Politics of Things: A Critical Approach Through Design 9783035620566, 9783035620535

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Foreword BIRD
Preface – Politics of Things
Ontological Crisis
Maker/ Made
User/ Used
Grinded Theory
Un/Common Acts
Material Mischief
Borderline Objects
Rapid Protopeople
Un/Common Sense
AI/IA
Paratypes
Humanodes
Un/Common Bodies
Rogue Couture
United Notions
Open So(u)rcerers
Critical Things
New Dis/Orders
New Dis/Positions
Tactics of Criticality
References
Authors

Citation preview

Politics of Things

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Members: Michelle Christensen Michael Erlhoff Sandra Groll Wolfgang Jonas Gesche Joost Ralf Michel Marc Pfaff

Advisory Board: Lena Berglin Cees de Bont Elena Caratti Michal Eitan Bill Gaver Orit Halpern Denisa Kera Keith Russell Doreen Toutikian Michael Wolf John Wood

Michelle Christensen Florian Conradi

Politics of Things A Critical Approach through Design

Birkhäuser Basel

CONTENTS Foreword BIRD Michael Erlhoff

Preface – Politics of Things Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi

009 011

Ontological Crisis

019

Maker/Made

021

A Crisis of Making

022

Politics of ‘Objects’

026

Dis/Orders 030

User/Used


037

A Crisis of Use

038

Politics of ‘Subjects’

041

Dis/Positions

044

Grinded Theory


049

Design/Sociology 050

004  POLITICS OF THINGS

Practice/Theory

053

How To Read This Work

068

Un/Common Acts

073

Material Mischief

075

Borderline Objects 


093

A State of (T)Reason

094

The Deflective Practitioner

103

Un/Reasonable Doubt

114

Rapid Protopeople

119

Ontological Cabaret

120

Re/En/Actants

129

The Betasocial


140

Un/Common Sense

145


 AI/IA 


147

Paratypes

173

Public Private Piracy

174

Re-Situationist 181 The Ideo(a)logical

Humanodes

191 197

Giving Fire Fire

198

From Data to Dada

209

Demo Democracy

221

CONTENTS 005

Un/Common Bodies

227

Rogue Couture 


229

United Notions 


247

Black Data

248

Ambiguous Computing

256

Automated Autonomy

265

Open So(u)rcerers

271

Cultural Robotics

272

Homo Incognita

279

Counterapparatus 290


006  POLITICS OF THINGS

Critical Things

295

New Dis/Orders

297

The Draftsman


298

Tactical Tactics

303

Rear Reason

306

New Dis/Positions

311

We Have Never Been Human

312

Material Diplomacy

317

Posthuman Design

320

Certain Uncertainty 


325

Tactics of Criticality

331

Composing Critique

332

References

339

Authors 349

CONTENTS 007

FOREWORD BIRD One day Alexa was asked if she or he or it was a subject or an object. She or he or it was totally confused and remained silent forever. Meanwhile this question also concerns all human beings and especially designers. Because designers have always considered themselves able to develop objects, signs, media and services which would serve as guides to users: chairs to be sat on and cars to be driven and communication to be used in the way the design defines, and signs and logistics to be followed. Thereby designers developed the idea of being something like meta-subjects and tended to see other human beings as something like objects. But those other human beings never quite accepted the role of being just objects of design and instead destroyed or ruined that guidance and very often misused design in a very creative way one could call ‘Non-Intentional Design’. Last chance to act as a subject. Probably, those days are now gone and especially the digital objects today are trying to dominate their human users, or, in other words: they have exchanged the roles of object and subject. If this is really happening, then we can forget all our philosophy and the statements deriving from the Enlightenment as well as the concept of identity. Furthermore, as the Enlightenment was based on the idea of a subject (the human being) and objects: Enlightenment stated that each subject needs the objects to become a subject – or has to be aware of the objects to be aware of being a subject herself or himself. And all the concepts of sociology, psychology (of psychoanalysis in particular) have been built on this. Karl Marx’s remark that the tables might already be dancing by themselves while indeed they were just moved by people has now become somehow obsolete. If this were true we would all be heading towards a very complicated new structure and system and would have great problems in understanding this. This publication by Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi represents both the discussion and the result of a deep analysis and of experiments related to exactly this topic. They discuss and explain how the objects are interacting with the subjects and vice versa – and how this interaction has changed. This is applied to both everyday life and design – after all, this is a book deriving from the analysis of design. As this analysis has moved into a real existential dilemma, this publication could have gone up into a very abstract theoretical sky. But it does not. Instead, it develops from very common experiences and even plays with this. On the one hand, this book is very serious, but at the same time it is also a very entertaining read. Exactly the way theory should work. At least when the tables have started to dance. Michael Erlhoff Board of International Research in Design (BIRD), June 2019

FOREWORD BIRD  009

PREFACE – POLITICS OF THINGS Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi ‘People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.’ 1

Ontological Crisis In times of crisis, where we stroke our phone more than we stroke our partner, and the timer on the navigation system makes us walk, run and drive faster, where our credit card makes us spend phantom money and the smartwatch on our wrist tells us when to breathe, we might start to consider who is in fact the ‘object’ and who is the ‘subject’ in these relationships. When space-specific advertising seems to fabricate social class, while individual-targeted content contrives digital lifeworlds, and fashion imposes possibilities of how we can perform our genders, then perhaps we can acknowledge – as we produce things, they are producing us back. In a society where a specific shade of blue makes us assume neutrality and nations become brands, where the rise and fall of politics can rest on a single hashtag and 140 characters can compromise world peace, we must accede to the fact that we are abiding by the artifice that we have created, and in a sense, we are currently in a battle with, and through, these artefacts. As this state of ontological crisis advances to fall more and more outside our grasp, we seem to find ourselves digressing deeper and deeper into a state of incomprehensible production and reproduction. As the artificial becomes organic and the organic artificial, people increasingly turn into products and products take on human abilities, terminology such as ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ are washed away in removed metaphors that we can no longer reach, and suddenly things might know more about us than we know about them. And as we persist to reach beyond our reach, perpetually playing with fire, we seem to find ourselves merely chasing the shadows of what we invented.

1  Michel Foucault in personal communication (Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 187).

PREFACE: POLITICS OF THINGS  011

Compromise As ‘makers’ and ‘users’, we have been fairly compromised. We have been constructed in every aspect – as subjects, we are produced in the way that we think and understand, speak and argue, in the words that we use, and the ones that we do not use (Butler 1999). As (and through) objects, we are produced in the way that we move, the way in which we sit, act, push, swipe, make and do. Therefore, through our interaction with things, we are socialised, culturalised, civilised, capitalised on – and through latent powers in the mundane material politics of everyday life, we are constantly being conducted and reassembled. Once we embark on the endeavour of engaging with this simmering predicament as ‘aware’ or ‘critical’, we realise the confrontation of how fabricated we really are. Due to the entrenchment of culture in the material world, we do not even have a mildly bland vocabulary – our materials, colours, forms and functions have all been taken hostage by whirling cultural manifestations. We move within a maze of scripts, not able to utter without saying. So how do we possibly find an access to all of this, how do we begin to release ourselves from the conditioning that we are producing and produced by, as we find ourselves quite literally on the muddy middle-ground of simultaneously making and being made, using and being used. Where do we begin to have a different conversation with, and through, these things that we make and use. This research project is an exploration into locating a scheme to release oneself, albeit for a moment, from this obscure position. In a sense, one might say, it is an attempt to find possible escape routes – locating possible possibilities to distract oneself from oneself, as oneself has certainly been compromised. This fluid co-constructive force of power and production can perhaps best be understood from a Foucauldian perspective on power, namely that we simultaneously articulate, and are the vehicle of power (Foucault 1980, 98). Thus, a playful interaction with this dual power must consequently entail a dual strategy – or perhaps, as this project is embedded at the bewildering crossroads of practice and theory, rather a tactic (in the poaching sense of a tactic explicated by Michel de Certeau, 1984). We must perceive and formulate a tactic of intervention – not just against the visible outcomes of this inauspicious power (its graspable empirical consequences), but against its power source (ourselves, that is, or one might say in these circumstances, the battery of the gadget). This ploy of self-intervention is vital, as it not only provokes the project of reproduction, but also acts as an epistemological approach towards understanding it (and understanding one’s own tacit participation in the process). It seems to provide an inlet into undesigning some of culture’s ingrained habits, and of redesigning our options of how to co-produce the material world.

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Ceasefire Thus, within a society where the roles of who is in fact the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ in human-artefact relationships have become highly intertwined, this research project takes its point of departure in proposing a ceasefire between the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’. We propose entering into a different relationship between us and the things around us, where we retreat in our anthropocentric approach of ‘granting’ things will, and things retreat their mundane covert powers. Where we stop subjugating things to blind or short-sighted intentionality, things stop overpowering us with their scripted agendas, and where we co-design with the things already as we construct them. In times of crisis, we propose that all parties form a truce – at least for a moment, in order to enter into an urgent negotiation. As a mode of investigation, this research project explores how artefacts can come into being with a distinct attribute to protest, by having an open script, thereby attempting to create things that are co-constructors of meaning and message. It ­investigates the potential of engaging in a relationship between producer and produced, where confidence meets insecurity, stasis meets fluidity, where dogma hesitates, and pragmatism doubts, with the aim of understanding how artefacts can come to hold a legitimated ability of confusion, indecisiveness, ambiguity and ­paradox. In this way, the project depicted in this book explores the designing of ­frameworks for a potential dialogue that does not favour people nor the things around them, but rather attempts to enable a constant shift in positions.

In/Discipline The project merges methods from the fields of design and sociology, drawing out a fusion of theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to specify a design research tactic of intervening in the social-material world. As sociology turns towards matter, and design makes a turn towards the social (Lury and Wakeford 2012), a transdisciplinary space flourishes which seems to foster an investigation into the un/designing of social-material power. Within this amalgamation, the endeavour contrives social happenings with and through things, and explores the idea of artefacts intervening in, or even inverting the social. It has an immense focus on personal social relationships between the human and nonhuman, as it seeks to evoke and explore intimate social tension and personal power-plays between us and the things that are brought into being. Therefore, we approached these interplays from the perspective that the artefacts are as much co-agents of this research as we are. In this way, the project explores the process of ‘becoming-with’ the artefacts as fellows in a framework where ­human and nonhuman are explicitly co-constructed in the happening of social life.

  PREFACE: POLITICS OF THINGS  013

Practice-Based Theory In order to provide a framework for this engagement, the project contrived the approach of ‘Grinded Theory’, appropriating the method of Grounded Theory (Glaser 1998, 2002) for practice-based design research. The basis of the method was applied as it pursues the formulation of theory arising from the bottom up – from the ground of the process. At the nexus of praxis and theory, design experiments were employed to elicit three social-material ‘situations’ in which we hindered and compromised our own personal things, conversations and bodies, in order to enter into odd dialogical encounters. We constructed and shadowed the material r­ egimes of power that we ourselves lived and operated within, prototyping possible disputes and unravelling alliances. In this way, we chose to create and stand in the middle of the problem, as we explored our own deluded dependencies, ruthless routines and hackable habits. As an experiment, one might say, we crumbled any safe ground that we might have been able to stand on hitherto, turning upside down and inside out most of what we thought that we knew until then, in other words – ­researching reasonable doubt. Each applied experiment was in turn followed by theoretical ­reflections, before once again plunging back into practice. In this way, both the ­design practice and theoretical reflections were pulled through an epistemological grinding mill, always interrupting one another in a rather crude condition, evolving what will be shown as ‘practice-based design theory’. And so, this is as much a theoretical experiment as it is a practical one, as it is, in its core, an attempt to construct theory on the basis of applied design experiments. Within three phases of alternating between praxis and theory, concepts emerged, and terms were coined, contextualised and written into essays. This, in the hope that practice-based design theory might be a productive epistemological approach to access the crisis that design was largely responsible for creating in the first place. The essays resulting from this project provide a reflection on what kind of knowledge might have in fact emerged from these applied engagements, and on what terms it may be considered constructive and transferable. In this way, the overall project is a spirited experiment with theory construction and operates with a certain degree of methodological anarchy. We took a carte blanche, one might say, as it seemed that the undisciplined field of design research was offering one (Erlhoff 2016, 211; Joost et al. 2016, 9), in order to venture into the dark alleys of exploring the praxis of theory and the theory of praxis.

Juxtapositions This book is the result of an experiment into performing a collaborative PhD p ­ roject. Aspiring to converge and consolidate our two academic backgrounds in critical

014  POLITICS OF THINGS

­approaches to design and sociology, it was carried out as a collective pursuit by the two authors. Therefore, the construction of the overall research framework, the ­experiments, and the constant documentation of the unfolding process was ­conducted as a collaboration. Throughout this venture, however, two parallel independent yet highly interdependent perspectives on the common process were synthesised and formulated. In this way, each of the authors assumed one distinct point of view, resulting in two interrelated cross-dependent subject matters – namely an exploration of the ‘dis/order of things’ and the ‘dis/position of the h ­ uman’ within the current ontological crisis. Within the dis/order of things, Florian Conradi outlines the urgency of things in a society where the human proceeds to innovate so rapidly that they are slowly coming to realise the shifts in power taking place as they emerge into a state of ontological anxiety. His work delineates the politics of ‘objects’ that is transpiring meanwhile, discusses the scripted and latent powers that things hold to act out in the social order, and locates within this a struggle to find tactics to tackle the trouble that we have designed ourselves into (Flusser 1999). Striving to defeat the ­instrumental perspective on the world that is so entrenched in the ways that we have learnt to become human, and human makers of things, he argues for the addition of the nonhuman perspective within critical approaches to making. The aspiration of this component part of the project is thereby to distribute the power of authorship and share autonomy with things – aiming to make thought experiments and think up spaces of materiality to elicit inverted ways of reasoning, and divergent reasons for designing. In the essays that follow, he argues for a decentralisation of the ‘maker’ as we emerge as human-nonhuman collaborative makers-in-the-making – drawing on deflective practice, re-situationist activism and ambiguous computing as a form of design practice. Based on the curious in-between spaces that emerged from the experiments, he discusses the potential of the field of design research to produce counter-logics and rear-reason in an omni-reasoned world. Within the dis/position of the human, in turn, Michelle Christensen outlines the collapse of the ‘subject’, as we become so entangled with our rapidly evolving tools and contraptions that we no longer know when things extend us, and when we become the human extensions of things. As the basic principles and concepts on which we have based the understanding of ourselves hitherto, at least since the Enlightenment and the ideals of humanism, seem to have fractured and cracked along the rims of reason, her work provides a practical attempt to tackle the theoretical call for new concepts of the ‘subject’ that are more ‘applicable to the present’ (Braidotti 2013). Thereby, she investigates whether the tactic of over-entangling oneself with artefacts and systems in everyday life might provide a point of view ‘from the inside’, proposing perspectives on the ‘subject’ – of who we might also be. In the essays that follow, she argues for the demise of the ‘user’ as we find ourselves entering an entangled shared agency and politics with things – drawing on posthuman performativity, becoming the third wheel in our own apparatus of knowledge production,

  PREFACE: POLITICS OF THINGS  015

and ‘hiding in the light’ – in the overproduction of data, putting the idea of human sovereignty in question. Delineating an approach to posthuman-centred design, she discusses how we might consider the potential of a shift from algorithmic-­ aristocracy and ubiquitous-capitalism towards techno-socialism and a corporeal-­ democracy with things. This book, therefore, can be read in several ways. By reading it chronologically, one can become entangled in the unravelling dialogue of perspectives between the two authors, as they each reflect idiosyncratically on their common attempts to contrive a camaraderie with things. By reading every second essay – one can also choose to follow either solely the perspective of the dis/order of things (chapters Maker/Made, Grinded Theory, Material Mischief, Borderline Objects, AI/IA, Paratypes, Rogue Couture, United Notions, New Dis/Orders and Tactics of Criticality), or the perspective of the dis/position of the human (chapters User/Used, Grinded Theory, Material Mischief, Rapid Protopeople, AI/IA, Humanodes, Rogue Couture, Open So(u)rcerers, New Dis/Positions and Tactics of Criticality). Taking into account the magnitude of deciphering the politics of ‘object’ and ‘subject’ positions within an entangled co-production of species in shifting power relations, this book is discernibly a nanoscopic perspective on a geopbytic challenge. It is a perspective based on our own tangle with the mundane politics that played out in our everyday lives, as we are submerged into becoming our own ­research problem.

