SWAMPS AND SLOWSTEPPERS as Feminist Design Power Tools
Tove Grรถnroos
Swamps and Slowsteppers – As Feminist Design Power Tools Architecture, gender and Technology Autumn 2014 Texts and Illustrations by Tove Grönroos guided by Helen Frichot School of Architecture Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Stockholm, Sweden
INDEX Part I: Introduction
4-5
Part II: Slowstepper
6-7
Part III: Sleep vs. Technology
8-11
Part IV: The Slow Iori Awakes
12-13
Part V: Contradictions
14-15
PartVI: Mirrors
16-17
References
18
Comments
19
3
4
INTRODUCTION The connections between architecture, gender and technology are blurred and messy and they’ve changed over time. One could claim, as Judith A McGawh does, that the concept of what is usually called technology is far too limited.(1) History in that sense is therefore also far too limited, focusing on major events often related to hard technology such as spaceships and computer technology etc. In that way we forget the soft technology, if you may call it that, often connected with women, what Zoe Sofia calls “container technologies”. This storybook is made out of texts written during the seminar course “Architecture, Gender and Technology”. Through readings of different gender theories the texts explore different standpoints when it comes to technology from a feminist perspective. This way of exploring the field and throw old concepts over board is a relief – not least for someone like me who grew up being taught that women couldn’t be “technological” (if they where it was only exceptions). This was “proved” by images drawn by boys and girls depicting a bicycle from their memory, where the girls draw organic, nonrealistic bikes whereas the boys correctly sketched almost machine-drawn bikes. And I’m born in the 80’s! Fortunately this could be balanced with row models such as Alex in Flashdance, a cool mother and sisters. The image stuck though, therefore I always fix my bike when no one’s around – thereby avoiding my neighbour who share the old idea of what women and men should be and what they can. In this way we get ideas, about what we know and can, projected upon (and inserted in) us even before we’ve gotten the chance to show it. This idea of objectifying I will discuss in part II Slowstepper where I’ll use the Slowstepper (Tardigrade) as a surface for projections through which I’ll highlight problems with objectifying. Throughout this book I’ll use the swamp as a posthuman landscape. It is posthuman because our ideas about how to value it has changed and still changes to become something more than to fullfil our needs. In part III Sleep vs technology I will look into how the swamp is a container of knowledge and hidden values. I also propose the idea of sleep; actual and metaphorical. In part IV: The Slow Iori awakes I further investigate the relationship between sleep and technology. I call for sites of mutual sympathy and consideration in which technology can be explored and produced unconditionally. I suggest the network as a feminist design tool to open up and include everyone in the process of technology. In the beginning one might think that I “reject technology”, due to my use of animals, as metaphors or projection surfaces for something, as a contrast to technology or progress. That is not the case. My texts try to explore how to reject negative hierarchies; both historically canonised as well as at daily basis performed. I see no real contradiction between technology and feminism, only in who creates what and why and what is to be called technology or technological. This of course creates kind of a contradictory discussion, but that is also a way of pointing at the complexity of these questions. From reading Donna Haraway I talk more about these (and other) contradictions in part V Contradictions. The last part, part VI is a kind of manifesto where I call for an awareness of the effect of mirror neurons. I also propose mirroring as a form of tool for change. 5
SLOWSTEPPER The Slowstepper (Waterbear/Tardigrade etc) lives in the swamps, mosses or lichen, encircling the extended wetlands in the north of Sweden, drawn to the uniformity of the drifting colours – ochre, brown, green, mint – and the calmness of the heterogeneous. These Slowstepper have got cousins all over the world; in the deep oceans, at top of the Himalaya, in the equator regions and around the polar circle. Humans discovered the Slowsteppers in the 18th century but still don’t know a lot about them, they tend to focus on trivial matters as for example how close to a volcano a Slowstepper can survive, or looking at them one by one under a low-power microscope.Most of the time humans do not speak about the Slowsteppers, or even know that they exist, probably due to their petit size, or just pure ignorance. The Slowstepper can sleep for many years, drying out in a sun-exposed swamp, then – awaken by a sudden rain some years later. For the Slowstepper day and night do not exist, only years of wakefulness or years of sleep. Living dead is a comfortable but uncertain state. Drifting between consciousness and death without being scared. Pretty often they get lost, they might not see it like that but it can be difficult to understand in any other way. If they’ve walked very far they might fall asleep for indefinite time. If one falls asleep the others