1,720,972 research outputs found
From the Cloud to Agbogbloshie: The Case of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform and Akwasi Bediako Afrane’s TRONS
No full textThis contribution sheds light on discarded electronics repair in Accra, Ghana. After placing these practices in dialogue with the Western and Eurocentric narratives around the materiality of digital interactions and infrastructure, it delves into two arts and design contexts that gravitate around the electronic waste landfill and processing site of Agbogbloshie (Ghana). The first case study is the Agbogbloshie Makerspace (AMP), a critical making (and unmaking) platform empowering local repairers and dismantlers through open-source collaborative design methods. The contribution then focuses on the work of Akwasi Bediako Afrane, a Ghanaian media artist who re-appropriates discarded computers to critique and speculate on our sociotechnical condition. Situating these initiatives in the light of our broader dominant internet and computing narratives, the article situates the importance of these practices in order to tackle and raise awareness about the planetary electronic waste condition we live in.LHS
RGB Lights, water-cooling tubes, trashed motherboards and dusty fans ::disentangling the transindustrial labour of our computational culture
No full textThe contribution places here in dialogue two radically different yet inherently connected socio-technical contexts both gravitating around our planetary needs for digital growth and computing power; crucial in sustaining our digital interactions and behaviours. Taking here a material and infrastructural turn on our sociotechnical cultures, this contribution focuses moreover on computer devices and personal computers (PCs) : part of the foundational “hardware layer” upon which depends our algorithmic culture’s needs and desires. This contribution is structured around two conducted fieldworks and communities located around the lifecycle of these computers: both at the level of their optimisation/design and recycling/reuse. The first fieldwork is the one of COMPUTEX2023 (Taipei): one of the major computer fairs celebrating the computing industry and showcasing scratch-builders and case-modders, a community of computer gaming enthusiasts interested in modifying their personal computers (PCs) aesthetics and design. The second one deals with these computers when they are discarded and sent to the electronic-waste (e-waste) processing site of Agbogbloshie (Ghana): dismantled and recycled by local workers attempting to extract economic value and profit. Bridging these two contexts, the contribution proposes here to map through space and time the entanglements and frictions occurring in the body gestures, techniques and discourses located at the material and infrastructural layer of “the digital”. From complex PC builds and setups to e-waste dismantlers working in precarious conditions with rudimentary tools, it aims to challenge our preconceived ideas of technological progress and shed light on the human and material/ecological implications of the digital. And shed light on the transindustrial nature of our planetary computing culture
From cloud aesthetics to alternative circuits and assemblages:bridging theory, fieldwork and design to nuance our computational tropes and narratives
No full textFrom red heart emojis we use on Facebook to light blue buttons on Instagram pressuring us to post content – matcha lattes, fluffy cats, niche memes, you name it -, the design and marketing of platforms we use on a daily basis are structured around a core ideology: seamlessness. Seamlessness is the desire to obfuscate these platform’s “seams” and the technical logics – algorithms, protocols, codecs – at play when interacting with content. What these platforms consciously hide is, to put it differently, the way they manipulate our data as well as our attention1. They slice, moreover, the experience of scrolling online into ‘jittery, schizoid intervals’2 giving us the impression that, in addition to their lack of materiality due to their minimalistic interfaces, they annihilate time. In opposition to these behaviours and intentions, the design theorist Matt Ratto urges us to design for “seamfulness”3. Seamfulness – as opposed to seamlessness – materialises a broader intention to shed light on these platform’s seams. This desire comes moreover with a specific will: focus on the various actors, and procedural rhetoric4 revealing how these platforms operate, intentionally craft specific socio-technical interactions and make us inhabit the world in a specific way. Emphasising on the seamfulness also means, from my perspective, to engage as artists and designers with three specific postures bridging theory with fieldwork and practice. I argue through this article that embracing these postures is foundational inside our arts and design practices and pedagogies in order to crack open these platform’s opacity and blackbox5 resulting from their seamless design. The first one is to contextualise and trace the emergence of these technical objects through what anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan calls their chaîne opératoire6: mapping their sequential and chronological processes occurring from their production and optimisation to when they reach their end of life and are discarded. The second one, centred around the concepts of the critical technical practitioner7 and making8, urges us to engage – as artists and designers – with methodologies coming from social sciences in order to demystify and understand how these platforms operate in the real world9. The third and final posture the article puts forward opens the door to the importance of “conversational pieces”10 where technology is used as a medium to critique and nuance the dominant tropes and narratives it conveys