016  POLITICS OF THINGS

Ontological Crisis

  19

Maker/ Made Florian Conradi

A CRISIS OF MAKING Widely experienced I suppose – things do not always work as we want them to. We try to catch Wi-Fi, car engine hesitates, copy-machine grumbles, printer quibbles, paper gets stuck. Handle breaks, pen runs out of ink, computer does not turn on, battery is empty. Socks too thin, boots too heavy, that too bright, this too dark, that too big, those too small. The moment that things do not work, we stand startled, asking ourselves what to do now – most often, casting blame on them for their incapacities (Erlhoff 2013, 156). This, however, might be the moment at which we come to see them, to understand them – exactly at the point where they might misunderstand us, and for short while, a research space of uncertainty opens up. It seems to be that things really do try hard though, and so do we. They try to connect and to provide, but sometimes we cannot do with them what they try to offer. We break off plastic pieces, squeeze things into the ‘wrong’ place, and even if we do not know what this or that button is for – we press it anyway. We hit, push, press, bend and squeeze things – mostly to make them fit, mainly to make them fit to make do. In this anthropocentric era of ‘many everything’, things hardly have a say. We make machines to make machines, machines to carry machines, machines to ship machines, and machines to destroy machines. We now make machines that ‘talk’ to other machines, conveniently sparing us the time to even have a conversation. We create networks that include some and exclude many. And as machines and networks become increasingly capable of acting ‘autonomously’, we seem to be deliberately giving away even the ‘last’ confrontations and responsibilities, as we consider letting calculative computing and unmanned drones foster and ‘objectively’ administrate our wars (Braidotti 2013, 44). We have exploited every possible resource on the planet, and from maintaining slavery to manage cotton plantations to upholding wars to mine cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries in our smartphones (Frankel 2016), we have exploited people and the planet in order to create more stuff. Make, make, make. From fires to firearms, from notions to nations, from DIN norms to uniforms. Sometimes we simply innovate for the sake of innovating – making it possible to fly to the Moon for the sake of touching down (first) and planting a flag. In fact, the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 did not fill the hearts of people with pride or awe, Hannah Arendt writes, but rather with relief, as the human was no longer bound to live on Earth forever. Our many great scientific endeavours had not only managed to fabricate human life as artificial, cutting ties to nature, but had now also managed to break out of prison Earth – Earth being the very quintessence of the human condition according to Arendt. And we now find ourselves rebelling against our own human existence, she writes, bringing earthbound creatures act as though they were dwellers of the Universe, as we outspeed our own inventions (Arendt 1958, 1–2). In these times of anthropocentric innovation, not only is the planet for sale, but also

022 MAKER/MADE

the Universe has been colonised by commerce. We can hardly see a star that is not already sold, we can buy weather names online, and now the wealthy can proceed to plan their next orbital, suborbital and lunar recreational travel (Cuthbertson 2017). They can only hope that they do not bump into the masses of discarded litter that we have left in ‘junkyard space’, where the more than 17,000 artificial things in orbit have occasionally collided to create over 170 million useless ‘space debris objects’ (NASA 2016; ESA 2013). As soon as a new tool is introduced, Vilém Flusser argues, one can speak about a new form of human existence – because a human that is surrounded by tools, by culture, is no longer at home in a primitive environment, but is both protected by and imprisoned in that culture (Flusser 1999, 45). In a split second, one artefact replaces another, and before we know what we can do with it, it seems, the next product has been released. And so, as matter-makers, we might have slightly underestimated and overlooked the produced patterns of powers, the development of deceptive and destructive desires, and the jittery jargons that deeply underlie mostly every-thing. Within this process, we witness a blatant disregard for the thingness in things, and through our subjective projection on material – the granting application of meaning to matter, also a dismissal of the perhaps unheard potentials that they hold (Sennett 2008, 7). What could be more obvious, Heidegger argues, than that man transposes his propositional way of understanding things into the structure of the thing itself. Violence has long been done to the thingly element of things, he writes, and thereby our concept of things does not catch or gain possession of the thing as it is in its own being, but rather makes an assault upon it. In this way we have not yet championed the ability to allow things to remain in their self-containment, accepted in their own constancy (Heidegger 1971, 23–26). Through science’s knowledge of ‘objects’, he claims, things were already annihilated as things, long before the atomic bomb exploded. The bomb’s explosion itself thereby was nothing more than the grossest of all gross confirmations, namely that the thing as a thing remains nil – thingness remains concealed and forgotten, its nature never comes to light and it never gets a hearing. This continues to happen so essentially that not only are things no longer acknowledged as things in the first place, but they have yet to appear to be thinking as things at all (ibid., 168). But perhaps there is a thing in things, an autonomy that was not programmed, a misbehaviour that was not concepted, a protest that was not planned? As we continue to coerce the standards of normality – from DIN standards to algorithmic hierarchies of ‘relevance’, constantly categorising and creating quality control, we not only apply ferocity to things, but embody in them the attitudes that are designating and classifying us. Because in the anthropocentric era of innovation, the nonhuman hardly has a say. Things are made in masses to follow human ideas and scripted to follow specific storylines through a form of material enthralment. Within a strenuous reproductive turmoil, we are working hard to upkeep culture – projecting our own needs on materiality, tweaking the things until they work

  A CRISIS OF MAKING  023

as we wish them to, and tossing away the things that do not. And as the human strives in its drive to not be limited, even by materiality, what prevails is the idea of going further, bigger, beyond – megastars, megastores, mega-cities – kilo, mega, giga, tera and nano in a geop-scale. Overshadowed by the overproduction and overconsumption of our own inventions – from spiritual commodities to corporeal ones, and from capital commodities to capitol hill – we seem to be turning into a society where experience is for the rich and expectations are for the poor. Where governments are led by plausible probability while its citizens stumble adventurously into apparent advantages. Where discovery is replaced by recovery, and few will, and already do, hold the power – sourced by all the others (Boskin 2018). Where singularity will be knocking at the door while we are busy cleaning satellite dishes – we will have entangled ourselves in so much complex-matter-debris, that we will be busy barbecuing on the rim of a social abyss. Every critique will turn into another commodity, and there will be no place to hide, other than another darn yoga retreat – relax, rethink, resolve, stretch – for the purpose of: reboot and redo. As Guy Debord, founding member of the situationist movement has argued, when the process of commodification will have been consummated to its fullest extent, society will be propagated by the commodity and all of life constituted by notions and objects deriving from their value as tradable. In this moment, commodification will have completed its colonisation of social life, and society will be reduced to a ‘society of the spectacle’. All that was once directly lived will become a mere representation, as being will be reduced to having, and having into merely appearing (Debord 1967). This will be a society, or perhaps it is one, where we are so busy reproducing our reproductions, that we did not even notice that things are starting to know more about us than we know about them. And as Humboldt measured the world, we now measure ourselves – from blood pressure to footsteps, from followers to friends, from page views to polls of political power. As we develop a growing fascination for observation, explanation and validation, we are constructing an increasingly quantified world, and countless objects to help us do so. From tactile trackers to twinkly tracers, and from international databases to extraterrestrial space-bases, everything seems to be equipped with plenty of shiny buttons – but perhaps it is time to stop just pushing them. Best case, it seems that we currently find ourselves on a treadmill powered by our own innovations, and worst case we are incarcerated in a dungeon of rationality that we ourselves dug. Worst, worst case it is a treadmill in a dungeon, and getting out of it seems not to be such an easy task. ‘Prometheus was here’ is scratched on the wall, next to a tally list from the old Greeks about morals and ethics, and E=mc² stands faded under the windowsill. If the dungeon had a window, one would see the Moon, and even that has been flagged. How to slow down the treadmill while being in a daze from running? This work tries to decelerate the revolving belt, for a moment, in order to seek out a dialogue with our commodified companions. To open up a space of the in/for-

024 MAKER/MADE

mal, for un/making, wrong/doing and mis/placing, as a common human-nonhuman act. As a research space, it strives to create a liminal space of mutual crises, in order to create a truce between the maker and the made, where we leave behind our anthropocentric perspective and instrumental approach to the world, encouraging the emergence of things that open up a space for an adventure into the lands of dis/ advantage. Because even within this ontological anxiety, running on a treadmill standing in a dungeon of rationality, one cannot help but be a producer, a maker of more things – pushing, swiping, nailing, writing, doing. As human beings, we are conditioned and condemned to create – we are making and being made.

A CRISIS OF MAKING  025

POLITICS OF ‘OBJECTS’ Our entire environment consists of things – houses, furniture, machines, pens, cigarettes, tins – of course, it also consists of people, but science has largely turned them into things too: measurable, quantifiable and easily manipulated (Flusser 1999, 85). We have attempted to put all of these things into (a social) order – divided into classes, grouped according to names that designate their similarities and their differences – and this order is both the code that governs how we interact with the world and the ways in which we are able to perceive the possibilities of it (Foucault 1970, xxii). The difference between humans and the artificial is no easy task to distinguish though, and therefore, Flusser questions whether we might need other criteria to understand the ontological world – such as perhaps movable and immovable things. However, as he writes, a country would seem to be immovable, yet Poland has moved further West, and a bed would seem to be movable, yet rarely gets moved. And so, whatever catalogues of criteria we make up for things, they seem to be countered by the mere reflection upon those categories themselves – it is no easy matter knowing one’s way around things (Flusser 1999, 85). Over time, he continues, we have either attempted to resolve problems by transforming intractable things into manageable ones – what one might call ‘production’; or tried to overcome them – what could be called ‘progress’; and what we did not manage to either transform or overcome became ‘last things’, and people died from them. Then, however, came the non-things, the heavy flow of information that was integrated seamlessly into every other thing, and now all we have left are the tips of our fingers, he argues, with which we can tap on keys, or, nowadays one might say – push, scroll and swipe. This new human therefore is not a wo/man of action but of play, he writes, no longer lives a life of drama but of performance, no longer has things, but has programs – and will not die of ‘last things’ but of ‘non-things’, not of unresolved problems but of program errors. Thereby the future will be programmed by the programmers, who have been programmed (ibid., 86–93). Since the Industrial Revolution, the man-machine relationship has been increasingly reversed, as the human did not just use machines any more but became used by them – becoming a relatively intelligent slave of relatively stupid things (ibid., 52). This has slightly changed in our century, as the machines have become more efficient, smaller and more ‘intelligent’. However, the ongoing attempts to build the intelligent non-organic machine provide new dangers, as a lever is no longer a stupid arm when it is built into a central nervous system (ibid.). And this is challenging insofar as we might find ourselves in the situation that the world will be crawling with post-organic-machinic super-slaves at the same time as we are trying to eat and digest the industrial by-products poured out by them, Flusser writes. We have been moving our arms as though they were levers ever since we have had levers – simulated that which we have simulated, but what might happen when not just the stupid lever, but the intelligent ones begin to strike back (ibid., 53).

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By contrasting active humans to assumedly passive nonhumans a priori, we are in danger of losing our understanding not only of humans, but also of things – because the human is not a constitutional pole to be opposed to that of the nonhuman (Latour 1993, 137). Humanity and nonhumanity are inextricably enmeshed, and this is the ontological condition of the Anthropos, where we are entangled in a web of relations with what we made. In fact, it is quite safe to assume, as Jane Bennett argues, that humans need nonhumans to function more than nonhumans need humans – as many nonhumans, from a can rusting at the bottom of a landfill to a colony of spores in the Arctic, fester or live beyond the proximity of us (Bennett 2010, 151–152). In other words, while humans initiate or mediate some of the actions of their nonhuman companions, practically all human actions are mediated by nonhumans – our actions, sense making and even our bodies. Therefore, Karen Barad summons us to take issue with the idea of human self-centred exceptionalism, becoming more widely accountable for the roles that we play in the differential constitution and positioning of the human among other creatures (Barad 2007, 136). People and things have always existed as outcomes of reasoning, as well as products of meticulous cultural and material practices, rather than being a point of departure of pure, stable and clear-cut categories. There is no escape from the radical connectedness that we have with these extrinsic relations, and as living matter, including the flesh, is intelligent and self-organising, we must begin to emphasise the nonhuman vital force of life (Braidotti 2013, 60). Matter in itself is intelligent, Guattari argues, exactly because it is driven by informational codes that both deploy their own forms of information and interact in multiple ways with the social environments (Guattari 2000). Or as Donna Haraway puts it – machines are so alive, whereas the humans are so inert (Haraway 1985). Therefore, one of the most pointed urgencies of our time is finding new and alternative modes of political and ethical agency for our technologically mediated others (Braidotti 2013, 58) – to consider the politics of objects, both the politics that we programmed and the politics that appeared. Foucault writes, in a reflection on the necessity of an expansion of our comprehensions of power, that it seemed to him that economic history and theory provided a good instrument for relations of production, and linguistics and semiotics offered instruments for studying relations of signification, but for understanding actual power relations we had no real tools. We had available only ways of thinking about power based on legal models, raising questions of what legitimates power; or we had the tools to contemplate power based on institutional models, raising questions about the power of a state. But it was necessary to expand the dimensions of a definition of power, at least if one wanted to use this definition to study an intrinsic latent informal dimension of it (Foucault 1983, 208). Foucault's insights regarding the ‘microphysics of power’, Barad argues, have profoundly altered the ways in which power and knowledge are currently theorised. However, there are crucial features that he does not articulate, including the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena – an agential conception of material-

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ity and power that takes account of the materialisation of all bodies, nonhuman as well as human (Barad 2007, 201). Therefore, one might argue, we need yet another expansion, not just to include Karen Barad’s agential intra-acting material-discursive extension, but furthermore to comprehend (and even play with) the mundane latent powers of ordinary things. Jasper Morrison observed, in regard to latent power, how objects affect the space around them, changing the atmosphere of a room – something that might be hard to measure, but that in some way represents an invisible quality of things (Morrison 2002, 14). In this way, objects are important, anthropologist Daniel Miller notes, not because they are evident or because they physically constrain or enable, but precisely because we do not see them. And the less we are aware of them, the more powerful and significant they are – by setting the scene and ensuring an appropriate behaviour, they determine what takes place, even if they are unconscious of their capacity to do so (Miller 2010, 50). When taking into consideration a ‘politics of objects’, and the ability of things to act out latent powers, the idea of ontological politics emerges as a helpful lens, as it speaks of the conditions of possibility that we live with and suggests that the conditions of possibility are negotiable, as they are not given. The term ‘politics’ in itself works to underline how the process of power unfolds as both open and contested, and so it argues for the idea that realities do not precede the mundane practices in which we live, but rather that they are concurrently shaped within these practices themselves (Mol 1999, 74–75). It brings into play the power plays and negotiations of nodes and networks, performances and assemblages, as well as human-nonhuman and organic-inorganic hybrids (Escobar 2010). Understanding the current crisis of making at the interface of human-nonhuman social friction as being a case of ontological politics therefore might allow for an asymmetric perspective – because if we are both maker and made, then we are actively being co-constructed as, through and with the material and artifice that we make. If ontology relates to being, to what is, to what exists, to the constituent units of ‘reality’, then political ontology by extension relates to political being, to what is politically, to what exists politically, and to the units that comprise that political actuality (Hay 2006, 80). While the world with which political theory has traditionally concerned itself is a world of social human relations, a world of Aristotle’s ‘political animal’ – ontological politics furthermore takes in the materiality of the world (Pellizzoni 2015, 76). And this turn towards ontology does not mean moving away from the culturalism of language and moving back to a naive realism, Pellizzoni argues, it means rather adopting a non-dualist understanding of material reality and the human intermingling with it. Its basic tenets are thereby the blurring of the epistemic and the ontological – the importance of techno-scientific advancements as a challenge towards both traditional realist and constructionist accounts; as well as the close connection of ontology and politics – the ‘actuality’ and the ‘political’ being deemed to be directly implicated by and in one another (ibid., 7).

