Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Maja van der Velden
(University of Oslo)
Andrea Gasparini (University of Oslo)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Many of the materials in our digital technologies originate from stones containing minerals and metals. What do we know about these stones? What (his)stories can we tell about them? In this workshop, we will build a materials library of stones and stories that may inspire more sustainable futures.
Long Abstract:
Many of the materials of our digital technologies originate from stones (rocks), such as gold, copper, tin, zinc, cobalt, coltan, lithium, etc. There are different ways of knowing them. Geologists know these materials differently than chemists. Anthropologists know them differently than human rights workers. Tech designers know them differently than Indigenous communities. In this workshop, we will together build a materials library for the digital world. It will consist of stones and their (his)stories, creating a contact zone of different ways of knowing the minerals and metals, and their role in the design and life cycle of digital technologies.
Mary Louise Pratt (1991) described contact zones as “the social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. The materials library we will create together during the workshop may become such a contact zone, in which different disciplines and communities meet, with their different ways of knowing about the many aspects of the extraction of the stones, the processing of their metals and minerals, and their interactions with technology design. When we present our stories in our own words, avoiding unitary language, and share the stones with the other participants, new stories may become possible that may inspire different technology designs and use for more sustainable futures.
We invite contributions in different formats, oral, artistic, creative, slides, histories, short essays or short position papers, etc. We do want every participant to bring an example of the stone (rock) in question. If this is not possible, the convenors of the workshop will try to obtain a sample and bring it to the workshop.
Pratt, M.L. (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone"
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Andrea Gasparini (University of Oslo)
Short abstract:
This presentation examines the relationship between stones, minerals, and humans. As we age, we tend to disconnect from their use in technology. Yet, we still possess the ability to connect with nature from a young age.
Long abstract:
This presentation looks into the relations and roles of stones, including minerals, and humans. As adults, we do not relate to stones and minerals so often, especially not in the context of how they are used in technology. This alienation can be approached in various ways, however, I will present how, from an early age, we have a willingness and the ability to connect with nature.
The idea behind this presentation is based on an observation made in a Norwegian mineral shop where they were selling “pocket stones”, and the fact that I then recalled that I also had some stones in my pocket when I was younger. Research has shown that children often, without any precondition, have stones in their pockets (Rautio, 2013). Moreover, Rautio argues that the tactile contact of stones may give an “idea of interdependence of all life on earth.” (Rautio, 2013). This activity does create an emotional connection to the stones (Nieuwenhuys, 2011), and maybe nature itself.
The presentation will use actor-network theories to address the agency of stone and minerals in the context of nature (Jones & Cloke, 2008).
On the other hand, stones and minerals are heavily used and hidden in everyday technologies. What are the stories of the technologies in the pocket? Why do you have it there? Is it a tactile necessity?
Participating in the presentation will allow all to get two pocket stones from Norway, given the simple request to answer a few questions at the end of the presentation.
Sayaka Kuramochi (Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM))
Short abstract:
During the workshop, the participants will explore the relationship between society and technology with the help of a special crystal, Rochelle salt. A crystal that was frequently used in military technology among other things in Germany and Japan during the Second World War.
Long abstract:
New technologies, as they emerge, integrate naturally into old societies and form new social systems. For some years now, we have been in the third wave of AI, which celebrated another triumph last year (2023) with the availability of high-performance AI-based text and image generators. Many people now use these services on their private PCs and cell phones as a matter of routine. Although AI systems have existed before, they were not perceived as revolutionary by society at large and no one is aware of them today. Materials and associated technologies are also developed, prosper, disappear again and fall into oblivion. Sometimes they are rediscovered and reappear in a different context, a seemingly natural process.
The material at the center of the workshop is crystals of a special type of salt (Seignette salt or Rochelle salt). These crystals are of organic origin and are found in nature, particularly in wine. In 1920, it was discovered that they have ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties. Since then, they have not only been actively used as piezoelectric elements in headphones and microphones, but also in weapons technology, particularly in Germany during the Second World War, for underwater surveillance devices (passive sonar) such as anti-submarine defense, among other things.
In an artistic context, the material will be used and staged in a new way, thus reinterpreting the relationship between nature, technology and society.
Therefore, during the workshop we will explore the relationship between stones, minerals, crystals and new technologies and conduct experiments with these materials.
Alison Gerber (Lund University)
Short abstract:
The digitized stone is an interface between knowledges and communities; in its multidimensionality it offers the possibility of heterogeneous interpretations without hierarchy. With digitized stones and their movements between scientists, I focus on moments of translation, capture, and connection.