From the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) to computing power: exploring the situated practices of liquid nitrogen overclocking
No full textDrawing from a fieldwork conducted at COMPUTEX Taipei, one of the largest computer expo in the world, this contribution proposes to zoom-in at the level of Graphical Processing Units (GPU) manufacturers and their interactions with computer hardware hobbyists. More specifically, the paper focuses here on hobbyists competing during the event over liquid nitrogen overclocking: a computer hacking practice consisting of building custom GPU cooling rigs in order to increase computing power and benchmark graphically demanding games and simulations. From this empirical analysis, the contribution aims here to situate the crucial role of these hardware enthusiasts in collaborating with GPU manufacturers and corporations, “testing the limits” of such devices before these are produced and commercialised worldwide. This contribution is divided in three parts, shedding light through these hobbyists on the design, optimisation and commercialisation process of our GPU hardware chips. The first section inquires the community’s underlying discourses (or lack of discourses) about computing power and the digital. The section maps their motivations, objectives, goals and desires behind the development of such situated practices. Second, we further dive into the analysis of their strategies and techniques for computing power optimization. In other words, we shed light, here, on their modes of knowledge-building - from data collect, inscription to process optimization - for addressing the possibilities and drawbacks of liquid nitrogen GPU cooling. Finally, we expand on their partnerships with manufacturers and corporations through the process of feedback implementation. Using concrete examples, we show how competition and exploration practices of computer hobbyists impact the design of our GPU chips.LHS
Disentangling our environmentally-situated practices of thermal control: from Taipei’s overclockers to Accra’s repairers.
No full textDigital growth and progress is depicted by our major internet corporations as non-materially situated: disconnected from the earth and its processes of extraction, optimisation and waste. Critically reframing this dominant trope and narrative, the contribution proposes to map the environmentally-situated practices of computing power: required to operate the energy and graphically-demanding objects of our platform and algorithmic cultures. Informed by theoretical inquiries and fieldworks, the contribution moreover focuses on one aspect of our sociotechnical cultures: the production - and leakage - of heat generated by our devices; and the consequent need to cool down these devices. The presentation is structured in three parts. First, it contextualises computing as inherently connected to thermal manipulation and control. From Mel Hogan’s inquiries on water infrastructures upon which our cloud platforms operate to Nicole Starosielski’s analysis of quantum technologies and their dependence on cryogenic refrigerators and liquid helium, the first section situates the topic inside a network of STS and environmental media-studies academics and scholars. The second and third section of the contribution map our practices of thermal control through two case-studies emerging from different lifecycle stages and sociotechnical contexts of our planetary computing culture. The first case-study emerges from Taipei, Taiwan. It follows a community of hardware hobbyists and gamers interested in practising extreme overclocking: pouring liquid-nitrogen on their computer chips in order to optimise their performances and benchmark energy-intensive programs and videogames. The second-case study is located in Accra, Ghana. It disentangles a task undertaken by second-hand computer repairers: replacing dusty fans and optimising their customer’s machines’ cooling systems in order to avoid them overheating. Placing these two inquiries in dialogue, the contribution proposes to map the environmentally-situated practices of thermal leakage and control. By doing so, it further contextualises the eco-material implications of our needs and desires for digital growth and progress.LHS
“Faulty” GPUs, gold, forks, cooking pots or iron-rods ::recycling computers in Accra, Ghana
No full textDuring the autumn of 2023, FIBER hosted Part 5 of its Reassemble Lab: Practising Permacomputing, a concept and a nascent community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology that is derived, among others, from permaculture principles. In his second contribution, Cyrus Khalatbari delves into the circular economies and e-waste repair and recycling culture of Ghana, contextualising these practices within permacomputing
Pour some ln2s, avoid condensation, win the prize:the environmentally-situated practices of liquid nitrogen overclockers
No full textDuring the autumn of 2023, FIBER hosted Part 5 of its Reassemble Lab: Practising Permacomputing, a concept and a nascent community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology that is derived, among others, from permaculture principles. In opposition to narratives of computational power as weightless and non-materially situated, Cyrus Khalatbari focuses on computer-cooling: the hidden environmental infrastructure upon which platforms operate
Method for Design Materialization (MDM) for artists, educators and archivists: an introduction. ISEA 2023.