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From the perspective of a maker-being-made therefore, the expansion of a dual and informal 'microphysics of power’, being assigned to and resulting from a world of artificial-organic human-nonhuman trans-species politics, encourages novel questions to be posed. Questions concerning the material-power that we interact with and operate in every day, about the reigning ‘social order of things’ that is ceaselessly being manifested, the state of things, one might say. What and who is being governed in this apparatus of material in/abilities, do we form republics, do we act civic with one another, who has what rights? What ideologies are being injected and re-implanted, by whom, into whom or what? Is there corruption, extortion, nepotism, patronage, bribery or embezzlement emerging – and can we then rather form a coalition with our fellow dwellers, perhaps already in the process of (meaning) making? Because it seems that there is a conflict arising, and we do not have the means to describe it, let alone mediate it. We must begin to understand the non/human ‘us’ in all of this in order to be able to act on new terms, to practise material empathies and post-anthropocentric ethics, to eventually be able to induce a new common politics with things. If we attempt to overcome the human-centric dogmatic and instrumental way of acting as ‘makers of things’ – then can we perhaps enter (together) into the critical unknown – materialise something beyond our limited human capacities and imagination, encourage some-thing novel to emerge between people, systems and things? Because power tends to corrupt, Lord Acton famously noted, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Dalberg-Acton 1887). Therefore, the attempt of the designer distributing power becomes paramount – opening a space for overt rather than covert power plays. In a rumble against the rational, as an intervention against intent and as a revolt for another reason – this work acts in favour of the emergence of unreasonable unities and pledges un/reasonable doubt. As we have been apprehended by the apparatuses that we designed and find ourselves waking up in a dungeon of rationality and reason, we must submerge willingly in shady relationships with things, knowing that we have power over them, and they have power over us. We can no longer ignore the situation of ontological crisis that we are currently living in, allowing the unsettling blur to stay at a near distance as both sides seem to be arming up.

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DIS/ORDERS So how does one possibly find an access to all of this – how do we begin to loosen the ties from the structures that we ourselves are producing and produced by, not least as designers who find ourselves quite literally on the muddy middle-ground of simultaneously making and being made. Because in this over-mediated and overmade world, categories and classifications, hierarchies and orders, are constantly being re-established in things as a literal manifestation of culture. And even when we attempt to make things otherwise, it seems that we cannot control the culturally automated interpretations and responses to the forms, functions, colours and references that we use. In the designer’s dilemma of duplicity, where everything is an intertextual reference to a reference to something outside of itself (Kristeva 1980, 69), we seem to be busy rearranging copies of copies, even within our drive to strive, to constantly reinvent fire. And this in turn is underpinned and bolstered up by the impossibility of intent, because as soon as we intend to create something, for instance something safer, like a seat belt or an emergency button in an elevator, we simultaneously design something else, in this case fear, danger and paranoia. Everything that we will ever, or have ever designed, will inherently be not only re/used and re/understood, it will not just be determined by the structures of the world in which it emerges and is implemented, consequently reproducing those structures, but it will moreover do so in a dynamic, remixed and constantly shifting process of re- and co-construction. So – does this mean that we should stop designing, perhaps making was never ours to make? No, we are a species of fire and play. Designing is a ‘natural’ phenomenon, and every-body is a designer – be it the designing that transpires through people, animals, planets, systems or things. And so, while Don Quixote created his invincible belief in chivalry and bravely fought windmills within an aware delusion (Cervantes 1615/2003), in these times – it is really quite difficult to even locate the windmills to fight. Because we cannot help but make, as people, let alone designers, we are busy creating worlds. In the past, this was primarily a question of giving formal order to the apparent world of material, as scientists and thinkers attempted to categorise and order what was already there. However, nowadays, it is increasingly a question of making a world appear – a world of forms that are multiplying uncontrollably (Flusser 1999, 28). Looking into the etymology of the word ‘design’ in Greek, Latin, English, German and French, Flusser delineates the idea that the crux of ‘designing’ is trickstering. The word itself, as a noun, includes the meanings of ‘plan’, ’scheme’ and ‘plot’, and as a verb it contains meaning such as ‘to concoct’ and ‘to simulate’. It seems to always occur in contexts associated with cunningness and deceit, he argues – the machines that we design (traps, like the Trojan Horse) use mechanics (fooling forces such as gravity) and technology (what Plato might have called cunningly seducing people into perceiving distorted ideas). And so, design is the basis

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of all culture – deceiving nature by means of technology, he writes, replacing what is natural with what is artificial, and building machines out of which there comes a god who is ourselves. Thus, whoever has chosen to be a designer has chosen against pure goodness, as we must concede to the fact that between ‘moral’ good and applied ‘functional’ good there can be no compromise – in the end, much of what is good in ‘applied good’ is bad in the case of ‘moral good’ (ibid., 17–20). It is human nature to believe that anything that seems possible to make should be tried, Sennett argues, and materially, humans have proven themselves to be skilled makers of a place for themselves in the world – however, Pandora has always hovered over our history of making things (Sennett 2008, 2,13). From a functional perspective, for instance, there is no difference between the elegant and user-friendly design of an ergonomic chair or an electric one, a racket or a rocket (Erlhoff 2013, 185; Sennett 2008, 2–4). With design, the devil is always lying in wait, and therefore one cannot be ‘good in oneself’ and ‘good for something’, one must choose between being a saint and a designer (Flusser 1999, 32–33). Perhaps we can only either, he argues, design bad and convenient, or inconvenient and saintly. Or alternatively, we could perhaps enter into a compromise, designing things intentionally less well than we might be able to do – arrowheads that constantly miss, knives that quickly get blunt and rockets that tend to explode in the air (ibid., 32). This is the producer’s predicament of principles (as if the designer’s dilemma of duplicity were not enough), and this is why so many movements have struggled to rethink the critical capacities of the field. Because as much as we have played our part in creating the order of things, we can also be part of dis/ordering them, creating clutter in the categories, and putting our understanding of them, as well as of ourselves, into an interim state of uncertainty. With the emergence of approaches from the Italian Radical Design of the 1960s to movements such as critical and speculative design (Dunne 1999; Dunne and Raby 2001, 2013), design fiction (Sterling 2005; Bleeker 2006), adversarial design (DiSalvo 2012) or critical making (Ratto 2011), the idea that design could be a material mode of critical inquiry gained significance and visibility. Dunne and Raby, with their term of critical design, have argued that most designers understand design as somehow neutral, clean and pure, not taking into consideration that it is informed by values based on a specific worldview, or way of seeing and understanding a reality. Therefore, design can be described as falling into two very broad categories, they argue, namely affirmative design and critical design – while the former reinforces how things are now, conforming to cultural, social, technical and economic expectations, the latter rejects the current state of things as being the only possibility and provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative values (Dunne and Raby 2001, 271). Critical design, they write, is related to haute couture, concept cars, design propaganda, and visions of the future, but rather than presenting the dreams of the industry, its purpose is to stimulate discussion and debate among designers, industry and the public (ibid.).

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Bill Gaver adds the argument that mainstream technologies tend to be designed for an undifferentiated mass of ‘normal’ people, resulting in a set of bland devices that appeal equally to everybody, and deeply to nobody (Gaver 2006, 1). In order to imagine alternative ‘normalities’ therefore, many of the critical movements emerging in the design field use design fiction and speculative design proposals to challenge assumptions and conceptions about the role that objects play in everyday life, and thus their objects play a role of product design while emphasising neither commercial purpose nor physical utility. They exist mainly for sharing a critical perspective and posing questions to the public. One of the movements that is closely aligned to the agenda of this research project, through building prototypes over mock-up fictional scenarios, thus at once turning back to confronting the issue of materialising, is the small but steadily growing movement of ‘critical making’. This approach has in common with this project its focus on making a socio-technical critique of material making, reconnecting materiality and morality, and encouraging design approaches for non-traditional design ends (Ratto 2011). Critical making attempts to highlight the reconnection of two modes of engagement which the world has often held separate, namely critical thinking – traditionally understood as conceptually and linguistically based, they argue; and physical ‘making’ – material work. The movement does this in order to overcome what Ratto frames as the brittle and overly structural sense of technologies that often exists in critical social science literature, as a way of creating shared experiences with technologies in order to transform socio-technical imagination, and as a site for overcoming problematic disciplinary divides within technoscience (ibid.). The ultimate goal of critical making is thereby to develop novel understandings by the makers themselves, making objects that are intended to be a shared making-experiences, in order to engender insight and perspective on socio-technical phenomena for groups of making-participants. This brings us one step closer to a critical approach in design, which combines critique with making operative and experienceable objects that are acting rather than illustrating a political difference in the world – with an emphasis not just on the politics of the design work, but also of the designer. From the literary scientists we know that one cannot fully author, and concepts such as Roland Barthes’ renowned ‘death of the author’ (Barthes 1977) raise equally important questions about the design work as they do about text. As Jacques Derrida formulates it ‘Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is, meaning’ (Derrida 1978, 11). This argument disputes the idea of ‘pure’ authorship and leads to an argument for the case of the object as subject. If meaning must await being made, and as he further argues, must come into being, not before or after the act of coming into being, then perhaps we should consider authoring contexts in which meaning can occur, rather than attempting to author specific meaning in itself. In this way, the designer would choose to retreat from the position of ‘Author-God’ (Barthes 1977), building on the idea that the artefact that is formulated can have a say in

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terms of what meaning occurs. This would imply that the ‘designer’ creates frameworks of meaning, giving up the power of full authorship. And it would mean that the meaning and message that the artefact raises would not come into being before the moment in which a receiver engages in a dialogue, thereby creating meaning that is able to inhabit itself. Because as the old German word for ‘thing’ (Ding) expresses in its meaning of ‘a gathering’, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion – a contested matter (Heidegger 1971, 172), perhaps the matter itself should be part of the thing? Therefore, we need to explore the possibility of an extended vocabulary of prepositions that can address the disparate shifting relationalities between heterogeneous entities that are at once material and semiotic, objective and subjective, human and nonhuman (Michael 2004, 12). It is right at the juncture of where the movements of critical approaches to design and the social practices of objects meet, that this exploration attempts to add the dimension of the nonhuman other to the politics of design and designing. Because although these critical design approaches are manifold, and valuable indeed, they do not share power with the thing, or focus their attention on the aspect of reducing the instrumental human-centred approach to the material world, and thereby, their priority is not to include our nonhuman allies in the considerations of critique. And so, it seems that we need to attempt to engage in a less human-centred approach to making meaning, thereby formulating alternative conceptions of the designer and the thing. Rather than making critically designed things, it will attempt to make things that are an active part of raising a potential critique. It will actively compromise the ‘maker’, co-designing with things, in order to make collective trouble in the human-nonhuman social order. Therefore, this research project entered into an experiment in retreating from authorship, and thus into a radical democracy of sharing power with one’s own creations. In a constant negotiation with things, it confronted the ‘maker’ with the tangle of not-making, not-yet-making, re-making, mis-making and un-making – to in the end finally dissolve into the work itself. Designing with things meant working with misbehaving matter, designing voids of meaning, exploring the unintentionality in things, and questioning whether they might become by themselves through coincidence or positive error. It explored whether it might be possible to encourage some of that thingness in things to emerge, asking whether things might then exist as a different division of political objects, and whether they might enable something different than what we could have intended. In this way, and in order for another mode of critique to emerge, this project meant putting oneself on fragile ground, and living with one’s monsters, one’s own ghosts – listening to the things speaking back. In three practical experiments, it toyed with the idea of things going beyond one’s control, intention and perception, attempting to reposition relationships of the maker and the made. Rather than creating dystopian critiques, warnings or speculations, this project engaged directly in the material-political power-loaded spaces of everyday life. Because if the designer can never be a

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saint and is nothing more than a trickster – then one might assume that perhaps a trickster would be able to trick him/herself out of his/her own trickery. Therefore, this research project endeavoured to invert the world, turning it inside out and upside down, in order to access a different point of view of the world and how it operates. It engaged head-on in the paradox of how one even begins to not design in a design process, and if not ‘just designing’ – then when to start and when to stop oneself, and on what terms; or perhaps, on whose? In this way, it attempted to locate and practise tactics to release oneself, albeit for a moment, from the obscure position of ‘maker-making-and-being-made-by-material-world’, inducing possible escape routes and possibilities to distract oneself from oneself. And so, in a slight delirium, and through a cross-eyed perspective, we managed to stand slightly beside ourselves. As a process of disorderly design therefore, of dis/ordering the positions and powers at play, this project attempts to open up the design concept to emerge as a joint human-nonhuman activism, and thereby, it aims to add something to the ‘thingness-debate’, not just from ours, but also from the things’ perspective.