join, they have really intimate relationships. They understand each other emotionally a lot better than wale’s, which in turn have a lot greater emotional understanding and connections than humans. Of course humans do not know that, because they think microorganisms are more like plants than animals, stones than living things. To focus on how the Slowstepper might feel, on their senses and relationships to their surroundings, we move from seing them as objects and they become things or subjects. When being objects they are without other purpose than to be experimented on, fulfilling some researchers desires. When becoming subjects with their own vital relations and movements they shift from passive objects to having a meaning in themselves, “constantly engaged in a network of relationships”. (4) Jane Bennet describes how an object, like a Gun Powder Residue Sampler, can be given meaning and thereby become more than just a thing, – an actant. The actant “is that which does something”. (5) In that way, depending on how we choose to look at things they will be given different meanings. Not only by how we look at things will determine how we see them, they will also determine how we see ourselves. This has been clear in the researches about humans, where researchers have been seeking answers about themselves by looking at the chimpanzee. Thereby excusing the violent behaviour exercised by man by pointing at the chimpanzee saying ‘it’s “natural”’.(6) Choosing the chimpanzee instead of the Pygmy chimpanzee (Bonobo), both equally genetically related to humans, makes humans see certain behaviours as “natural”. For example problem solving through violence becomes “natural”, whereas the Bonobo solves problems through sex.
6
7
SLEEP VS. TECHNOLOGY The swamp seems empty, dead almost. But around the half sunken trees – no, they grow there – and the floating algae, the activity is high. This might be one of the most bio diverse places in this country… Then suddenly, a muffled sound in the distance, but they can’t hear it, only feel it like a steady vibration deep inside. They want to scream but are out of voices. In the distance someone is pointing on a graph, explaining that and that, laughing at them, saying that they are so small and insignificant. “What did you ever do to change?” they are asked. They try to look at whatever creates that pain, but they don’t have any eyes so they just point in the direction of destruction, trying to say – with their bodies that are protectoral shells– that they where there, all those years ago they where there, they’ve seen it all. They try to say that there is no such thing as revolutions, only rises and falls of insignificance. They try to say that it’s all contained inside their bodies that are like shells. But it’s out of reach and insignificant to many. Then there is this moment of silence; they now appear to be nothing more than empty bags thrown away in the moss, the only thing giving them away being the claws pointing out from under the skin. The swamp is now emptied, drained on hidden treasures and significance. The temperature is sinking, and sinking. They are now all asleep. “Medan björndjur I dvala tål en temperatur nära den absoluta nollpunkten, dör aktiva björndjur vid betydligt mindre extrema temperaturer.” (7) (“While sleeping waterbears can survive a temperature close to absolute zero, active waterbears dies at significantly less extreme temperatures”. (Authors translation))
There’s been this idea, in human history; that you can separate man and landscape, body and mind. Zoë Sofia points at this relationship between nature and inhabitants saying; “the organism cannot be considered apart from the habitat that houses it”.(8) Here we see that there’s been a change in how humans understand the relationships between landscape and inhabitants, but we can also se a change in understanding different landscapes through different parameters.
“A swamp is a wetland that is forested. […] Swamps and other wetlands have traditionally held a very low property value compared to fields, prairies, or woodlands. They have a reputation for being unproductive land that cannot easily be utilized for human activities, other than perhaps hunting and trapping. Farmers, for example, typically drained swamps next to their fields so as to gain more land usable for planting crops. Many societies now realize that swamps are critically important to providing fresh water and oxygen to all life, and that they are often breeding grounds for a wide variety of life.” (9)
8
The problem with perspective is that it’s hard to see things from other perspectives than your own. Empathy is also something that often comes second hand when put against profit. This can be seen in how much value we put in the GDP, which clearly is a short-term measure that excludes important factors such as sustainability or human value. As our understanding for different aspects and values grow, we might be able to re-evaluate our ideas about values and understand that everything is connected. The farmers will have difficulties in surviving if they erase everything that doesn’t instantly fit into their idea of profitable land; such as with the swamps, due to the fact that they, even though they don’t always know that, are dependent on both animals and functions captured in those swamps.
