Johannes will give a lecture performance at Machine Project, Sunday,
October 11, 2009; 8 PM.
Hackers love knowledge. They try to find out how stuff works. And
that's great. Experimentation is a major part of hacking. It is in
the most philosophical sense a deconstruction of things.
A specific use is never inherent to an object, even though technical
demagogues like to claim that it is. Just compare the term
"self-explanatory" and the term "archeological find". It's a pretty
hard task to find out what technology is and what it should do if you
don't have a clue about the context. Usually the use is connected
with the object through definition ("instructions for use"). Turning
an object against the use inscribed in it means probing its possibilities.
Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno
Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability
to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as
social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in
retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a
culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over."
However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful
is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least
political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned
products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results,
useless prototypes) are not discussed.
Well. What can we do?
We can fail. Beautifully.
[]
<http://machineproject.com/events/2009/10/11/reach-out-and-touch-face-a-rant-about-failing/>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/10/monochrom-in-los-angeles-reach-out-and.htm>monochrom
at 10/05/2009 05:38:00 PM