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User/ Used Michelle Christensen

A CRISIS OF USE As humans we are constantly adapting. Over time we have undergone physical remodelling, intellectual mutation and social metamorphoses. We have always transformed inseparably from designed artefacts, as we have been entwined, meshed and muddled with our tools and contraptions in a highly entangled evolution (Haraway 1985). Our thoughts are engendered by neurons, technologically mediated social interactions and by our machines themselves, and our bodies are repaired, transplanted or manufactured with prosthetic enhancements ranging from contact lenses and tattoos to robotic limbs and search engines (Hillis 2016). Within this ceaselessly ‘progressing’ social-material world, we have not just adapted systems and things to our needs and imaginations, we have adapted to them. We have invented devices and mechanisms that mundanely update and alter our actions, knowledge and even our bodies, and these are not just an expression of culture being materialised, they are the production of culture itself. As we change material, material changes us. As we change functions, functions change us. In the era of the entanglement, our process of evolution has meant producing things that in turn produced us, and throughout this process, we have designed into them ways of (re) acting, (un)knowing and (dis)embodying ourselves (Barad 2003). This is a world where we have attempted to design everything (Erlhoff 2013, 17) – from the endeavour of designing life through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to striving to design death through last-will apps and moonshot immortality projects. The boundaries between people and things are steadily blurring, not least as info-, bio-, nano-, and neurotechnologies emerge to increasingly treat the human and its body as something that can be functionally designed, manufactured and even carefully commodified (van Mensvoort 2012). Concurrently, we witness our products beginning to act more like people, as socially skilled chatbots and artificially intelligent personal aides and smart speakers seem to be voicing themselves as the new middlemen in our homes and everyday lives. And so, designed artefacts and systems extend our memories, abilities and fathomable existences, as we extend theirs. From tweets and feeds to smartphones and smart homes, to purchased and DIY body augmentation – technology has become mentally and physically a part of us. And so, we have become accomplices in designing probabilities and possibilities – manufactured and envisioned. Having (b)reached a whole new level and scale of intimacy and interdependence, these are times when people are produced not just in language and behaviour, but in principles of products and paradigms of programming. Therefore, we sometimes seem to lose track of who or what is speaking and hesitate when trying to draw the borders of where ‘we’ stop, and ‘they’ begin. We search for ourselves digitally to see who we currently are, drive faster because our cars became safer, and become paranoid by all of our own security measures – from antivirus software to impracticable passwords. We update our

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websites to work on our browsers, update our browser to work on our operating system, and update our operating system to work on our computers. And so, not only do we adapt to things, but things adapt to other things, and as the system changes the browser changes, the interface changes, the navigation changes, eventually the content changes, and so its reader too. And then once again the system is modified. From social bots to nanobots, the uneasy tingling and itching never ceases, because from social media to blood cells, we share the power of decision-making with masses of things (Pickering 1995, 26). Things that are massive and minuscule, visible and invisible, attached to us mentally or physically, and are acting as the dissolvent and the glue. We are updated by our updates, adapt to our adaptations – we create and are created by the systems and things that surround us. However, it seems that somewhere along the process, we created so many of them that we might have completely lost any sense of sway. Did they over-evolve? Did we? Too much, too fast, our processors cannot keep up? Always on, always logged in, always press save – not least because we simply cannot perceive, analyse or store the amount of information that we produce. We have extended memories that we at times cannot even reach – and as USB 1, 2 and FireWire have gone out of trend, we no longer have access to the old hard-drives that store our past. Is this entangled co-productive designing and being designed leading us to evolution, devolution or revolution? Never mind – adapt or get left behind. And so, there was indeed never a ‘subject’ prior to or distinct from the agency of things. We are in fact, one might say, nothing more than the net result of thousands of years of sedimented evolutionary history of human and nonhuman, which constituted the human at every level of thought and action (Hayles 1999, 284). French philosopher Bernard Stiegler contends that conscious reflections in humans first emerged with the use of the stone tool, as the tool acted as an external marker of a past need, a so-to-say archive of its own function. In this way, people and things have always performed an intricate dance together (whoever might have been leading the frolic), as there was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity, and today this mingling has just become harder to ignore (Stiegler in Bennett 2010, 31). Despite this, the human has an ongoing tendency to understate the degree to which people, artefacts, technologies, animals and elemental forces share powers and operate in dissonant conjunction with each other (Bennett 2010, 34), and therefore we have an inclination to disdain the fact that there is an indivisible correlation between the manufacturing of the world and the fabrication of wo/mankind itself. The development of our species has been dominantly viewed from a perspective that reifies what we think we are, and the very notion of speaking of ‘human evolution’ distinctly captures this belief. As an object of study, we became historically and scientifically centred and thereby disassociated from inanimate objects, and with this we came to consider ourselves as a ‘thing in itself’, concealing the essentially worldly connectedness that was always in fact present (Fry 2012, 11). This vision of purely

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human evolutions is not only caught in an anthropomorphic frame, it moreover upholds the distinction between the human and the technological, if only to redefine it as a new alliance between distinctively different entities (Braidotti 2013, 106). And this, one might say, might have led us to a failure to comprehend our own being-inthe-world. As humans and nonhuman artefacts are not merely intertwined with each other, but constitute each other (Verbeek 2005, 112), our understanding of ourselves, and that of adaptation, most likely has to move from our initial perspective of ‘the natural’ to one of ‘the artificial’ (Fry 2012, 12). As Michel Foucault puts it, the individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. Hence, the individual which power has constituted, is at the same time its vehicle (Foucault 1980, 98). So, although we like to perceive ourselves as autonomous subjects, as users of our own trailblazing hard- and software inventions – we are in fact both user and used. As an entangled blend of people and products, fact and fiction, human and machines – processing, sensing and acting together – we are cyborgs, hybrids and creatures that inhabit borderlands (Haraway 1985). We have outgrown all the boundaries and binaries that we once trusted, as we seem to be shivering between science and serendipity, enlightenment and entanglement, being stimulated and simulated, overdone and undermined. And as the rather curious species that we are, we have designed our way into a tangled entwinement, busily adapting and being adapted as we trip and tumble over our own ingenuity – but who is now abiding by whom, or what?

 

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POLITICS OF ‘SUBJECTS’ Upload, download, update, downscale, upgrade, downshift, get up, lie down – breathe. Turn on, turn off, turn down, turn in – reboot. Answer your phone, sit down on your chair, do this degree, cut your hair, get ABS brakes, follow the news, drink alcohol, make a joke – smile. We are designed and updated according to the current standards of the everyday. We seem to be written in codes, organically and artificially, from socially to html. As principles, values, standards and rules of behaviour guide our decisions, procedures and the systems of our culture, we often act accordingly – although we do not always seem to know according to what. Within this sphere of radical materiality and hyperconnectivity, where we are busy posting and swiping – we are continually being read, categorised and targeted, tagged and traced. Be it through the culturally engineered results from a search engine, the economically choreographed suggestions of what you might ‘also like’, or the assumptions behind the suggested settings in a smart home – these technologies are effectually contriving us. As ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent' objects and pattern recognition algorithms study us only to reproduce us based on who we already are or what we already do, we are potentially giving up our agency, not just to devices, but to our own tricky tics and idle habits. So as chips and sensors find their homes in our fridges, coffee machines and sneakers, making our lives both more measurable and more governable, advising us on our personal conduct, we can perhaps apprehend that things too have a constantly generated social life, are intentionally and unintentionally scripting ‘political agendas’, and they are attentively aligning to act them out. And as communication is progressively brought down to a hashtag and consumption to a ‘dash button’, it has never been easier to post and publish. From the grammar of language to the grammar of code, we are written in them now. Thus, we must look to the gravity of materialisation and its intrinsic politics, in order to fathom and grasp the depth of the discursive, ontological and networked politics at play (Coole and Frost 2010). This state of ontological obscurity seems to proceed to fall more and more out of our hands, as we produce ourselves deeper and deeper into a state of unperceivable re/production. As we continue to reach beyond our reach, and masses of humans construct masses of things constructing masses of networks – we seem to find ourselves trying to catch up with the ripples that we set in motion, as the social-material world seems to have whirled into an utter spin. In an entangled design process, we created things to monitor each other and things to record ourselves – we even created systems to oversee the other things that oversee us. Delete history, clear cash – one must now actively remember to forget. And so, there seems to be a strong ontological shift taking place, as we are perhaps transforming into the product of our products themselves, as we feed the feeds that feed us. We find ourselves entering into novel power plays – being read by our own communication, outsmarted by our own smart systems,

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and disciplined and rewarded in accordance with the standards that we are ourselves constantly setting. And by the time that we have understood things, they change – just as we learned to micro-blog, we have to nano-post in images and icons. Just as we learned to ‘cloud’, we have to learn to ‘fog’ and ‘mist’. Just as we begin to perceive the Internet of Things, it has already lost its enchantment towards the transpiring of artificial intelligence (Stocker 2017). Connected communication and products in networked systems connect and quantify us, and one might wonder whether we have created systems that are more complex than we can ourselves perceive. Overproduced, overconsumed and overconstructed – we have rationalised, bureaucratised and quantified our things, and so ourselves, swiftly moving towards becoming the embodiment of Max Weber’s great tribulation and Karl Marx’s scariest dream. When Michel Foucault looks at how rules of the acceptable are implemented in the production of discourses, he writes that we are subjugated to the production of truth through power. Notions of truth are institutionalised and professionalised, and compliance with these discourses is rewarded. We are judged, condemned and determined in our undertakings, as a function of discourses, which are bearers of specific effects of power. This power operates through relations in society and manifests itself in everyday practices and interactions. People internalise the notions in the discourses, thereby coming to believe them as truth (Foucault 1976, 31). In this context, one might further argue that notions of truth, and thereby the rationales by which we live, furthermore become institutionalised and professionalised in things. In this sense, artefacts can be viewed as an image of, a carrier for, and an actuality of our perceptions and beliefs, our cultures and societies, and thereby our actions and bodies. In this way, even (and especially) the most mundane things that surround us in our everyday lives become producers of the norms and rationales that we live by. With everything that we use, wear, see, touch and inhabit, we engage in a relationship, short-term or long-term, and in various intensities. These relationships co-shape our way of thinking, co-direct our behaviour and co-create meaning – or as sociologist Jennifer Gabrys puts it, things are propositions and potentialities for feelings and encounters, as they lure us into ways of being. Any understanding of ‘the social’ therefore, would need to attend to the things that are continually drawing us into tactility, engagement and occasion (Gabrys 2014). A ‘paradigmatic consumption’ is deeply entrenched in our everyday lives, and it is humiliatingly seductive, as the default culture clicks in wherever moral ignorance or indecision prevails (Borgmann 2000, 422). Foucault’s objective was therefore, to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects – delineating the modes of objectification that transform us into being ‘subjects’ at all (Foucault 1983, 208). In this context, he speaks about technologies as implying a certain mode of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills, but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes. He turns to the relation between manipulating things and domination in Karl Marx’s Capital, to show how every technique of production requires the modification of individual conduct

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in their ways of thinking and acting (Foucault 1988, 16). Of course, it has been acknowledged, with everything that has been written on subjects and the subjective, that these are hardly fixed or theoretically resolved entities (Fry 2012, 164). Yet one common thread weaves its way through this history – all subjects, as they are brought into being, are subjected to a power that demands obedience, and so in a sense, the very core of being a subject, circles around that (ibid.). The fundamental codes of a culture therefore – those governing its language, schemas of perception, exchanges, techniques, values and the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every person, the empirical orders with which they will be dealing and within which they will belong (Foucault 1970, xxii). Through this double-edged process of producing and being produced, we seem to have become the consequence of our own ways (and plays) as we find ourselves merely chasing the shadows of what we invented. The world that we are presently fabricating and fabricated by, it seems, can no longer be perceived as being governed by the autonomous subject, the prescriptions of nature or the sanity of science, but perhaps rather by a sorcery of entangled species operating in colliding and coinciding in mundane mesh-networked-ecologies. How then, one might wonder, can we begin to understand the new terms for these relationships between us and our mundane things. In this entanglement, where we are written in codes of conduct – what have we become? Who is directing whom, who is informing whom, who is extending whom? We seem to be not just entangled, but perhaps even entrapped – like a cat that can no longer free itself from the yarn that it was just playing with. By the time we put out one fire, we seem to be starting the next one – so before our toothbrush speaks with the coffee machine, informed by the virtual assistant who was listening in and leaked information to the health insurance – perhaps we should briefly pause and untangle. We are both the source and consequence of the crisis of use that we currently find ourselves in – and quite like in Plato’s well-known Allegory of the Cave, we are prisoners in a cave only able to perceive the shadows and hear the echoes of ‘the reality’ taking place around us. In the allegory, the prisoners watch the shadows projected on the wall in front of them and give them names. Despite the fact that the shadows are nothing more than contours of objects being carried back and forth by puppeteers by the fire standing behind them, they believe them to be real. This is the only reality that they know and can access, and they do not question it although they do not know the causes of the shadows (Plato 360 B.C.). In my version of the allegory, however, we built the cave that we ourselves are chained in, as well as the chains, and the shadows are our own – shadows of human and nonhuman entanglements (note the creepy puppeteers behind us have been dismissed). And rather than attempting a straightforward jailbreak that ultimately frees non/humanity from self/enslavement, this project is much more an attempt at engaging with the shadows on the wall – of grappling, teasing and flirting with them, in the hope that before just giving them names, we can come to realise that they are our very own shadows at all.

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DIS/POSITIONS We have a bad habit of parsing the world into dull matter (things) and vibrant matter (us), but the quarantines of matter and life only encourage us to further ignore the vitality and lively powers of material formations (Bennett 2010, vii–viii). It is paramount, therefore, that we question the actual historical efficacy of the object-subject divide and the imperative to treat humans as an end rather than a means, political scientist Jane Bennett argues, in order to open up a space for forms of ethical practice that do not rely on the image of an intrinsically hierarchical order of things. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between humans and things minimised, but the status of our shared materiality is elevated – and this could mean perceiving a world where human and nonhuman bodies are enmeshed inextricably in a knotted and dense network of relations of vibrant matter (ibid., 12–13). The irony of the ramshackle mentalities of modernity, which seem to have slightly overlooked the simultaneous evolution of ‘nonhumanity’, is that in the modern era we are so busy seeking to continuously innovate and reify the definitions and categories of the objects around us, that in seeking to increasingly become more advanced we are in fact moving further and further away from a cohesive understanding of the world (Latour 1993, 13). At this point, Bruno Latour argues, we scarcely have much choice than to entirely rethink these decaying categories, since if we do not change our common dwelling with things, we will miss the chance to absorb into our worlds the ‘other cultures’ that we can no longer dominate, and we will be forever incapable of accommodating them in an environment that we can no longer control. Therefore, it is up to us to change our ways of changing (ibid., 145). In this sense, we can currently observe a theoretical turning back towards the urgency of consolidating the dimension of materiality into an analysis of the social, because as Karen Barad famously argued – ‘[…] language matters, discourse matters, culture matters, but there is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter’ (Barad 2003, 801). This ‘turn’ covers multiple disciplines and has many names, as it has been widely termed as everything from the ‘ontological turn’ (Escobar 2010), the ‘material turn’ (Pierides and Woodman 2012), ‘continental materialism' (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011), or increasingly, ‘new materialism’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). What these movements have in common though, is a rejection of traditional dualisms of modern thinking, as well as a critique of the excessive strain on linguistics carried substantially by the postmodern movements. Furthermore, the authors share the concern that current techno-scientific advancements pose a challenge towards established accounts of the ontological and social world and the human hitherto. Therefore, within the movement, the attempt is made to take themes of contingency, flux and difference from their confinement to the realm of culture, back into the realm of matter (Pellizzoni 2015, 73).

