WSU Colloquium on Steampunk and Critical Making

Posted by Roger Whitson on February 22nd, 2014

[Slide 2]
Hi, so I thought I’d begin by talking about a text that I completely admire.

Bruno Latour’s “Compositionist Manifesto” is often invoked by scholars in the digital humanities.
Critique has “run out of steam” because it assumes a shared world that no longer exist.
Like the vision of a world/nation/public space that has to be remade.

Yet, references Nietzsche’s hammer in order to make this argument.

“What performs a critique,” Latour tells us, “cannot also compose. [...] With a hammer (or a sledgehammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, stitch together” (475)

[Slide 3]
Of course, anyone who has actually used a hammer knows this isn’t true.
Rubber Mallets are used to affix and level tiles onto mortar.

[Slide 4]
Drop Hammers are used when forging metal tools to shape them.

[Slide 5]
Even sledgehammers, as nineteenth-century scholars know, are used to pound down spikes that “stitch” together ties to railroads.

[Slide 6]
Latour’s analysis is symptomatic of what McKenzie Wark calls “social determinism.” He argues that too many humanists give knee-jerk critiques of so-called “technological determinism” when we are just as guilty of privileging social and metaphoric explanations of history over and above technological ones.

“Take for example the way humanists reach so quickly for the insult ‘technological determinist!’ To even think in any constructive way about tech is to risk being charged with this. […] One has to be a social constructionist, not a technological determinist, say those whose specialty is the practical knowledge of the social. But why can’t one be a technological constructionist? Why is that not even a category of thought here? And why can’t one indict social determinists for their unwarranted metaphorical substitution, in which the world is “turtles all the way down”, but the turtles are social forms rather than technical ones? The game is rigged, you see. Against the fetish of the technical, the humanist brandish the fetish of the social. And on that basis pretty much zero progress has been made in thinking the relation between the technical and the social for thirty years.”

I believe that steampunk can act to bridge the divide between social forms of thinking and technological ones – because the aesthetic embraces both literary texts and quirky technological objects.

[Slide 7]
Quirky histories and narratives found in steampunk are a product of an increasing awareness of how computation is impacting our sense of time, materiality, and social life. Steampunk emerged out of the alt-history genre, “what-if” tales that included Victorian technology and referenced gadgets found in HG Wells and Jules Verne.

Two foundational novels show the early reliance of the genre on “what if” stories that experiment with alternative history.

Warlord of the Air (1971) by Michael Moorcock in which a member of the British military stationed in India travels to an alternate future where World War I never happened, and British colonialism expanded around the globe.

The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling imagines how the realization of The Analytical Engine by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace would usher in the Information Age one century early.

[Slide 8]
Steampunk has grown into an industry, but I wouldn’t call it a genre anymore. I argue that it’s a design schema or even a modality for different kinds of weird nineteenth-century technology. Steampunk novels exist, but also comics, fashion, technology, and manga.

[Slide 9]
Of course, not everyone is happy about this development.

[Slide 10]
In a larger sense, the developments in the steampunk genre are interesting because they make me consider how literary texts can inspire forms of critical making and design. “Critical Making” comes from Matt Ratto and Garnet Hertz, who are attempting to mix the worlds of hands-on production and critical theory that I feel are productive for literary studies as it becomes easier to work in different modalities. It also has affinities with the adversarial design thinking of Carl DiSalvo, in which “the means and forms of design [...] challenge beliefs, values, and what is taken to be fact.”

[Slide 11]
One big practice in critical making is circuit bending, in which consumer electronics are opened up, and metal probes are used to create circuits that were never intended by the manufacturer. Here, we see a speak-and-say that’s been modded to create electronic music.

My claim about critical making is that it gives us a material understanding of technology and history. So: history for people involved in critical making (and it’s sister genre media archaeology) are concerned with the materiality of media objects and the way those materials have histories that are physical. Shannon Mattern has shown, for instance, four aspects of technology that complicate narrative accounts of media history. I’m combining some of these aspects for brevity.