In the discussion of sustainability you might hear people saying that the technology will solve everything, we just have to invent “that” and “that” first and then everything will be all right. But what if the problem is that “popular culture celebrates each new machine or commodity as a revolutionary wonder.”(10) What if the problem is the way we believe in our own capability to change things through technology? Maybe there is no such thing as revolutionary wonders made by humans, only lame experiments and the game of playing god – a way of self-celebration in an attempt to avoid the ever-present feeling of inferiority. We celebrate change as something clearly good. Progress is a goal in itself even though in the long term it might just ruin everything. Here the preserver might be so much more important than the active projectile. “But since people´s attention is directed most easily to the noisier and more active parts of the environment, the role of the utility and the apparatus has been neglected.” (11) 9
The Swamp was like the uterus, a matrix taken for granted and seldom uplifted in human cultures. The uterus, the female, has been seen as something passive in comparison to the active, the male sperms. Zoë Sofia says that “container technologies may not be as dumb or as static as we traditionally assume”(12) and that “just as we don’t notice or acknowledge the active giving of the (m)other, so too do we take for granted containers and the resources they supply, they are merely spaces to get stuff out of or put stuff into.”(13) Sofia claims that women might have started to “play a more distinctive role as a food-provider and effective ruler than she had in earlier foraging and hunting economies. […] One manipulates, assaults’ the other remains in place, to hold and protect and preserve.” (14) There clearly is a problem with celebrating new technology, just as Sofia explains; we take more and more out of the “bestand” and all our resources becomes tool-suppliers: “One danger of this framework, as Michael Zimmerman explains, is that it turns everything, even ourselves, into the same: neither thing, object or subject, but raw material, standing reserve, human resource”. (15)
10
I find this interesting when it comes to swamps and tardigrades. The swamp, which was seen as a dead wetland, proved to be so much more important than we could imagine and are now seen as containers of un-profitable(?) values such as biodiversity. The tardigrade is interesting here since it can only survive extreme conditions through passiveness, turning into an almost dead condition – a kind of sleep. It’s a micro-animal with a much longer history than humans, even though they might have been neither active nor progressive during that time. What if what humans could learn the most from them is not how to copy their capacity to survive extreme conditions, but rather their capability of transforming into a sleeping condition when things get tough. What if the solution is sleep rather than technology‌
11
THE SLOW IORI AWAKES When the darkness falls another animal awakes on it’s branch in an East Indian rainforest – or is it Gondwana? Every motion it feels, every move, appears to be heavy and light at the same time. She cannot move faster, trapped in that body, trapped in space – it’s too dark to see where the forest ends, but she sees far enough. She feels the blood pumping in her arm, cold-warm, warm-cold. She feels a small sting in her belly from something she ate. Sometimes she feels incomplete, like she misses out on things, like she’s trapped in that body and her mind wants’ to move fast between the trees or out in space. Her talent is her patience; this is usually not how she feels. Go, go and gone you where, itchy feeling of inadequacy. She looks into the darkness, every light mirrored twice at the back of her eyes making her see further than most. She spots a grasshopper some branches away and slowly starts to move one of her arms.
The Slow Loris moves according to its name almost in slow motion.(16) The half-monkey is related to the Lesser bushbabies and to be able to compete for food with them the Loris specialized in eating poisonous animals. To be able to handle the poison it digests the food much slower which in turn prevents it from using too much energy, therefore the Loris mostly just sit still or sleep and only when needing to find food it moves its slow motion-like body movements. The Loris shows that evolution doesn’t always make the best of everything but only as far as it needs to. Sometimes a mutation makes a species turn in other directions and sometimes they can’t even adapt.