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The focus on posthumanism within new materialist thinking moreover, is triggered by the convergence of anti-humanism and anti-anthropocentrism, critiquing the limiting humanist ideal of ‘man’, as well as species hierarchies in general (Braidotti 2017, 238). The overall call for insubordination from humanist ideals can to a considerable extent be traced back to the ‘death of man’ eminently announced by Foucault in 1970, from which emerged an epistemological and moral crisis that attempted to go beyond binary oppositions. Targeting the humanistic arrogance of continuously placing ‘man’ at the centre of world history, the battle began against the implicit assumption that what is human about humanity is connected to a sovereign ideal of ‘reason’ based on the rationality of the Enlightenment (Foucault 1970; Braidotti 2017, 241). As Rosi Braidotti argues, the human is nothing more than a normative convention, which does not make it inherently negative, as much as it makes it just highly regulatory as it comes to stand for normality, normalcy and normativity. It functions by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalised standard, acquiring transcendent values – and so, the human is nothing more than a historical construct that became a social convention about ‘human nature’ (Braidotti 2013, 26). Human mastery through the exercise of control and autonomous will, Katherine Hayles argues, is merely the story that consciousness tells itself in order to explain outcomes that actually emerged through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures (Hayles 1999, 288). And so, as Friedrich Nietzsche put an end to God (1883), Michel Foucault to man (1970), and Donna Haraway to the essentialised woman (1985) – anti-, transand posthumanism are putting an end to the normative human itself. The posthuman predicament, therefore, is an attempt to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between ontological categories such as the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems (Braidotti 2013, 97). Hence theory, Braidotti insists, should right now be engaging in coming to terms with unprecedented changes and transformations of the basic unit of reference for what counts as human at all. Because just as we do not know what posthuman bodies can do, we cannot even begin to assume what post-anthropocentric intelligence might actually be able to think up (ibid., 104). Thus, we are in dire need of a vision (or at least a more desirable spectacle) of the subject that is ‘applicable to the present’, in which we take a leap forward into the complexities and paradoxes of our times, combining critique with possibility in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects (ibid., 52–54). If there is a relation between the proclivity for mastery, the objectivist account of science and the imperialist project of subduing nature, as feminism has argued, then posthumanism might offer a potential for the construction of another kind of account – one in which emergence replaces teleology, reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism, distribution replaces autonomous will, and a dynamic partnership between human and nonhuman replaces the humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control (Hayles 1999, 288). We need to devise new social, ethical and discursive

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schemes of subject formation that take into consideration the profound transformations that we are undergoing – and hence, we need to learn to think differently about ourselves. Therefore, authors such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Katherine Hayles take this quandary as an opportunity to empower the pursuit of alternative schemes of thought, knowledge and self-representation, especially as the posthuman condition urges us to think critically and unconventionally about who and what we are actually in the process of becoming (Braidotti 2013, 12). And so, although some versions of the posthuman have displayed an antihuman and apocalyptic rendering, we can still craft others that will be conducive to the longterm survival of humans and nonhumans – organic and artificial – with whom we share the planet and ourselves (Hayles 1999, 291). Or as Michel Foucault puts it ‘I think that there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism’ (Foucault 1983, 215). As we face these limits of humanism, we seem to find ourselves rather abruptly entering into entirely new dis/positions – somehow re/placed, mis/placed and dis/ placed – plunged in between the discrepancies of what we perhaps are and how we learned to understand ourselves. These are times when our image of the human as the superior species crackles against the backdrop of aspects such as the parallel politics of the systems and things around us. And when the categories that we have to understand the world fade towards our lived realities, then we must enter with healthy hesitation and severe self-criticality into the project of rethinking ourselves. Foucault writes affectionately about Immanuel Kant’s toil, ‘When in 1784 Kant asked, “Was heisst Aufklärung?”, he meant, What's going on just now? What’s happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words, What are we?’ (Foucault 1983, 215). As all boundaries have been broken, new dynamics have given birth to the extremely entangled posthuman, abiding by the ethos that they contrived, as their inventions and intentions are overrunning each other to the extent that they can no longer even follow. And so, the basic principles and binaries on which we have based the understanding of ourselves, at least since the Enlightenment and the ideals of humanism, have fractured and cracked along the rims of reason. If, as this entanglement seems to suggest, we can be ceaselessly re-formed, re-socialised and re-written with and by designed systems and things – then what and who am I? And what might a hands-on design approach contribute to understanding all of this – because who, one might consider, if not design, as a science of the artificial (Simon 1969), would be the most appropriate place to start. Can this posthuman predicament be investigated by designing entangled situations – by exploring what it could mean to share the monopoly of agency, knowledge and bodies with systems and things? Because if we strictly maintain the narrow perspective that we as rational-superior-autonomous-subjects can continue to conduct and control all else, in a world where complex assemblages have already taken on a dynamic and life of their own – then we might truly be thinking and designing right past our own lived experiences.

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This urgent relationship between perceiving who we might be becoming in an intermingled relationship with our things, and what role design(ing) plays in that investigation, is at least twofold. On the one hand it entails a rather hands-on deliberation on how we might approach designing in the first place, if we were to look over the rim of our own teacup of humanity, thereby endeavouring into designing a world with space for more than us. But furthermore, and much before that, it engenders a space for stepping back and attempting to explore these unfolding ontologies, these political systems of non/humanity, through designing (and being designed) on alternative terms. This, in turn, would mean committing oneself fully to the endeavour of getting to the marrow of the concealed politics at play, by making things that can act out on undetermined terms, engaging directly with them, and shadowing the regimes of power that unfold – in the case of this research project, in one’s very own household and on one’s very own body. Therefore, instead of strictly focusing a design approach on what the human wants, on making things that make our lives easier, and on things extending us – this is an attempt at focusing on designing for the human-nonhuman assemblage, and the encounters and happenings that emerge from this. It is an exploration into how to share power with the more-than-human in the design process, engaging in the object and subject positions that this situates us in, and wondering how then the humans and nonhumans might assemble and augment one another. The switching of object and subject positions in human-artefact relationships therefore serves to open up a space for thinking, but also for doing, differently. As the following experiments will show, this created uncanny entanglements as well as exposing existing ones, allowed for curious conversations by ‘talking with’ rather than about things, and spawned generative identities as human and nonhuman merged to become a rogue apparatus. Because as many of the social theorists, it seems, are analysing these phenomena from the sanity of their study, this research project attempts to do so from a position of immersive research – by standing in the middle of the problem, further entangling oneself as a tactic to gain a vantage point from the inside, standing knee-deep in social-material confusion. By constructing a series of practical experiments that involve living with disobedient and rogue things, the positions of object and subject are blurred entirely, in order to begin (somewhere) to investigate power plays between us people and our things. So as the ‘material turn’ whirls into a ‘material spin’, this research project aims to plunge a stick in the wheel, while investigating alternative concepts of subjectivity, agency and politics through a practice-based design research approach. In this way, it aspires to make a contribution to the ‘new materialism’ debate from a design research perspective – dissipating the boundaries of object and subject, practice and theory, design and sociology – and not least researcher and researched.

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Grinded Theory Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi

DESIGN/SOCIOLOGY Coming from a background in design and sociology, this project aimed to combine aspects from both fields, making use of the critical and reflective space that emerges in between them. It aimed to explore how design and sociology can draw on theoretical and methodological modes and tactics synergistically, clashing with a certain degree of scientific anarchy to produce novel insights on, and especially engagements with the material-social world. From the sociological perspective, the movement towards things can be tracked back to formulations found in for instance the anti-bifurcation processual philosophies of Michel Serres with his quasi-subjects (1982), as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblages (1988). In the movements that followed, the inclusion of things as active agents in the social world was pushed further forward, as authors such as Bruno Latour popularised the idea that sociologists were barking up the wrong tree when constructing the social with the social, while objects are in fact omnipresent in all the situations in which they are looking for meaning (Latour 1996, 235). Fellow authors such as Mike Michael seemed to be thrilled with what he describes as a broad, straggling but evidently accelerating intellectual movement that is attempting to theorise the ‘material’ within sociology (Michael 2004, 6). Generally, there has been a great explosion of the object-concept, which does not remove itself from its roots in ‘thingness’, such as what we can observe in Haraway’s ‘Cyborgs’ (1985), Star and Griesemer’s ‘Boundary Objects’ (1989), Mol’s ‘Ontologies’ (2002) or Knorr Cetina’s ‘Epistemic Objects’ (1999). With a growing expansion of this theme in the design field, we have moreover seen the emergence of concepts such as for instance Julian Bleecker’s ‘Diegetic Prototypes’ (2009) or Bruce Sterling’s ‘Spimes’ (2005) – which are concepts that exceed any traditional understandings of what a thing could be in the social-material world. In 2010, Goldsmiths College at the University of London explored this fruitful overlap with a conference crossing the departments of design and social science, entitled ‘Making and Opening: Entangling Design and Social Science’. They argued that while design and the social sciences intersect at a number of points, there is a tendency for social science to treat design as a topic, and for design to treat social science as a resource (Wilkie et al. 2010). Four years later, in a subsequent cross-departmental symposium entitled ‘Inventing the Social’, they now questioned whether and how the ‘return of the social’ involves a radicalisation of the performativity agenda in social and cultural research and theory. Scholars have long recognised that sociality is ‘performed’ and ‘enacted’, they argued, but technological and environmental practices raise the possibility that sociality can also be generated, created and produced – and deliberately so, potentially leading to a further de-naturalisation of the social (Marres et al. 2018). While terms such as ‘generated sociality’ or ‘the de-naturalisation of the social’ might first raise a certain doubt or even critical rejoinder, the use

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of these terms must be understood in the context of what Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford call ‘the happening of the social’. In the book Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, they investigate and exemplify ways of investigating the open-endedness of the social world, seeing the social more as a happening – understanding the social world in all its ongoingness, relationality, contingency and sensuousness – and attempt to address the dimensions of the social world in its indeterminateness (Lury and Wakeford 2012, 2). An inventive method, they argue, should not be external to the problem, leaving the problem itself untouched, and must go beyond the perspective of taking the human as the only source of agency in the social world (ibid., 3) Within this context, the potential of thinking of things as ‘devices’ as a hinge between design and sociology, practice and theory, and ontology and epistemology, is raised. The word in itself, they reason, has multiple everyday meanings, from an object to a method. As Luciana Parisi observes, the notion of device not only admits that objects and methods are mutually constitutive, but also acknowledges that it is their interrelation that forces us to confront the ‘new’. Or as Katie King has described them, devices are ‘jumpy materialisations of practices, transforming and dissimilar agencies rather than elegantly inert guarantors of epistemological simplicity’ (Parisi and King in Lury and Wakeford 2012, 9). It is in the moment where artefact and method are understood as not just mutually constitutive, but as one, that we can observe the overcoming of the disciplinary borders between design and sociology. Because it is in this moment that the borders of the material artefact and the social research method become blurred. And it is moreover in the emerging understanding of research method as not-innocent, but rather intervening in the social world that we come to grasp a novel perspective not just on social research, but on design research. It is in this space of object as social practice, or even more radically, the space of artefact as method, that we expand to new terrain. In this way, the experiments in this book play with the idea of the artefact as design and sociology, seeing them at once as one. However, rather than sociological observations on the artefacts’ influence and happen-to-be agency, it rather explores the idea of enabling things to openly raise, negotiate and play with power as active co-actors in the ongoingness, relationality and contingency of the social world. It attempts to explore the artefact as an event, arising in a process of ‘becoming-with-human’, where human and nonhuman are explicitly co-constructed in the happening of social life. It is from this perspective that it manoeuvres along the borders of artefacts evoking, inventing, or even inverting the social, questioning what might be gained by the pursuit of turning sociological questions into ontological ones, and the other way around. Because in these times of the dis/ordering of things and the dis/positioning of the human, where the ‘codes’ of conduct are scripted and encrypted in the merging of the social and the material, both design and sociology have to take on new attitudes. As things are not just there to be observed, but furthermore actively observing – when they are knowing, asking, telling, leading and suggesting – we need to

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The 39-square-metre site of research. Main room from two perspectives. Main site of first experiment ‘material mischief’

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Hallway and kitchen. Main site of second experiment ‘Artificial Intelligence/Intelligent Artifice’

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conceive of a sociology not just on, but with and perhaps even by things. Therefore, the three experiments carried out within this project each explore an approach to what one might call ‘intervening sociology’. The first study unravels an interfering sociology, as tampering with the way that mundane things practised their customary duties meant interfering with the way that we were able to perform our own everyday lives. For the period of one month, our home turned somewhat into a ‘madhome’, as things turned on and off, acted out and played on indeterminate terms. The second experiment in turn incited a form of live sociology, as entering directly into a conversation with intelligent systems allowed for a peculiar parley with ‘artificial intelligence’. In a fruitful battle to utter, share, tell, chat, gossip, lie and outwit each other, non/sense and meaning were translated from human to machine and from machine to human, and thereby made differently intelligible. The third exploration elicited what one might call a generative sociology, as vibrant and dull matter merged to become differently wearable utterly ‘rogue couture’. In this study the human body becomes ‘open source’ and the artefact generates identity, as human and nonhuman merge to become open and unfinished. Providing the opportunity of deeply immersing oneself in a constructed social material ‘situation’ for a limited amount of time, all of the design experiments in this project emerge from an attempt to hack ourselves and our own presumptions. Therefore, they are a venture into making more mischief with things, in a plea for more play and awkward moments with materiality, in order to engender curious conversations and strange intertwinements. The project initiates a series of episodes where species meet on un/common terms – eliciting an ethnography on getting to know one another, differently. Since, as a researcher, one can anyway never take oneself out of the equation, as mere presence is an intervention in itself, we figured that at least one can put oneself in a more immersed position. As the artefacts developed in these studies disrupted and teased away at the fabric of our everyday lives, blurring the power positions of who is in fact object and subject, and challenging the codes of conduct with which all parties act out – the practical situations formed a possibility space for exploring ideas of shared human-nonhuman agency, politics and subjectivity. As an endeavour to cross the boundaries – mashing and merging design and sociology, observing and intervening, object and subject positions, of other and of self – it aimed to poke at the boundaries of things, and of ourselves. In this way, the observing and intervening sciences collided to literally shift the power and positions of humans and things, in order to secure that all parties stand on uncertain ground. Engaging in this inversing material sociology, where we often became the observed, interviewed and prototyped, entailed an endeavour into the dual position of being both researcher and researched. And so – as an experiment – we entangled ourselves even further in a social-material spin in order to immerse severely into this ontological crisis, with the hope that this might provide an asymmetrical perspective from the inside.  

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PRACTICE/THEORY

Practising Theory Western civilisation has a deep-rooted difficulty in making connections between the head and the hand, Sennett argues, as a long history has drawn fault lines dividing practice and theory, technique and expression. Modern society therefore suffers from this historical inheritance, ignoring the fact, that in a sense ‘making is thinking’ (Sennett 2008, 9,11). As Brandes describes, the practice of design research normally comes as an invasion of text, as words splash, splutter, pour and pelt down on our brains and minds. When linking the notion of text to design, text becomes an activity – nothing stable and finished but rather something constantly moving, and it in itself involves the making and creating of an artefact – regardless of the material used. Text, letters and grammar, she argues, are materials just like paint, plastic or steel, as they are both types of symbolic systems (Brandes 2016, 78–79). There should be no dualism or mutually exclusive categorisation of artefact or text, as any attempt to impose solid and binding rules, Jonas further argues, is counterproductive and obstructive to the development of design research as an own form of inquiry. Both text and artefact are practices, and a faulty distinction between the entities causes a mental obstacle to occur, ignoring entirely the fact that written texts in their various forms are artefacts to begin with, and especially scientific texts are carefully crafted ones (Jonas 2016, 70). Therefore, when it come to the intermingling of design practice and theory construction, perhaps we can rather view these dynamic, ongoing and mutually stimulating practices as the endeavour to alternate between formulating the constantly emerging issues at hand in material and in words. However, while theorising largely involves contemplating and describing what (might) exist, designing is about bringing forth something that does not yet exist in the world (Binder et al. 2011). In the case of the design practice in this project, we focused chiefly on simply doing the deed in a rather ad hoc manner, for the sake of putting a theoretical contemplation through a mill of social and material empirical confrontations. Because one of the main interests in carrying out this project was the possibility to explore how one might involve the element of design practice within a research process in a way that would incite the materialisation itself to be a significant part of contriving and comprehending the issue at hand. Being part of forming the argument, one might say. This procedure which one could perhaps express as ‘theorising design and designing theory’ comes from the rather simple starting point of investigating the process of embodying abstract problems in materiality – in experienceable material-social actuality, in order to in turn extract new

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Items used for artefacts in the first experiment (lost and found in the household) and the second experiment (carton boxes, MP3 player, audio box, and commercial AI system)

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Items used for artefacts in the third experiment (cotton fabric, NFC tags, old Android phone, paper for printing temporary tattoos), and researchers’ notebooks