No full textThis contribution argues for the potential of Barr, Khaled and Lessard’s Method for Design Materialization (MDM) as a research through design tool that is specifically suited for new media preservation. Building moreover from the ISEA first and second Summits on New Media Art Archiving, this article introduces the reader to this methodological and epistemological design framework through four existing articles: both addressing important issues in the context of new media practice, education, display and archiving. Placing these articles in dialogue with four structuring ideas of the MDM initiative, it posits the importance of further introducing new media artists to processes of self-archiving through the use of cohesive platforms such as MDM.LHS
2XTWEETSXMODEMSXTXTXTWEET (2X): Combining Media archeology and electronic literature to support societal change through design
No full textThrough the case study of the 2XTWEETSXMODEMSXTXTXTWEET (abbreviated 2X), this contribution will situate the potential of using Twitter’s publically available data streams as inputs for the creation of media archeological (Hertz and Parikka, 2012) textual assemblages hijacking the dominant narratives of our internet “cloud” and acting as conversational pieces (Bleecker, 2009) that support social change. Moreover, revisiting this installation intertwining Twitter data with screeching dial-up modems and using text as a raw materiality in order to make tangible invisible internet processes, this contribution will explore how our ubiquitous social media platforms can be detoured and reappropriated through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in order to enable critical technical practitioners (Sengers et al, 2006) to ask through design foundational questions about the political and ecological impact of our ubiquitous internet. This contribution will also contextualise the research-creation process of the 2X inside a network of arts and design projects. Moreover, it will build from works of electronic literature in order to debunk, at the level of the project, our common beliefs gravitating around the internet’s illusions of immateriality, neutrality and atemporality. This will enable us to ground the field as a prominent actor of change: that materialise and offer, through its body of situated practices, key questions about the sociotechnical and eco-material conditions of our data transmission technologies. The contribution will be divided into three parts. The first part will expand on our social media “infrastructural inversion” (Star and Bowker, 2000) and its potential for electronic literature practitioners. We will then explore how media archeology can be combined with the materiality of language for the creation of textual assemblages that support and contribute to societal change and critique. Finally, our third section will draw from the previous parts in order to revisit, in dialogue with the 2X, three projects emerging from the electronic literature’s field. Expanding from these works will enable us to further claim and contextualise the role of electronic literature in asking foundational questions about climate change and the internet.LHS
Into The E-Metropolis
No full textInto the E-Metropolis is a workshop-based initiative focused on reshaping the narrative of Ghana's relationship with electronic waste, particularly at TANTRI, Cape Coast. Rather than subscribing to the simplistic notion of technology being discarded in Ghana's "computer graveyards," the project seeks to illuminate the complex ecosystem of second-hand computer dealers, repairers, scrap-dealers, and metal casters. Operating through the lens of Afrofuturism, it will spark meaningful discussions and workshops involving these workers in order to collectively explore the past, present, and future of their knowledge and practices.LHS
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