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- Convenors:
-
Rosalie Allain
(University of Oxford)
Ludovic Coupaye (University College London)
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Short Abstract:
This panel explores how communities preserve, develop and conceptualise technical relations with their local, social, cultural and natural environments. We approach these embedded, transformative and generative practices as forms of 'techno-diversity' persisting and transcending an unwell world.
Long Abstract:
The globalisation of EuroAmerican political-economic and technoscientific models has increased public and anthropological attention to sustainability, biodiversity and social justice, to meet challenges posed by humanity’s future on a troubled planet. However, we also witness localised or “grass-roots” responses, resistances and re-appropriations of these dominant material conditions within the neglected domain of ‘technics’. This panel calls attention to these undertheorized processes by exploring how local communities develop unique modalities of technical relations with their “milieus” (Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon).
Milieu is used here to avoid distributing environmental issues between Nature and Society, inviting a renewed attention to the entangled ecologies of minds, materials and social relations which partake in world building practices. Similarly, we understand ‘technical’ as the ways in which groups adopt specific technics as practices which weave together materials, objects, species, knowledge and conceptualisations in their practical engagements with a given emergent milieu.
From this perspective, we propose to explore cultural, social or bio-diversity through localised modalities of actions — in other words, technodiversity (Hui, 2021) – with a focus on the interrelations between technics and milieu, as embedded, transformative and generative practices. We aim to theoretically and ethnographically explore the development of multiple local technical responses to the challenges exacerbated by global environmental, economic and political issues. These might include practices of resilience, resistance, disputes, DIY or hacking, all grounded in their particular local milieus and proposing unique visions of their own futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 April, 2023, -Laurence Douny (Humboldt University) Skander Hathroubi (Spartha Medical)
Paper long abstract:
Since their emergence in the second part of the nineteen century, synthetic dyes made from organic molecules have enabled the development of rapid and cost-effective production of textiles worldwide and on a large industrial scale. On the downside, these chemically manufactured dyes produce large amounts of toxic wastewater causing significant damage to living organisms and human health. The proposed paper highlights local knowledge mobilized by Marka-Dafing dyers in developing technics of fermenting textiles in the context of an increasing global need for sustainable and biodegradable dyes and fabrics that reduce environmental impact. The paper explores dyeing technics that Marka-Dafing women of northwestern Burkina Faso in West Africa, have developed over time to mimic indigenous silk: a precious and rare material that is used to weave their wrapper of prestige (tuntun). Grounded into an ethnography of materials, it examines the relationships between plants and the world of bacteria contained in cow dung which is used to enhance the mechanical and optical properties of cotton yarns, not only for making it look like wild silk but also for making the fiber more durable.
Rik Adriaans (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the invention of modular synthesizer circuits that integrate sonic and computational legacies of 1980s/1990s into their sound generation, interface, and design. Their designers embrace craft, tactility and obsolescence, and challenge linear trajectories of the analog and digital.
Paper long abstract:
Modular synthesizers first emerged in the 1960s when technological innovations made it possible to scale down the synthesizer from a room-sized instrument to smaller transistor-based systems, and they became obsolete in the 1980s with the advent of digital sound chips. The defining characteristic of a modular synthesizer is that it produces sound through connections of patch cables that are routed across the inputs and outputs of modules such as oscillators, filters, amplifiers and sequencers. Since the early 2000s, there has seen a global revival of modular synthesis among electronic musicians who ditch their laptops in favour of analog control voltages and patch cords—part of a boutique industry driven by open hardware, affordable manufacturing in East Asia, online distribution and the standardisation provided by the Eurorack format.
This paper explores the design, manufacturing and branding practices of modular synthesizer manufacturers whose electronic circuits incorporate sonic and computational legacies from 1980s and 1990s—the digital era in which modular synthesizers were nearly forgotten. It looks at the ethos of manufacturers of new synthesizer modules whose work incorporates elements widely seen as obsolete such as 8-bit analog to digital conversion, Amiga tracker interfaces, the FM chip of the Sound Blaster 16 and the circuit bending of objects such as toys, walkmans and computer components from this era. It locates these devices in an ethos that embraces circuit design as craft, tactility and obsolescence, challenging linear trajectories of the analog and the digital.
Edoardo Lomi (Copenhagen Business School)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to make sense of ethnographic observations of Boston Dynamics' 'Spot' robot following its short-term experimental 'unleashing' in the centre of Melbourne, Australia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to make sense of ethnographic observations of Boston Dynamics' 'Spot' robot following its short-term experimental 'unleashing' in the centre of Melbourne, Australia.
This experiment looked into what might happen as Spot entangled with an unfamiliar urban ecology. How would Spot's adaptive capacities relate with those of a nearby dog, car, street crossing, or passer-by? In posing this question, we were interested in exploring the idea of relational possibilities as immanent in technical objects and their milieus (Coupaye 2021). Moving away from a human-centred view of material agency as human intentionality inferable from the material, we then sought to approach the analysis of Spot's promenade as instantiating a particular modality for how this technical object may exist and operate in the world.
Our analytical attempts soon led us to question the scope of our own ethnographic task: what kind of ethnography was being crafted in and through Spot's data-gathering capacities along with those of other, human and nonhuman participants? And how to avoid the pitfall of mistaking Spot's technical spectacle for an unproblematic revelation of its technicity while still allowing for its non-anthropocentric elicitation?
In addressing these questions, this paper articulates an anthropology of techno-diversity understood as the inherent pluralism of technical objects–their 'inhuman remains' (Hui 2019 226) and 'margins of indeterminacy' (Simondon 2012 152)–and their wider milieus. The challenge of this diversity, we suggest, lies in approaching the study of technology without rehearsing the bio-centric, onto-epistemological grounds of its origins and agency in human sociality (Parisi 2022).
Vita Peacock (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the advocacy of media diversity by prominent actors in German’s Datenschutzszene, as expressive of a healthy and democratic socio-technical ecology.
Paper long abstract:
The past fifteen years have witnessed the emergence in Germany of a lively culture of associations, rituals, and concerned citizens, oriented around the protection of privacy and information in an era of increasing digitalisation. Advocating against ‘surveillance capitalism’ on the one hand (Zuboff 2019), and intrusive forms of state surveillance on the other, those who populate the German Datenschutzszene broadly share the philosophy that a democratic society in the twenty-first century is one which is decentralised, and offers a diversity of media options for participating in social life (Chadwick 2013). This means making the case that not every social relation needs to be digitised, and that paper in particular has an enduring role to play in the protection of individual and social autonomy (Selbstbestimmung); and further that that digital infrastructures themselves must and indeed can be built differently, with the use of encryption and other techniques to create privacy-protecting online spaces sometimes referred to as the ‘fediverse’.
Although participants often define themselves in the terms of what they oppose, namely the new forms of surveillance enabled by digitalisation, in this paper I explore what precisely it is that they are attempting to defend and nourish, namely a non-alienated relationship to technology oriented around the values and ways of relating enshrined in Germany’s constitution (Grundgesetz).