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theoretical concepts from this process of materialisation – from the ground up. While the process of abstraction-to-material seemed to carry the potential of confronting conjectural considerations with tactile real-world materiality, the process of material-to-abstraction seemed to possess the ability to draw out and make apparent concepts and considerations from the happenings that would happen to happen within this transformation. Through this process, the aim was to enable new ‘situations’ as a practice of inhabiting the ‘no man’s land’ between scientific states – eliciting new (thought) terrain. Thereby, the design projects attempt to create possible negotiation spaces – a form of human-nonhuman activist plots, hacking mundane relationships and cultures through unmaking everyday routines, knowledge practices and corporeal borders. Because as Brandes writes, our making practices are anyway opposed by designing objects, as artefacts themselves often seem to live a life of their own – they resist us, they literally ‘throw against’ something or somebody (as in the etymology of the word itself) – and this is equally true for any object (Brandes 2016, 79). So, what happens then when one shares the power of practice and theory with things? Can materiality (already in its process of materialising, perhaps) counter-argue, challenge, dispute or defy the emerging theoretical arguments and formulations, playing devil’s advocate to the arising theory? Can one enter into a process of making (with) things that one does not and cannot fully intend or understand, to then step back and observe what they might have become? And in order to not instrumentally imply a premeditated human-centred intentionality and reasoning in this emergence of meaning making material – how can one trip the trickster? Due to these deliberations, this project did not attempt to use design practice to embody an ‘authored critic’, nor simply to exemplify a (fully human) hypothesis, nor to prove one. Rather, the experiments were produced as explorations in themselves, materialising abstract (and sometimes slightly impossible and intangible) questions, such as ‘how can one design something beyond one’s own intent?’, in turn being provided with material answers that would not have surfaced without the artefacts that emerged. In this way, one might refer to the design practice as ‘investigative making’, as it is done not to prove a point or test a hypothesis, but rather as an exploration to surface and generate one. It did so in order to engage practically with an unfamiliar and derivative logic and rationale of (and not least reason for) designing. Constructing experimental social-material ‘incidents’ and ‘conditions’, believing that by entering into specific approaches to making, one might allow things, and hence knowledge to appear. Its challenge, yet its fascination therefore, lay very much within the interplay with aspects such as co/incidence, un/controllability and un/expected happenings – disordering the social order and position of things and of people in order to prompt common arguments. The artefacts emerged, in a sense, as holding theoretical arguments, having something to say in and by themselves, perhaps even something that we would or could not have formulated. Throughout the process, we attempted not to imply whether the research, and the

058  GRINDED THEORY

research practice, should be critical or not, or hopeful perhaps. We simply engaged with the spirits that had been called as they appeared to spill and knock things over (much like in Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice of 1798). One might say that within this frenetic exchange, we, together, ‘wrote our script as we spoke it’ – or as Merleau-Ponty writes ‘sometimes my own words take me by surprise, and then teach me what I think’ (Merleau-Ponty in Derrida 1978, 11). In the case of this project, this might translate into the fact that sometimes our design practice took us by surprise and taught us what we made.

Grinding Theory In order to plunge hands and head-on into a collision with ontological anxiety, therefore, exploring the redistribution of power between actors in the design process, the framework vernacularly designated as a ‘Grinded Theory’ approach was concocted. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘grinding’ of a ‘difficult situation’ means reducing something to smaller particles by milling it, as well as sharpening and producing something by friction. This seemed to be an appropriate reference, as the approach basically entailed designing situations that crushed our theoretical questions into particles – new deliberations, terms, critiques and potentialities – in other words, new more particular theoretical questions. After being roughly formulated, a portion of these particles were then once again put through the mill of design practice, evolving even further particles, and so on – one could say, the theoretical reflections were pulled through an ‘epistemological grinding mill’ of practice. And as this circle of alternating between formulating in things and in terms unravelled, a productive process of tripping over practice and theory occurred – allowing the one act to be interrupted by the other. Thereby, through the moving back and forth three times between composing in materiality and in text, the overall motive of this endeavour emerged as a practical-theoretical reverse engineered hypothesis. The methodological scaffolding of the project was thus bolted together by components of practice and theory – and was supported by the foundation of Grounded Theory (Glaser 1998, 2002), which was appropriated for practice-based design research. In order to enter into the experiment of these clashes, and not least in order to capture the moments and incidents that they would evoke, some basic elements of grounded theory were applied. First of all, the credo of the approach, namely that anything and everything might appear to be relevant at a later stage means that there is an immense focus on documentation and writing memos, or what has been described as ‘intellectual capital in the bank’ (Clarke 2005, in Birks and Mills 2011, 10). This amounted in a multitude of personal notebooks, the content of which was constantly clustered along the way to elicit a series of concepts

 PRACTICE/THEORY 059

Michelle’s notebooks. Notebooks were used for personal memos, autoethnographic recordings and developing potential terms and concepts.

060  GRINDED THEORY

Florian’s notebooks. The notebooks created an individual space for each researcher to capture their particular perspective.

 PRACTICE/THEORY 061

that were finally formed into larger categories and then written down in the form of essays. Within this process of clustering, a strong focus was laid on the researcher’s perspective on and autoethnographic experience of the social engagement with the systems that emerged – namely, living with them, speaking with them and wearing them. In this sense, the relation between human and thing was conceived of as a site of a qualitative empirical inquiry, from which empirical data could be collected in the form of personal reflections. Working together in a research collaboration, where the discussions tended to take on the format of rather-loud and hour-long, and where one often finds oneself somewhere between a great epiphany and speaking completely past each other, these notebooks took on a great value. Seeing as the design and autoethnographic recording happened collectively, the personal notes created a personal space for each researcher to express their individual thoughts – whether the research partner agreed or not – a memo-randum of understanding of sorts. Having two very different ways of documenting personal reflections, these note-books took on a life of their own, being written in a way where only the individual researcher would even be able to decode their own notes. And so, seeing that the method of grounded theory in itself does not provide a basis, or in this sense any guidelines for integrating design experiments in a research process, it was rather the element of documentation and clustering, the sense of ‘structure’ that the method provides to a process, and the overall approach to theorising ‘from the ground up’ was thieved from the framework. Glaser describes his own masterminding as endeavouring to emphasise the complexity of the world – and therefore the freedom, autonomy and licence to write generated theory that explains what is going on in this world. In his theoretical reverie, the researcher can use their own concepts generated from their own data, rather than using, and probably forcing he adds, the received concepts of others – especially those concepts of ‘unduly respected theoretical capitalists’ (Glaser 2002, 23). And generating such concepts, he states, is actually very exciting – because all that grounded theory in fact is, is the generation of emergent conceptualisations into integrated patterns, which are denoted by categories and their properties, and therefore these concepts in general, whether conjectured, impressionistic or carefully generated, have an ‘instant grab’ (ibid., 30). Holding this attitude in high regard, not least the consequence and wrath that it encompasses, a last element from the method that was truly attempted pursued within this project was the claim that literature should not be reviewed before contextualising concepts in the final stages of formulating them. This, in order to bypass preconceptions and maintain a theoretical sensitivity. Along the way, however, we did compile what we came to refer to as our ‘growing library of reassurance’. This library (which was more of a bookshelf, as the research site was merely thirty-nine square metres) was a growing collection of books and sources that we assumed might come in relevant in this last phase of the process. The books on this shelf ranged from high-school remnants (such as Goethe and Kafka) that were never re-

062  GRINDED THEORY

turned to the library, to remainders from former studies (from crisis analysis books to Fluxus art catalogues), as well as several sources that were collected during the research period, mostly on a hunch – often based on the subtitle or a seemingly relevant cover illustration – and were carefully constructed as a staple of hope and context. As a physical frame of references, the shelf served the role of signifying that there would in fact be an end of the process, and provided the feeling of relevance, and having a place (one day) on a shelf – by which we meant that the project would have a home, fit into a (constantly expanding) theoretical debate. Curiously, we would sometimes read the last page, sometimes we would even take a book on vacation, and so, this diligent flirting with theory conveyed an implicit reassurance. Rather than placing itself in one distinct theoretical canon, the literature collected and employed in this work therefore spans many fields and parts of it are indeed the result of an auspicious serendipity. The drift between sciences, one might add, was not as much a choice as it was a necessity, we found, as design in its ‘nature’ arises as a creature that inhabits borderlands, an instance of fragments, hybridity and convergence, and it must inform itself by whatever it needs, whenever it needs it, in order to act contextualised on the problems that it encounters. Always striving to locate and explore the compelling yet-unknowns, it cannot avoid but to build on the world and all that is in it as matter.

Plug-and-Play Theory Plug-and-play is a feature of hardware and software technologies that enables computers to automatically detect devices, without the need for any fuss or difficulty. In a sense, it reflects the modus operandi of the research practice in this project, in which we slipped ceaselessly between practice and theory in the three case studies, terming theoretical concepts in a very plug-and-play way. The ‘play’ furthermore illustrates the literally rather impulsive play with theory, as one might say that we viewed it more as ‘paint, plastic or steel’ (Brandes 2016, 79) than an instance of which one must be in perpetual awe. The concepts derived from the process were based largely on inventing terms and meanings ad hoc, at times also due to linguistic shortcomings as between us we were moving in trilingual space, and thus literally ‘in lack of better words’. These terms were usually coined in a moment, and then later, as the arguments (re)appeared along the way, made sense of. In this way, it was often a process of coining terms that one did not fully comprehend at that point, in a struggling attempt to formulate, to in turn be surprised at a later stage how profoundly fitting they might be. These premature formulations were recorded along the way, often initially accompanied by a rebellious and rather generalised claim (frequently followed by confident punctuation at the end), as they tended to appear as ‘micro-epiphanies’ – the moment where someone shouted out a seeming

 PRACTICE/THEORY 063

conclusion, being in awe of the words coming out of their mouth (at least at that moment). These ‘intuitive manifestations’ were crucial for us to capture and formulate at the moment when the enthusiasm and belief in the idea was uncorrupted by over-thinking, despite the fact that there might not have been much proof for them yet, and even if not all of them survived the final grinding process. Furthermore, we found that formulating the thoughts roughly in text tends to manifest them, not just on printed paper, but also in the back of one’s mind. This was particularly helpful when it came to such premature formulations – as it was in the further process of prototyping that one could collect the actual argumentations, data and exemplifications that one would need to comprehend the potential of the term itself. Thereby, the formulations arising from this process will evidently be very interpretative, qualitative and subjective. This is the case not least due to the simple fact that they arise out of a highly qualitative, intimate and even idiosyncratic experiment and framework, in which the personal confrontations, decisions and reflections are perceived as distinctly valuable. As the type of formulations that emerged from this process might indeed be more provisional and aspirational than universal and generalisable, they will have to be appropriated on their own terms. They most certainly do not meet the ‘classical criteria’ for scientific theory, such as falsifiability, refutability, and in this perspective ‘testability’ as Popper might have wished it (Popper 1963, 297) – the theories produced in this book do not operate on the premise of proving or disproving, but rather seek to serve as an engine that generates approaches to thinking about thinking and making. The epistemological milling in grinded theory therefore seems to set its own criteria for validity and relevance, which awarely removes itself from more traditional scientific discourses, asking rather how else theory might be constructive and transferable in design research. Therefore, this project, and this book, explores along the way alternative parametres for relevance and validity, proof and evidence, argument and analysis. Because in times where the divides between the virtual and material, organic and artificial, nature and culture, object and subject, private and public, micro and macro, local and global – and the list goes on – are evaporating into thin air, it seems that we might have to renegotiate and reformulate our positions, as ‘scientists’ and as practitioners, and we were curious how design research might be able to contribute to understanding some of this. The perhaps compelling part of theory construction within design research, especially based on a research-through-design framework, is the fact that one can take a myriad of components and play with them to create a fertile clash. Therefore, the ‘design theory’ which we will attempt to generate by the end of this book will hopefully rather be inciting and generative than being really very falsifiable or ‘true’. This research project therefore endeavours to place itself consciously in the in-between spaces of faulty binary understandings – between practice and theory, speculation and experienceable actuality, human and nonhuman others. It shifts object and subject positions to arbitrate new negotiations and to reframe a version

064  GRINDED THEORY

of design that takes place as a critical and inclusive process – with things. Within the investigation, the researchers find themselves standing in the middle of the research problem, taking on a dual position of being both the researcher and the researched. As a distinctively personal and autoethnographic study, the three experiments carried out actively produce temporary in-between social-material ‘conditions’, in order to submerge into them and come to comprehend them from a pointedly subjective inside perspective. And as the process will show, at times this emerged more as an experience of ‘living in a PhD’ than doing one, as the artefacts drew us into the research, making us the object and the subject of it. In this sense, the framework constructed attempted to prompt an instable research ground, entering into ad-hoc practices and shifted power positions in order to generate an unforeseeable space of research. Because as Butler has argued, theory is in itself transformative, but it is not itself sufficient for transformation, something besides a theory must take place – an intervention, an action (Butler 2004, 204). In this way, we entered into a dialogue with the mundane materiality that surrounded us, engaging in the complex powers that shift and play themselves out between people and things. While this opening up of the cultural black box revealed overt and explicit politics, it also remained in the awkward stage of the pre-specific – the moment before something is fully designed, where politics and ontologies are still unfolding. This allowed power struggles to take place, as it explored the instants between being made and unmade, being social and material, being cause and effect. And so, the project attempted to tickle and tackle the multidimensional materiality of an artefact – the really difficult to grasp infringements of abstractions, such as certain uncertainty and possible impossibilities – beginning to form arguments.  

 PRACTICE/THEORY 065

Research process and interdisciplinary space of the project

066  GRINDED THEORY

The approach of grinded theory – moving through stages of practice and theory construction throughout the process.