[Slide 12]
Recursive History. First, Friedrich Kittler argues that we need to stop talking about technology within linear humanist cultural histories, focusing instead on what he calls “recursive history,” in which elements or themes or (in Erriki Huhmato’s words, topoi) recur in different technologies in slightly different ways. Kittler’s example is the siren which begins as a seductive sea nymph, becomes a monster, then is incarnated as an alarm which incorporates the sonic aspect of one with the monsterous aspect of the other. Recursive thinking is a cornerstone of programming, which depends upon algorithms that are looped until something changes or stops them. But recursive history is also studied in terms of geological time, in which we look at media devices as (in Jussi Parikka’s words) “mini-mines of minerals and metals [such as] copper, gold, lead, mercury.” And these elements are to be understood not in human temporalities but in so-called deep time.

[Slide 13]
Palimpsest Materiality. Next, deep time manifests itself as material strata in the Earth’s crust, in layered urban spaces, in the literal guts of the machines we operate. This means that technologies and materials never completely erase the past but are superimposed on the past – forming a network of different temporalities that are layered, remediated, adapted, and repurposed. Old media reappear in newer media, become obsolescent, only to reemerge as needs change. For Mattern this means, “We can dig up the cables, pull out the wires, trace the epigraphy on building facades, analyze the disks – and observe their layering and interconnection.”

[Slide 14]
Steampunk anachronism is a way to excavate and manipulate the material superimposition of different technologies. Here, we have a project in Make magazine for recreating a Stirling engine using the steam from a teacup.

[Slide 15]
Stirling engines are interesting for engineers because they were originally supplanted by the rise of the internal combustion engine, but are reappearing as entrepreneurs try to find alternatives to fossil fuels. One reason they didn’t originally work was due to the fact that lubricants hadn’t sufficiently advanced to make the energy output efficient enough. Now, some engineers are trying to develop stirling engines [warning pdf] with the newer lubricants to see if they can compete with modern automobiles.

[Slide 16]
Probably one of the most famous steampunk objects is the Neverwas Haul, an art project completed for Burning Man. Here, you see the mixing of Victorian
technologies with recycled materials for a 3-story house that is built off of a 5^th wheel. In an interview with James Carrott, Shannon O’Hare said that the idea came from reading Neil Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, which imagines a program that creates a three-story Victorian house on tank treads. So, they decided to create it.

[Slide 17]
For my final example of steampunk making, I’d like to take you into a few methodologies for making a steampunk object. This is from an Instructables post on how to make a Steam gauge using an Arduino microcontroller. The gauge is mostly a decoration and registers random steam pressures for a few seconds before moving the hand to another pressure.

[Slide 18]
Arduino microprocessors are programmable electronic circuits. They come in several varieties, but the cheapest is probably the Uno I have pictured here. It’s basically a very simple single board computer that can execute about 30,000 lines of code per second (usually C, but it can also run off of Javascript). It’s used to create interactive objects that can sense an input, calculate a response and power servos that produce an effect.

[Slide 19]
This is the code for the steam gauge that regulates random movement and timing for the servo tied to the gauge’s arm. It also directs the three LED lights to blink. Note that this is a recursive algorithm, meaning that it generates different effects based upon where the arm was previously. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, because I know many of you don’t read code, but if you can make out some of the if/else statements, you can start to recognize the different variables that run the mechanism.

[Slide 20]
The steam gauge is a relatively simple programmable object. By showing it, I want to suggest the interconnections between different materials in mechanisms, as well as show how technologies like Arduino are enabling Makers to experiment with anachronistic material strata that defines our current technologies. I’d like to end with the Victorian period circa 1900, this is a German card from Hildebrands (a leading chocolate company) depicting the year 2000. This is “televised outside broadcasting” and is fascinating for how it links the telephone (then the most amazing technology) with video as a futuristic device. The point for me is not the Jamesonian suggestion that the future is seen from the context of the present, but that the different anachronistic strata of media history can be thrown into relief by examining a future that is not our own. Thank you.