12
While humanity is the most adapting it is also the most exploiting. In the film Interstellar we experience a fictive future where humans have exploited the earth and slowly it (the earth) becomes useless and dangerous.(17) We’ve become too many, wanting too much and need to search for other planets to colonize. Judy Wajcman reflects on changes in the way feminist theorists looks upon technology where feminists have debated “whether the problem lay in men’s domination of technology or whether the technology is in some sense inherently patriarchal”.(18) I concluded part 3 with the idea to choose sleep instead of technology where sleep rather signified a different view on technology than often chosen. I meant that action might not always be preferable, depending on what the goal is. The problem here is that the motives decides what direction technology takes. “Social scientists increasingly recognize that technological innovations is itself shaped by the social circumstances within which it takes place”, therefore technology cannot be seen as something neutral and must be related to its social context. (19) What I aim at is not a rejection of technology in the form the 1970’s feminist Wajcman refers to did (20-21), but rather to look at our relationship with technology. As “Industrial technology might have had a patriarchal character but digital technologies, based on brain rather than brawn, on networks rather than hierarchy, herald a new relationship between women and machines” we see a change in what purpose technology might gain. (22) The Slowstepper operates in different sites and adapt to those sites if needed. They operate slow and almost invisibly (to us at least). I imagine their networks being a mirror neuron network where they all mirror each others feelings and operate according to everyone else in the group – but as individuals. This could also be seen as a site – a site for mutual sympathy and consideration. This is what me and my feminist friends call “kind rooms” (Snälla rum). A kind room is a space of mutual acceptance: A prestige-less site where feelings are above rationality, where appreciation and laughter generate projects, and encouragement is more important than winning. Our feminist design tool is to create a common space where we can find strength and security and encourage each other to explore un-known fields of knowledge. The Slowstepper here becomes my agent, a carrier of values (that it might not possess depending on view). It operates in different sites in a kind of passive but constant way, but it also creates sites through being there. It creates climates for understanding in a place that could otherwise just be seen from a point of property value. On the Slow Lori I project what happens when someone else decides your destiny or your place to be. How stuck you feel when being excluded. This understanding of social climate might be a way to approach technology and see beyond traditional methods for how to do technology and what technology might be. The network then becomes a possibility to open up technology for those at present excluded.
13
CONTRADICTIONS He’s dead. They start to walk as soon as they feel it. The heart beat stops and they leave. Infrasound. It’s a memory but oh so present. They feel. They arrive at his house half a day later. They see he’s wife and ignore her. They make circles, they stand still. They greave for as long as usually. Then they leave. In a documentary Malik Bendalouj was about to make (interrupted by his own death) the meeting between the wildlife expert Lawrence Anthony and a couple of groups of traumatized elephants turns in to a kind of fairytale as their friendships evolves with mutual understanding. (23) Anthony was convinced that elephants where able to communicate over long distances. It is said that the moment when Anthony died (in Durban) two of the elephant herds he’d been working with started to walk towards his house (in Zululand). They walked for 12 hours and arrived to his house where they walked in circles around it and stayed for two days – a similar ritual to those they have when an elephant family-member has died. (24) As Donna Haraway says, you should not see animals and humans as separated through the uniqueness of humanity but rather see the connections between nature and culture. (25)
14
It is only a dot, a black dot on a grey background. You say it’s alive but the image is still. You say that it’s true but I never know. There is no motion so I can’t feel it. It exists and it doesn’t exist. They tell me to cry, to feel sad. I feel nothing. You might feel with someone but you might also not feel anything. You see a dot on a screen, someone tells you it’s your child, you see a dot – you feel a dot. Someone buys your body as a carrier for their child – you feel a lot. Someone buys your body for pleasure – you try to shut down. As if pain where only mental or physical. As if physical was always mental and as if physical was never mental. As if you couldn’t heal cancer with your thoughts. As if you’d always love a child that someone says is yours – you see a dot. You might be born into the wrong body. You’re a container of knowledge, of emotional knowledge. You’re a container of nothingness. My body is mine but it’s always projected upon. It changes me and it changes my feelings towards my body. You say I’m beautiful – I feel beautiful, or not. You say a meet lump is a child – I might believe you. The Monthy Pythons ironically sing “every sperm is sacred” and turns it into chaos. On facebook you might show your body if it’s according to how it is expected to look and be shown,(26) you show your hairy armpit and the rage is all over the place. You’re being critical toward the way people are exposed(27) or show a sketched image of different kinds of vulvas – you’re banned for some time to come and the image is quickly removed.