 PRACTICE/THEORY 067

HOW TO READ THIS WORK The following chapter Material Mischief introduces the first experiment, and thus the entering into a temporary truce with the things in our own household in an attempt to innocently break the ice with mundane domesticity. This study engages in the provisional practice of un- and reassembling ordinary artefacts in a very ad-hoc manner, venturing into ‘hacking culture’ by constructing and living with a series of mischievous para-functional things. As a space outside of an everyday rationale and reason, the study occurred as a game of ordinary chaos, not least as the objects were merely half-scripted and left largely up to chance, coming into being to also not seem to know ‘what they do does’. Chapter five Borderline Objects then continues to contemplate the distinct tactics of a retrieval in authorship and a distribution of power among the actors in the experiment, and thus the idea of engaging in a paradoxical practice, emerging para-sites and para-boxes. The chapter introduces the idea of ‘the deflective practitioner’ as a tactic of moving from reflection-in-action to deflection-in-action as a mode of committing human-nonhuman ‘treason against reason’, arguing for a move from master to apprentice in a bid to arouse more ‘un/reasonable doubt’. Chapter six Rapid Protopeople then proceeds to deliberate the approach of an intervening sociology as a form of ontological cabaret, as the constructed ad-hoc socials turned into bizarre reflexive acts of household politics. In a wrestle against rationalisation, it discusses the concept of posthuman preformativity and doing more drag with things, reflects on the asymmetrical re/en/actments of social life that emerged within the experiment, and explores the idea that we are live prototypes of our own inventions – that we are ‘released, but TBD’. Chapter seven AI/IA displays the second experiment, as the research project proceeded to engage in an armistice with artifice, creating an informal setting in order to get more social with AI. As we engaged in a peculiar parley with artificial intelligence and intelligent artifice, this study emerged as an endeavour to mis/place things and ourselves (in and as a system). Chapter eight Paratypes then continues to discuss the entering into a liminal phase of a rite of passage of objects turning subjects and subjects turning objects, in order to grant artificial intelligence, and our relationship with it, a time of adolescence. It continues to introduce the idea of the ‘re-situationist’ as a tactic of re-situating people, things and contexts – re/locating, re/placing and re/com/modifying objects and subjects as a mode of re/activism towards the orders and hierarchies embedded in current modes of knowledge production. In a call for the ‘ideo(a)logical’, it discusses the practice of squatting the system to plant an a-logic in the current covert ideologies that it produces. Chapter nine Humanodes then goes on to consider the practice of live sociology, reflecting on the emergence of improvised scripts and performative dialogics

068  GRINDED THEORY

within the collective machinery of comprehension. In a struggle against species hierarchies, it introduces the idea of becoming humanodes in a network of ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ systems, arguing how we are becoming the third wheel in our own apparatus of knowledge production. It continues to propose a tactic of moving from data to dada, in order to enter into a state of confusion rather than re-manifesting desolate probability. Proceeding finally to enter into a treaty with things, chapter ten Rogue Couture displays the experiment of merging with a system entirely. Through the emergence of a networked cloak and a series of scannable tattoos, the designer dissolves into the work, as the actors act out as allied artifice. Chapter eleven United Notions introduces the approach of becoming mash-ine as an embodiment of a post-anthropocentric treaty, where human and nonhuman align to produce ‘black data’. It introduces the idea of ‘ambiguous computing’ as a tactic to elicit outeractive textiles, dis/embodied interaction and machine-based imperfection. It discusses an eventual move from a ‘modus operandi’ to a ‘modus apparatus’, and thus the generating of automated autonomy as a mode of shared sovereignty. Thereby, it calls for an engagement into the human-nonhuman politics of the United Nations, and thus for tapping into the unknown using spectral manoeuvres to enchant materiality with the ability to emerge into a state of political autopoiesis. In a confabulation with autonomy, chapter twelve Open So(u)rcerers puts forward the idea of ‘hiding in the light’ – in the overproduction of data, putting the idea of the sovereign human in question. The essay proposes the potential of the democratisation of the self, of open source DIY material-discursive bodies as a decentralisation of power, and of infecting political paradigms as the human and nonhuman merge to become a counterapparatus. As bodies become ‘rewritable’ in this experiment, the figuration of the 'open so(u)rcerer' is contrived as the unfinished re-describable human. Chapter thirteen New Dis/Orders argues for a decentralisation of the ‘maker’, and thereby for a decentralisation of power between human and nonhuman actors already in the process of making. It advocates the aspect of moving from ‘craftsman to draftsman’ as we emerge as human-nonhuman collaborative makers-in-themaking, drawing on deflection, re-situation and an ambiguous co-becoming in the design process. It proceeds to discuss the emergence of curious in-between spaces within this research project, and discusses how the antimatter, omnimatter and hypermatter surfacing in the experiments incited a less predetermined and more nonintentional unfolding of tactile tactics. It then contemplates the overall experiment of ‘grinded theory’ as a critical approach, discussing the potential of the field of design research to produce counter-logics and disparate-reasoning in an omni-reasoned world. Chapter fourteen New Dis/Positions argues that we have never been human, and we have never had things – not as humanism would have it, and not as roman-

  HOW TO READ THIS WORK  069

tically as the Enlightenment would believe. It discusses the potential ‘subject’ conceptions raised throughout the book, and contextualises the rogue gameplays developed within the project in a reflection on the political systems that we operate in with artefacts, and advocates a posthuman-centred approach to design. It then proceeds to question where to possibly theoretically situate the future of this overproducing, overconsuming, overenacting posthuman subject – a creature created by fire, philosophy, plastic, pixels and politics. How can we begin to envision the future of these creatures that we have become, when theories hitherto have so fondly embedded us in the ‘after’ – postmodernism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, post-agency, post-discursive-material-perceived-deflective-non-real-realism – what comes after after?

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Un/Common Acts

Material Mischief Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi

 THE SET-UP In an allure of ambiguity and a bid for bipartisanship, this is an experiment into hacking one’s own culture – into disabling predetermined reason and sense in regular appliances, tinkering and tampering with one’s own routines and habits, and putting in jeopardy the latent powers concealed and lurking in the mundane politics of everyday life. In a sense, it is an inquiry into inverting the ordinary, the bare essentials that we operate within – the things on which we often base our actions and conduct, while hardly granting them a thought. In this way, it is an endeavour to enter head-on into a dialogue with things and dismantle the intent of all parties – thereby making a temporary truce. It is an attempt to compromise the power source, before we become batteries of our own gadgets, and our gadgets become the batteries of our acts. In a very ad-hoc manner, four artefacts were contrived, namely an erratic alarm, a haphazard lamp, a ramshackle router and a side-tracked radio. Based on lost and found, and what we had at hand, paraphernalia was broken and reassembled, taken apart and put together, in order to enable parallel functions and instigate possible new relationships. Quickly captured in plastic jars, almost as if preserved by hobby entomologists, these un/foreign bodies became something else, yet they are familiar – they are, in a sense, lookalikes. Mischievous and swindling, they toy with expectations and routine, not allowing you to do things the way that you usually would, as these little re-mystified in-habit-ants exist merely to provoke the usual performance of your social life. Within the framework of one month, during winter-time, these artefacts were lived with, as we engaged openly in self-impairment, hindrances and obstacles, emerging into mundane adversity. Partaking wilfully in these shady showdowns, things slightly changed the circumstances that we operated within. In this sense, rather than a hightech smart home, this experiment emanated a low-tech ‘madhome’, and instead of visiting foreign lands to carry out an ethnography, we visited our very own thirty-nine square-metre apartment. As a game of ordinary chaos, the consequence of this set-up surfaced as an experience of having been set-up, by ourselves. Thus, the passages that follow are excerpts from the autoethnographies carried out during the process. In short, this is story about getting yourself into some-thing, giving up on reason, and making mischief with meaning. It is about unmaking, undoing and wrongdoing, overusing and underplaying. It is about tempered time-loss, serious space-gaps and biased blank-spots. In a sense, it is about being a professional amateur, about impossible possibilities, and about breaking the ice if you will (but while skating on it).

076  MATERIAL MISCHIEF

A lamp, an alarm, an internet, a radio – re/assembled in an ad-hoc manner with lost and found items in the household.

  THE SET-UP  077

An Alarm The alarm clock is just like a usual alarm clock, just that the alarm is set to go off at random. Made with a speaker, a player and a shuffle function, the alarm quite simply did its ir/regular thing.
 This is a study about drinking tea instead of coffee, reading all of your spam and forty pages of blind-text. It is about calling one’s mum twelve times, sending fifty-six emails in one day and running for no reason. It is about buying too little of something and doing too much of something else. Simply put, it is about how we hacked our own habits, getting addicted to rogue routine and rear reason, and to being misled, misplaced and freed, for a moment – by time, from time to time, in and out of time. 


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FIRST ALARM
 04:35
 Deciding to get up. Getting up, feeling partially grumpy and dazed. Taking a too-hot shower and going to the studio which is a couple of streets away. Stepping out of the door, it’s cold and windy. Turning left. Stopping at the traffic light, light shows red, walking anyway. Hardly any cars driving at this time. Continue walking straight. Hardly any people on the street. Taking a left turn, walking straight ahead. Silently opening the first door of the big gate to the studio, feels like breaking and entering. Unlocking two more doors – there. Turning on the small light. Sitting down, not really sure what to do. Opening the computer and refreshing

emails; nothing there, looking at spam folder and reading it all. From loan offers and surgery advice to dating suggestions, deciding to cluster the spam. Rough clustering of Florian’s spam: ~18 % Investment related issues ~16 % Education related issues ~14 % Supplies related issues ~12 % Senior related issues ~10 % Relationship related issues ~ 8 % Health related issues ~ 8 % Debt related issues ~ 4 % Car related issues
 ~10 % Miscellaneous 
 Rough clustering of Michelle’s spam: ~24 % Social media related issues ~20 % Debt related issues ~14 % Fashion related issues ~12 % Friend related issues ~10 % Dating related issues ~20 % Miscellaneous Florian’s Spam Florian should attend nursing school while working at a trade school at night, he should complete an IT degree, as well as partaking in a psychology degree programme. After that, he should contemplate a certification as a paralegal, and attend a medical billing school. Currently, he should look for assisted and independent living where there are lots of fun activities for seniors 55+. His health condition seems to be concerned with asthma, he should take care of blood clot filter failure, and look for an affordable rehab centre for alcohol abuse. In his free time, he should buy solar panels and install some energy efficient windows from local contractors. Financially speaking, he, because of an

IRS loophole, should apply for a loan of $15,000 in less than five minutes, in order to invest in physical gold, and at the same time he should be concerned with resolving his debts in as little as in 24–48 months. In order to take care of his appearance, he should use original Korean ginseng cream, and should have a practical telescopic extendable ladder and an endoscope camera for hard-to-reach places at home. He should buy stuff now and pay later. On weekends, he should be outdoorsy and use his extreme military LED flashlight (with 4 × zoom) and his newly purchased practical electric lunch box + inverter. He is supposed to stop with the fake dating, meet up with Stesha from Krasnoyarsk, and buy a used SUV which costs not more than $4,000. Michelle’s Spam Michelle has to pay $72 for a yellow tag to the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Authority in order to release her two consignment boxes which are with the diplomat Mark Wilfred. Among others, her friends Emily and Jessica are looking for her, both urgently need to speak to her. Joy and Edward are deeply concerned about her outstanding funds, while Chris is offering her a personal loan without stress and with quick approval. Michelle should wear a perfect roll tab sleeve tunic, which should be nicely combined with charms from Santa Fe, while she has to wear flip flops ‘made in New York’. Since assumed that she is divorced, she should look for a single man 40+. She has to take care of her stiff aching joints and should take a new imported pill from Japan. At home she should use special spring carpet cleaner and should equip her house

 AN ALARM 079

with motion sensors to improve her home – she should always carry with her the wireless remote with a panic button.

13:00 Hanging things up which are lying down. 13:45 Listening to noise.

NEXT FOUR ALARMS
 14:25, 18:25, 19:00, 20:45 Deciding to invert what we would usually do when the alarm goes off. 14:25 Florian (drinking tea instead of coffee) Michelle (drinking coffee instead of tea) 18:25 Florian (calling dad, instead of mum) Michelle (calling sister instead of mum) 19:00 (Supermarket) Florian: Usually – espresso beans, water, eggs; now – ginger biscuits, lemon juice and cat food. Michelle: Usually – black tea, milk, salt and pine nuts; now – cherry water, baby wipes and white chocolate. 20:45 (Bar)
 We went to our favourite bar and sat on the table opposite the table where we usual sit.


NEXT EIGHT ALARMS
 12:45, 13:00, 13:45, 14:55, 15:10, 16:45, 17:00, 21:35
 Deciding to actively try to waste our time, trying to do the most non-important thing when the alarm went off. 12:45 
 Rearranging chairs five times.

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14:55 Laying things down which are hanging up. 15:10 Calling a hotline in order to wait. 16:45 Running to the tram station and not taking a tram. 17:00 Asking _______ to meet for a coffee. 21:35 Reading blind-text for about an hour.

NEXT SIX ALARMS 14:40, 16:00, 16:15, 16:55, 17:55, 19:40 Deciding to overdo something when we get alerted. 14:40 Florian (calling mum) Michelle (writing ten emails) 16:00 Florian (calling mum) Michelle (writing eight emails) 16:15 Florian (calling mum back) Michelle (continuing to write emails)

16:55 Florian (calling mum back again, mum is getting really nervous) Michelle (writing thirteen emails, running out of people to write to, digging up old acquaintances) 17:54 Florian (clicking ‘I like’ on everything on social media wall) Michelle (accepting all pending friend requests at once [thirty-seven]) 19:40 Florian (bought five packs of toothpicks) Michelle (gave away a third of her clothes)

19:35 Next site, copy-shop. Strolling to the copy-shop, thinking about the many lastminute job applications and project presentations produced there in the last years. Arriving, looking around at what they actually also do – printing on cups seems to be a big thing – dogs on a cup, grandma on a cup, Einstein quote on a cup. Looking at the people as they anxiously assemble church and school brochures, copying handouts to find a flat or a lost cat, mother shouting at staff for misprinting birthday invitations.  

NEXT THREE ALARMS 08:35, 13:45, 19:35 Deciding to go to places that we once had to go to in utter stress, going on a stressless-sightseeing tour. 08:35 First destination, deciding to visit the tax office. It is quite remotely located, huge sixties-like building with some unidentifiable artwork at the entrance. Deciding to sit down in the waiting area, taking a number and thinking about a question to ask the employee. 13:45 Second destination, the airport. Packing our backpack with a bottle of water, walking, entering tram, short walk then taking the S-train. Roughly forty minutes, staring out of the window. Feeling excited. Arriving at the airport, getting a coffee and sitting down at departures. Looking at stressed people dragging heavy stuff.

 AN ALARM 081

A Lamp Rarely at noon, mostly early evenings and late nights, and sometimes early in the morning, our lamp turned on for an unspecific duration of time. By tampering with multiple time switches that the lamp was plugged into, it was set to turn on randomly. Operating on its own terms, we sometimes managed to catch the event, and sometimes, we imagine, it had its moment by itself. In this one-week experiment, twenty-three moments occurred. Quite quickly, a thing was made something. This is a story about how rituals were formed, superstitions appeared, and about how we stopped talking for a moment. It is about how a cup got twisted three times around, about cucumbers and sadness, traffic jams and relatives, and how by the end, empathy was made.

082  MATERIAL MISCHIEF

MOMENT ONE Around noon. We thought that maybe something broke somewhere. Somewhere a tree fell down, someone had an orgasm, a door opened, a bad thought was thought. Someone sneezed. A machine stopped working. Someone tripped over something. Something tipped over. Someone kissed somebody. A cigarette got lit. A coffee spilled. A flight got cancelled.

MOMENT TWO Flickering around early evening, we debated what one could do. Do: Stop talking (if you do talk)
 Do: Start talking (if you don’t talk)
 Do: Stand still (if you are in motion)
 Do: Turn something around three times


MOMENT THREE UNTIL SEVEN Around late night and in the middle of the day. We decided that when the light turns on, we will turn something around three times. Florian: Turning a coffee cup around three times. 
 Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times. Florian: Turning a cucumber around three times.
 Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times. Florian: Turning himself around three times. Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times.

Florian: Turning the washing-up liquid around three times. 
 Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times. Florian: Turning the backpack around three times.
 Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times. Florian: Turning Michelle around three times.
 Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times. Florian: Turning a pencil around three times.
 Michelle: Turning a pencil around three times.

 A LAMP 083

MOMENT EIGHT, NINE, TEN, ELEVEN Mostly around night-time (we were silent for the duration of the light being on, sometimes it lasted for more than an hour) Florian: (Silent) Michelle: (Silent) Florian: (Silent) Michelle: (Silent) Florian: (Silent) Michelle: (Silent) Florian: (Silent) Michelle: (Silent) Florian: I was thinking of a person who missed their train.
 Michelle: I was thinking about Bella and hope she feels better now.

MOMENT TWELVE UNTIL TWENTY-ONE Mostly at night, early in the morning and again at night.
 We decided that when the light turns on, we will think in memory of someone who struggles, write it down secretly and then share this with each other. Florian: I was thinking of all the people who did not get the job that they wanted. Michelle: I was thinking of my uncle in Kenya who just got mugged. Florian: I was thinking of all the people who suffer from algebra.
 Michelle: I was thinking about my little niece who lost her mother.

