is not just text but the materialist emancipation of the object from an exclusive subjection to textual analysis. Antiquarianism acknowledges the past as artifactual hardware, so to speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a form of software. In a digital culture of apparent, virtual, immaterial realities, a reminder of the insistence and resistance of material worlds is indispensable, and all the more so from a media-theoretical point of view." --- Digital Memory and the Archive, Jussi Parikka, ed., U of Minnesota P 2013, pages 42-43

Questions: What do we learn from the resistance in the materials? How do our assumptions about history and technologies affect our writing and interpretations? How are old technologies and media fetishized, and to what effects? Are technologies ever "withdrawn" from time and space? Are they ever absolutely inaccessible to us?

MAGIC

Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." --- Profiles of the Future, Harper & Row 1973, page 21

Carolyn Marvin: "It was clear that science could do magic better than magicians. But the deeper moral was that conclusions reached by untrained lay eyes, especially amid the distraction of mystery, spectacle, and dramatic sound effects, could not be trusted. What could be trusted was detached scientific knowledge originating in considered texts, able to produce not only the effects of the old magic, but other effects that the old magic could never produce. Late-nineteenth-century electricians constituted a self-conscious class of technical experts seeking public acknowledgment, legitimation, and reward in the pursuit of their task. Their efforts to invent themselves as an elite justified in commanding high social status and power focused on their technological literacy, or special symbolic skills as experts. They distinguished themselves from mechanics and tinkerers, their predecessors, and from an enthusiastic but electrically unlettered public by elevating the theoretical over the practical, the textual over the manual, and science over craft." --- When Old Technologies Were New, Oxford U P 1988, page 61

Questions: How is technical expertise performed through not only demonstrations but also language? How is it a form of power? When technology appears to be magic or user-friendly, what is rendered either invisible or difficult for many people to observe? Consider labour practices as well as technical elements here. When do we not want technology to be indistinguishable from magic?

NEW MEDIA

Lisa Gitelman: "Newness is a matter of perspective and a moving target. . . . 'New media' is a tag for present-mindedness, then, but one that calls as much attention to time—to newness and oldness—as it does to today's media system and its exceptionalism. . . . The studies of old media and new are thus productively mutual, overlapping, and entangled." --- Keywords for Media Studies, Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray, eds., New York U P 2017, page 130)

Lev Manovich: "Rather than focusing on familiar categories such as interactivity or hypermedia, I suggest a different list. This list reduces all principles of new media to five: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and cultural transcoding." --- Language of New Media, MIT P 2001, page 44

Questions: How do we both study and produce new media? How does an emphasis on novelty shape our interpretations of pasts and futures? What is the relevance of "new media" (as a term) beyond the academy? Where else and how else might it be meaningful?

PRESERVATION

Dene Grigar: "There are three types of preservation right now: . . . emulation . . . migration . . . [and] collection." --- "Curating and Preserving Electronic Literature," Matlit FLUC 2014)

Questions: How do different types of works and technologies demand different approaches to preservation? How does preservation intersect with re-creation or re-construction? Can we preserve experiences and content/data?


The University of Victoria acknowledges and respects the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples on whose traditional territories the University stands and whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to Carl DiSalvo, Tom Foster, Garnet Hertz, Patrick Jagoda, Virginia Kuhn, Kari Kraus, Shannon Mattern, Tara McPherson, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, whose approaches to teaching technology, society, and culture have especially influenced the construction of this syllabus.