(28) Haraway say that “etching of modern Christian creationism” could be seen “as a form of child abuse”. Someone puts films of you, being naked, in a public forum where heartbroken guys put up videos of their ex’s as revenge, but it’s not a crime to be filmed while having sex. Who’s the victim? The law can’t tell. Knowledge knows no boundaries with Internet, or does it? Aaron Swartz thought that knowledge (through internet as a media for fast and open access) should belong to everyone. In his attempts to search for ways to open knowledge sources he became a victim of the authorities aims to control people from using what they created. We shape technology, technology shapes us. We create tools that society controls and sometimes society knows more boundaries than technology. Your body might be built up by prostheses of ideas: The idea of the hymen being like a membrane covering inside the vulva. An idea so widely spread it causes disasters for women not “breaking it” and bleeding while for the first time having intercourse with a man. Ideas about two sexes being each other’s opposites leaves out other possibilities. As if everything was yin and yang, or black and white. Assumptions are made. We make things up, we tell stories and always leave things out. I make up stories of a Slowstepper being able to connect with other Slowsteppers in a mirror neuron-like landscape. I make it up, but I can’t know that it isn’t true. By making it up I program the Slowsteppers, I give them functions and prostheses that might be taken for truths, just as the idea of the hymen. We are not unshapeable organisms, we are re-programmed machines. We are not complete robots, but we are not isolated bodies. We buy clothes made in horrible working environments but we don’t feel it because we don’t see it. We text sms’ to someone and assume that they’ll get exactly what we mean, see what we felt. We feel lonely when that person doesn’t respond. 15
MIRRORS – A MANIFEST(O) FOR MIRRORING ACTIONS In a word full of contradictions one can find it hard to have a clear agenda, to know exactly what one thinks and what would be the right solutions to a problem. One can always try to seek for answers though and propose ways to reach a goal. One might feel what is right or not. Now you might think that one cannot possibly feel what is right or wrong. But can one know by using logic? I’d say that we could learn more from emotions than we might think. Not that emotions should decide our positioning but rather that we, by logically analyzing our emotions (cognitively) can learn what methods might work. “Before the discovery of mirror neurons, scientists generally believed that our brains use logical thought processes to interpret and predict other people’s actions. Now, however, many have come to believe that we understand others not by thinking, but by feeling. For mirror neurons appear to let us “simulate” not just other people’s actions, but the intentions and emotions behind those actions. “ (29)
A mirror neuron is not only a way to learn things but also a way of emphasizing with others. “When you see someone smile, for example, your mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, creating a sensation in your own mind of the feeling associated with smiling. You don’t have to think about what the other person intends by smiling. You experience the meaning immediately and effortlessly.”(30) These reflections creates mirrored actions, a kind of domino effect where how you act might trigger other actions or feelings. Not very surprisingly this means that you are most likely shaped, not only by your surroundings (environment) but also by the way people behave around you. The feminist theatre group Potato Potato uses the idea of the mirror neurons as a pedagogical tool in their plays. Their idea is that the actions appearing on stage activate mirror neurons in the audience, therefore making the audience feel as if they where engaged in the actions themselves. ”– Publiken ska få vara med i utopin och förstå att de har den i sig.” (31) ( –”The audience shall be invited into the utopia and understand that they have it inside themselves” ) (authors translation).
Judith Butler, a gender theorist that I myself have been very influenced by in my argument, came up with the idea of gender performance. (32) Gender is in her way of seeing it “constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time”. (33) In this way gender is established through repetition of actions. If you believe in this idea you can change your world through actions, giving the possibility for others to mirror them, or as Potato Potato might say: make others discover what they already have inside themselves. In this I think that both Potato Potato and Judith Butler are great row models: Potato Potato by engaging in political change through their theatre and Butler by her theoretical work as well as her activist engagement in political movements.