Long abstract:
The digitized stone is an interface between knowledges and communities; in its multidimensionality it offers the possibility of heterogeneous interpretations without hierarchy.
For several years I have followed archaeologists and others in their work with stones: rocks you can chip your teeth on and rocks whose resolutions demand supercomputer access, in a study grounded in research on the ways that scientific representation and visualization allow us to know what we know (Cetina 1999; Daston and Galison 2007; Latour and Woolgar 1986) and on a broadly defined, nuanced, and social world of “representational practice” (Hess 2001; Myers 2008; Vertesi 2014, 2015). With special attention to digitized stones and their affordances, I focus here on moments of translation, capture, and connection. I follow scientists as they move from multisensory experiences in muddy trenches to a brief focus on the visual in digitization processes before they begin work as embodied inquirers again in the new kinds of analyses enabled by digital worlds.
I propose to join this workshop with a short (~10 minutes) oral presentation based in an essay on stones as database architectures and as contact zones, drawing on my ethnographic work on 3D digital methods as they move between epistemic cultures. I will bring a 3D printed stone tool – an object of inquiry, a teaching tool, and a specific vision of what matters (and what doesn’t) when it comes to rocks.
Isabelle Boucher (Concordia University, Montréal, Canada)
Short abstract:
Viewing copper as both material condition and heuristic object at the intersection of technoscience and environmental justice, this essay considers how copper's properties have informed our assumptions about efficiency, resilience, and connectivity as economic and social virtues—to unsettle them.
Long abstract:
Too often, we ignore the relationship between our imaginaries and, as Anne Pasek writes, “the material idiosyncrasies of the object we have on hand to think with” (2023, 17). By thinking with copper, a highly conductive element that has played a central role in industrialization, digital computing, and green technologies, this paper asks what copper is conducive of, both materially and conceptually, within green economies. It traces copper—a technology-agnostic material—throughout seemingly disparate, multiscalar, and multi-sited histories to unravel the ways in which Quebec’s vision of economic and environmental sustainability is predicated upon epistemic assumptions, social relations, and economic structures that have been, at least in part, historically co-constituted by copper’s elemental idiosyncrasies and pervasive infrastructural presence. Viewing copper as both a material condition and a heuristic object that lies at the intersection of energy governance, technoscientific expertise, and environmental justice, this paper considers how the properties of copper—conductivity, ductility, and low reactivity—have informed our assumptions about efficiency, resilience, and connectivity as material, economic, and social virtues.
Drawing on historical studies of energy forms, knowledge, and power, and copper’s discursive figurations and infrastructures, this short historical and speculative essay will look at the convergences between copper, science, and clean growth, to reveal how the patina of Quebec’s green economy has been weathered by cybernetic cultures, oppressive cultural norms, and uneven geographies of human and nonhuman harm. This offering to the materials library seeks to unsettle these norms and decouple sustainability from efficiency, to rethink copper's elemental possibilities anew.
Rebecca Birch (University College London)
Short abstract:
Starting with a tiny apatite pebble, which was mined in Quebec, Canada, in 1890, and later found in Northumbria, UK, in 2022, this moving image and live story-telling performance explores the speculative histories and futures of apatite extraction in Quebec.
Long abstract:
In the mid-1870s an ‘apatite-fever’ took hold in Quebec, Canada, where speculators rushed to invest in mines and apatite could command $15-$16 per ton (Rothwell and Raymond,1881). New townships were established in the forested hills; communities created by global markets. The apatite was shipped to Europe for use as a phosphate fertiliser. In 1891, one shipment, on the SS Gothenburg City, ran aground at St Mary’s Island, Northumbria, shedding 300 tons of apatite into the sea.
In July 2022, I found a fragment of this load, a tiny apatite pebble on the beach at St Mary’s.
It is this apatite pebble that I will bring with me to the Materials Library. The pebble carries a lot of questions, of the past, but also the future. By 1892 apatite from open cast mines in Florida began to undercut the Canadian prices, the industry in Quebec collapsed, the mines closed. But what became of the communities that were temporarily established? And the land that was purchased by prospectors? And what can a reconstruction of this history of speculation, tell us about the future? A future in which ‘First Phosphate’, a company newly listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange, will resume apatite mining in Quebec, this time for use in lithium batteries.
For the Materials Library I will share, via a storytelling and moving image performance, the research and development stage of my forthcoming docu-fiction film, Apatite Findings, which will bring into dialogue the histories and futures of apatite extraction in Quebec.