16
Other occasions were we might se a flow of mirrored actions are for example in the overthrowing of the Shah of Iran (Mohammed Reza Pahlavi): in the demonstrations following the Black Friday in 1978(34) and in the Arabic spring where actions where spread through word as well as social media throughout the Arab world 2010-2011. The occupy movement is another, global movement, still ongoing in different parts of the world. In the contemporary movements the Internet and its “social medias” play a big part. Here technology works as a tool for spreading information when other channels might be too slow or just blocked or cut out (by for instance the government in a certain country). “We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they’.”(35) With these tools knowledge becomes something we more easily can share, across different boundaries. It’s an extension of the ideas of Walter Benjamin (“The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) where instagram might be a good example of “radical political transformations opened up by developments in technoscience”.(36) Not so much in the way it spreads political ideas as for how much it shapes our ways of experiencing photography as part of everyday life. From a mirror neuron perspective we must be aware of our actions. They will be mirrored and they will have consequences. In everyday life you can choose to smile, to listen, to hug. You can share something you think is important, a story mouth to ear or an article you read on internet. In this way I don’t think feminist debate should focus only on gaining the same benefits as men; for instance to work 100%. Instead we should search for alternative utopias beyond the existing, that we, through embodiment and action, can spread and realize. You can choose a study object or focus out of a feminist awareness. I choose to focus on emotions, senses not often focused on when talking about technology. I choose not to follow traditional waterproof disciplines but to seek inter-disciplinary cooperation’s. I choose poetry and storytelling rather than one-dimensional “truths”. I choose the waterbear as a surface for feminist projections, may those projections be truths or far-fetched utopias. I mirror others and I choose to act according to the idea that my actions might be mirrored.
17
REFERENCES 1. Judith A. McGaw, ‘Why Feminist Technologies Matter’ in Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, Arwen P. Mohun, eds, Gender and Technology: A Reader, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2003. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade 2014-09-24 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian 2014-09-24 4. Jane Bennet, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, in Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3, June 2004, pp. 354 5. Ibid, pp, 355 6. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/dewaal-bonobo.html 2014-09-30 7. Illustrerad Vetenskap nr 5/2011 pp.34 8. Zoe Sofia, ‘Container Technologies’ in Hypatia Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 182 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp 2014-10-07 10. Sofia, pp 195 11. Sofia pp. 186-187 and 12. Potato Potato Scenkonstkollektiv “Sug F* Slicka K*”, Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, 2014-10-07 (http://www. potatopotato.se/2/144/sug-f-slicka-k/) 13. Zoe Sofia, ‘Container Technologies’ in Hypatia Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 185 14. Sofia, pp. 186 15. Sofia pp .196 16. http://www.svtplay.se/video/2386110/varldens-natur/naturens-drivkrafter-avsnitt-3-vastra-ghats-i-indien 2014-1108 17. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 2014-11-08 18. Judy Wajcman, ‘Feminist Theories of Technology’ in Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2009, pp. 10 19. Wajcman, pp. 15 20. Wajcman, pp. 13 21. Wajcman, p. 11 22. Wajcman p. 12 23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Anthony#African_conservation 2014-11-18 24. http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/film/article17211077.ab 25. Donna Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, 1991, pp. 14926. https://www.facebook.com/alladultvines 27. http://supersnippan.tumblr.com/post/64902086787/you-have-to-be-kidding-us-inte-det-na-na 28. http://supersnippan.tumblr.com/post/52450363934/det-har-alltsa-hant-igen-halva-supersnippan-ar 29. http://www.brainfacts.org/brain-basics/neuroanatomy/articles/2008/mirror-neurons/ 30. ibid 31. http://www.sydsvenskan.se/kultur--nojen/vi-ska-framat/ 32. Sally Wyatt, ‘Feminism, Technology and the Information Society: Learning from the Past, Imagining the Future’ in Information, Communication & Society, 2008, Vol.11(1), p.111-130 33. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler#Gender_Trouble:_Feminism_and_the_Subversion_of_ Identity_.281990.29 34. Ryszard Kapuscinski, “Shah of Shahs”, 1982 35. Wyatt, ‘Feminism, Technology and the Information Society: Learning from the Past, Imagining the Future’ in Information, Communication & Society, 2008, p.111-130. 36. Wyatt
18
COMMENTS - archandphil.wordpress.com My responses to other posts:
Comments in response to my posts:
In comment to “Salli” By Elsa Jannborg
Wim Wiklund commenting “Mirrors”
“I really like how you take the text and put it into a different context. In that way also explaining its core meaning:)”
“Interesting post. I believe you are right. We cannot perform an idea that we have not been exposed to unless we are slightly mad, which makes madness such an important factor of progress in society though it is widely frown upon. For neurotypicals, mirroring is our way of getting by in society and in our relationships with others.”
In comment to “Depression and the Posthuman” By Daniel van Schaik “I like how you put focus on how badly we use our (brain) capacity. As can clearly be seen in how low people are actually valued in society: us being stuck in a post-industrial structure which tells us how to behave and keeps us from thinking of what we really are. This is unfortunate since our capacity to dream and create utopias could extend so much further. This could be seen in Sweden in for instance the debate about working hours (it’s been a long time since we changed to 8 hours work days but the 6-hour work day or the flexible work-“day” is still rare). We have machines that could in many cases do a lot of work, but the profit of that *never* extends to involve everyone (or even anyone seeing from the point of view that we are all connected). In that way we are always bound from thinking beyond the established (or at least think as far as to change it for real). This ofcourse also extend to architecture which often is very limited – not to the least in new housing projects; being far from utopian.”
JA Perez commenting “Sleep vs. Technology”
“I really like the way you’ve connected disparate sources and analogies. The idea of interconnectedness comes through very persuasively. The conclusion comes from nowhere, which is fantastic. The issue of technology as the source of our problem and the resource that will solve it is a bit of a tragicomedy. I like that you solved this conundrum by suggesting perhaps it is not more work, more technology… but more rest. More resting of the machines, the computers, the cellphones, the printing press?”
Helen Frichot commenting my first post:
“The Tardigrade will make for an excellent key character or ‘aesthetic persona’ in your posthuman storybook. You might want to have a little look at the Jakob von Uexküll text that is available as a reference text for Meeting 01, where he tries to draw out the different perceptual worlds of different creatures. This also allows you to compare different scenes, for instance, inside a space craft, or else in the ‘natural habitat of the slowstepper, and even the pre-human landscape, the prehistoric scene into which the Tardigrade emerged. Or you could also posit everyday urban scenes in Stockholm, or elsewhere. I also think the idea of relative speeds and slownesses in relation to ‘environment-world’ is an interesting thing to consider. I recently read the opening chapter of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, where we find a tennis jock at an interview to get a place at an exclusive college. His intelligence is being questioned, and they mistake his initial non-resposiveness to stupidity, when in fact he is thinking superquick, and his only difficulty in communicating is that he is too fast for their comprehension (so where he believes he is speaking slowly, this around him think he is having a seizure, and uttering inhuman squeaking sounds)…”
In comment to “Donna” by Elsa Jannborg “Nice:) I really like the narrative and the way her hearing device becomes an extension of her body, and that she chooses when she wants to use it!”
In comment to “Half Human, Half Posthuman” by Emma Crea I like the ctrl Z can be seen as an opportunity for more exploring and testing. I know time when I’ve worked a lot at computer and start to sketch by hand and want to ctrl Z and it’s off course not possible. I feel it in me that it should be but realize it’s not :) In a film called “Divergent” they are able to project and see what you experience in your mind. I find it scary but at the same time it would be really interesting and maybe possible to understand both ourselves and others better… and “Your film references again makes me think of Interstellar, in two ways: 1) It describes a situation where technology and mind is cooperatively used to take us places we’ve never been before (places we want to go but also places we don’t want to go). 2) The cooperation between theoretical physicist Kip Thorne (his equations) and the film makers came up with the design of the black hole, ideas was made visual through technique. I think that is a splendid way of using technology to understand abstract “ideas”. here they where not limited by what we as architects often are (the gap between idea and realization), because the idea was a formula, not an image, to begin with. But in one episode in the film a 3d “world” is created to describe something that is 5D and here I think it gets more troublesome. We don’t know how to describe 5D because we can not really understand it or even visualize it in our minds. Sometimes I find it being the same way when I draw (in computer or by hand): I don’t really know or understand what I see/feel inside my own head.
In comment to “Access Things” by Jonatan Lennman I like how you, in your last paragraph, point on a change in the way of seeing radical. That the accessibility might just be the radical, to see architecture from different perspectives and to make it reachable through different “entrances”. And that this binding might be necessary to get architects to be as radical as they need to, to be inclusive.
19
Swamps and Slowsteppers as Feminist Design Power Tools This storybook is made out of texts written during the seminar course “Architecture, Gender and Technology�. Through readings of different gender theories, such as Donna Haraway, Judy Wajcman and Sally Wyatt, the texts explore different standpoints when it comes to technology from a feminist perspective.