084  MATERIAL MISCHIEF

Florian: I was thinking of my brother. 
 Michelle: I was thinking about people who don’t speak German but live here to get by. Florian: I was thinking of the bartenders we all know/not know.
 Michelle: I was thinking about my mum. Florian: I was thinking of all the people who suffer from too much weight. 
 Michelle: I was thinking about our students. Florian: I was thinking of all the people who get mobbed.
 Michelle: I was thinking about my sister. Florian: I was thinking about all the people who got stuck in traffic. 
 Michelle: I was thinking of Victor. Florian: I was thinking of you. Michelle: I was thinking about our old neighbour downstairs. Florian: I was thinking of all the men who are right now at a hairdresser.
 Michelle: I was thinking about my mum. Florian: I was thinking of all the people who have lost something.
 Michelle: I was thinking about you having to go to the hairdresser.

An Internet One month of incredibly slow and rather limited data (2 GB) for two people, three computers and two phones. Within this one month, data inflation occurred, a black market was established, and household communism was formed. This is a story about interrupted internet and corrupted speed. It is about how we made informal trade-offs as data prohibition hit, and in the end, it is about how Florian became a data-dropout.

DAY ONE
 Feeling happy. Browsing as usual.

DAY THREE
 Still feeling content. Browsing as usual.

DAY SEVEN
 Peeking at the data usage, checking consumption. Panic. What did I use the data for? Where did it go? Videos, attachments – what did I download, did it download? Speculating – ‘it was this...’, ‘it was when I...’. Tensional dialogues, everyone raising their voice when talking about the internet. Slight scuffles occur. More don’ts occur in the conversations – ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’, ‘you always...’ and ‘did you...? Again!’. Turning into ‘I need data for...’, and ‘I also needed more data for...’. Mistrust evolving.

 AN INTERNET 085

DAY NINE
 All feeling a bit frustrated. Deciding to disable our browser ‘display image’ function to save data. Placebo actions and general paranoia emerging – starting to prewrite emails, going offline between online tasks. Not browsing randomly any more, no more funny videos, no more searching. Noticing that some news pages no longer allow access because of display-image thing. Looking for alternatives, using Wikipedia as news source. Unsubscribing from all mailing lists – PhD list, gone; advertising (noticing that we subscribed unwillingly to twelve different mailing lists, art gallery stuff), gone; colloquium list, hesitating.

DAY ELEVEN 
 Feeling a bit cheeky, daring to browse again.

DAY TWELVE A relative sends us a lot of high-res. images. Panic – too late, already downloaded. Florian warning Michelle about it. Therefore, deciding not to go online tomorrow. Data-free day.

DAY THIRTEEN 
 No data used.

DAY FOURTEEN
 Over time, developing a strange personal analogue data economy. Data capitalism. Making a list of each other’s biggest data concerns. Deciding that 70 MB should be for collective use. The rest (27 MB) can be

086  MATERIAL MISCHIEF

for private use. Debating what we need the collective data for. What is important? Collective data is used for PhD research, family concerns, skyping, bank transfers. One nice image selection is sent to all relatives. Additionally, making the decision that we have 10 MB each privately at our own free disposal, and that we keep 7 MB collectively in mind for bad times or emergencies. Within 70 MB collective data-use plan: one image per week to worrying family (as low-resolution as possible). Three important emails per week with attachments. Faux-pas: 0 searching for yourself 0 social forums 0 replying to unnecessary requests
 0 looking for another great theorist Tally-list for extra beneficial data collection: Doing the dishes: 2 MB Doing a wash: 3 MB
 Writing uncomfortable emails: 4 MB

DAY FIFTEEN 
 What happened?! Most data used up, just have some megabytes left! Discovering that an automatic system update on Florian’s computer took place. Desperation! Personal data economy breakdown – crisis meeting on the couch. Michelle blames Florian for being reckless. Commonly deciding to hold on to our economy but having to change the exchange rate. Doing the dishes: 200 KB; writing uncomfortable emails: 400 KB. Sending pixelated image

to relatives. Sending a colour square to relatives.

DAY SEVENTEEN Florian develops an un-comfortability around data, and prefers to no longer use any data. Michelle takes all the data responsibility. Florian developing an analogue-digital trade-off. Florian doing the dishes and the washing equals Michelle writing uncomfortable and important emails. Michelle checks everyone’s online banking and therefore Florian goes food shopping. Florian cleans the flat, and Michelle finds paper calls. Florian thinks about this as establishing a Kilobyte Kibbutz.

DAY EIGHTEEN Deciding to start harvesting data, we need to save every bit and byte at home. Going out to use open networks at cafés (online banking, feeling a bit compromised). Developing the feeling that we are paying for data with coffee, deciding to switch coffee places more often to distribute data/ coffee consumption. Using friends, random people, family and supervisors as search engines.  

 AN INTERNET 087

A Radio Every morning at 08:30 we listened to this radio, which randomly played us information that was picked on the basis of what we considered the most uninteresting things for us to know. It covered rescue channels, as well as trucker, crochet and military channels, not to mention micro-biology, finance and preachers. This was a seven-day experiment, where we recorded snippets of what we mis/understood, steadily building a new vocabulary as we found ourselves getting familiar with slightly peculiar subcultures and finding things that we were not looking for. This study is about the Caribbean, God and fishing advice. It is about how 4.3 turns into 5.7, about the intersection of Mainville Road and River Hill Drive, and about ‘bear bites’ and a Hallelujah. It is

088  MATERIAL MISCHIEF

about a general court-martial order and twelve degrees below zero, Echo Foxtrot Two Seven Five and an inflation in close to seconds.

DAY ONE 08:30 A male voice speaking briskly, sometimes in a British accent, and an incredibly selfassured female voice speaking in an Indian accent. This is definitely a financial channel. It seems that the impact of slowing growth on Chinese currencies may or may not have got sterling rattled, and as we head towards Sunday a calm-looking Euro should be discussed especially in regard to the fact that a fad is minutes away from

Wednesday. But it looks like a solid update when we talk about an economic slowdown in a quarter...big quite transitory...inflation is close to seconds...close to a 2 % target. Apparently, a 9 %-ish prize by the most is a reasonable matrix, which indicates that there is little short turn-up side. Actually, it looks like the fad is on autopilot...for this year... 
 DAY TWO 08:30 
 A male and female voice speaking in a heavy Australian accent, we seem to find ourselves listening to a ‘how-to’ of a water rescue channel. Learning that if you do have a boat and you are in the area of the Cockburn Islands, you will have to use an identification like this: ‘VH6EO! VH6EO! This is woodman seven five zero. This is woodman seven five zero. This is woodman seven five zero. Over’. Then, you will likely get a response like this: ‘Woodman seven five zero. This is VH6EO go ahead!’. It is important that you repetitively answer: ‘This it woodman seven five zero’, tell them how many people you have on board and say ‘We would just like to Log On. The registration number is: Ecco Foxtrot Two Seven Five and our estimated time of return (is for example) ten hundred hours. Over’. When doing so you will get an answer like this: ‘Woodman seven five zero. Romeo. We have you on the LoG. VH6EO standing by’.


DAY THREE 08:30 Three cheerful male voices speaking over each other in an American accent, we seem to find ourselves listening to a hunting and fishing channel. If you are a novice in this area and if you find yourself going hiking in Yellson or what not. You should have daypacks and ice-water, measure your torso and consider a cheap pack with a 26-inch frame, check the 45-degree angle on those straps. Suspension. Be aware this causes fatigue. Try to find people who are wearing packs, ask them to try it out. You need great suspension on your pack. Go conditioning and put a few packs of salt (40–60 pounds in weight) in your pack and mow the lawn. Take your pack to the gym, there is no shame in it... If you are into nymphing, then this is about the tideline of nymphing. You have to be able to extend your drifts. Euro-style or Czech-style. If you are talking about Czechstyle, you have to have the proper line. If you want your line to sink immediately, you need a Euro-style nymphing line. Consider a thin thin thin gauge line, it should feel like a 10–20-pound test line. There is a thing like dynamic nymphing – Europeans are going with longer leaders, you can also go with a shorter leader. Consider from the fly-line to the taped litres, go three to four feet to the first fly, from that fly-line you go with a three X, or a two X. Go three feet before your first fly, then tie a triple surgeon, and then drop from there twelve to fourteen inches down another fly, and from there twelve to fourteen inches you have the sinkers.

 A RADIO 089

DAY FOUR 08:30 Male voice speaking confidently and staccato in a south-western American accent about the military, and something about serving and protecting. Apparently the problem of understanding the military justice system is that a contested general court-martial member with one charge and three specifications of one twelve alpha is actually fairly common and simple...it’s supposed to mean... contested general court-martial...is a felony trial with members, meaning that would be before a jury and then one charge and three specifications of one twelve alpha (that is, possession of a controlled substance)...the charge is one twelve alpha the USMG and the specifications are really just the wording under the charge...that someone had three pounds of marijuana in his seabag.

DAY FIVE 08:30 Two male voices and a female voice all speaking cheerfully in what seems to be a very Alaskan accent. This is a trucking channel. If you need some mud-flaps for your truck... they will first ask you: year, make and model...then the next thing they always ask is which engine, which emission and additionally if your truck has fourwheel drive...continue with questions concerning the AC...does it have XM-Radio...which seem to be ridiculous, because the only thing you need is some damn mud-flaps...

090  MATERIAL MISCHIEF

DAY SIX 08:30 
 Female voice speaking very calmly in an American accent, we seem to find ourselves listening to a crochet channel. If you want to read (crochet) patterns, you have to learn principles and concepts. Principles are the things you can memorise – like abbreviations, repeats, structures. The real struggle seems to lie in the conceptual attributes, so understanding the concepts of (crochet) patterns enough to work through a set of instructions while translating them into a physical act (of crocheting). That’s what apparently trips everyone up. For your first pattern reading – take mental notes, of the designer, the materials, any special instructions, take all the information which this section has to offer. Make notes, add questions that you might have in the margins. Focus on the little things. Read one row at a time...

DAY SEVEN 08:30 Young-sounding male voice speaking calmly and didactically in an American accent, we seem to find ourselves listening to prep for Med School (please notice that through the heavy terminology, the technical terms are most probably misspelled) . Bio-chem-heavy episode. It’s about the B-vitamins – not all but most of them. It will be about key enzymes and it is also about stages of deficiency. B1 is Thiamine, B1 is sometimes written as TPP. It is involved in dehydroiuanis reactions and electro transfers and it is not surprising that many of those enzymes that use Thi-

amine have dehydroiuanis in their name. It sounds like they are curing out redox reactions. Examples would be ‘phyhvidrate dehydroiuanis’ branch alpha chido asset dehydroiuanis and ‘transcitoles’, but where is ‘phyhvidrate dehydroiuanis’ in the cell – it is in the mitochondria… And what makes it so famous is the TCA circle… Phyhvidrate dehydroiuanis converts hyrovade to a Cyclo 2A. And then Cyclo 2A can be used for the TCA circle. And the TCA circle takes place in the mitochondria... So, it makes sense that the ‘phyhvidrate dehydroiuanis’ takes place in the mitochondria.

 A RADIO 091

Borderline Objects Florian Conradi

A STATE OF (T)REASON

Administrative Attachés We ceaselessly push and press, plug in and out, turn on and off, look for and misplace things as we please, and this usually countless times a day. We set things up, break them down, install and de-install them, according to our strange needs and desires – sometimes because someone tells us to, often just because we can. We seem to find ourselves in a pinball arcade game, where we are the ball that got placed. From our coming into becoming in the world, we are bounced around, fall down, get flipped and pushed, get stuck – and sometimes we get a bonus, although most times not. We get played along the way, and eventually we fall into the hole – game over. The arcade game is made out of material, organic and artificial, and mostly an entwined combination, and we made this apparatus as we made things, as we colonised things with rationality, and they recolonised our social worlds. Now – each individual gameplay is unfolding and unknown, and the machine is persistently being refurbished and updated, while being played. And as we seem to constantly have to have to, also because we want to have to have to, we might be commodifying ourselves out of a conscious existence (Debord 1967). As we still speak about human-computer interaction, we might increasingly need to speak about the performing of a computer-human interaction, as we proceed to be the reproductive producers of production resulting from the apparatus that we built. Some have spoken of next big machine, the one that will allow us to do things differently – the internet, for instance, was a hopeful vision, as mostly everybody could contribute to the borderless approach of information exchange. Now however, looking back, we find that the new machine was devoured by the old one, resulting in a rapid retreat and re-contemplation of the revolution (Avanessian and Hester 2015). It is difficult now to recall the world of the nineties, Borgmann writes, when it seemed like the beginning of boundless prosperity, inspired by a manifest destiny to explore and settle the new world of cyberspace – an era in which the iron laws of gravity and economics had been abrogated, and a time of challenges that called for boldness and unconditional devotion. Yet, still, at the centre of contemporary culture is consumption (Borgmann 2002, 1, 22). In the tracked, traced and capitalised shimmering of the bright net and a dusky destruction of the dark net, there are traders, dealers and global players at play, and heap loads of stuff to consume. Our searches are hardly searching any more, as the apparatus auto-completes our sentences, and the digital realm sadly came to host countless replacements of what was anyway already there – including viruses, bugs, shutdowns and exclusions, as the technology is perhaps more impartial than the politics that it embodies (Wajcman

094  BORDERLINE OBJECTS

2007, 287). And so, while almost everyone can access information and watch one trending video after the other, the human mostly applied rational intent and profitability advantage to a fragile potential. Moreover, after we got a bit bored by it, it seems that quite quickly proceeded to focus on an ‘internet’ of things, thinking that a revolutionary potential might arise by just putting the word ‘internet’ in front of things. And while consumers attempt to actually comprehend of such a ‘thingified’ network, busy people began thinking about the next big thing, artificial intelligence (Stocker 2017). And then they packaged it nicely in our phones and home-pods, and now artificial intelligence can be bought leisurely on the internet for just forty-nine Euros, and it can connect to the internet of things – how practical. And so, within a state of commodity fetishism, where products fulfil our tasks, and we fulfil theirs, and then they fulfil ours, we emerge into a social relationship of rational (re)production (Marx 1859, 983). Masses of preordained products and conniving communication devices tamper with our abilities to position or surprise ourselves, as society increasingly turns to passivity, certainty and reason – not just in the mass media of the ‘culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 97), but in its subtleties embodied in ordinary everyday objects. Between partial autonomy and partial determination, power operates between principles of domination, exploitation and organisation, Vaneigem argues, and this power that operates to uphold the hierarchy of social order has perfected itself by humanising itself to the extent that it has ‘emptied men of substance’. The rulers are in control, he writes, but it is the strings that make them dance (Vaneigem 1967). And so, as we continue to make calculating commodities and devious devices, they proceed to complete their colonisation of social life – and it is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, but that they are now all that there is to see (Debord 1967). Alienated consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses, and a cycle is set in motion that must be maintained at all costs, through a process of self-regulation (ibid.). Therefore, a connected-social-material conflict seems to be arising – as the more we continue to just make, the more problematic culture becomes, because culture is made out of objects, and these objects get in our way (Flusser 1999, 58), and in a world of connected objects, probably also in each others’. Take time for instance, it is nice to have time, so they say, yet ‘having time’ means being able to capture or even own time – and who can own time? Nevertheless, let us say that we have time, that would in turn mean that we have already administrated it – and indeed we did. We portioned it, calculated it, measured it, gave speed to it, asked people to remind us of it, we even sang songs about it – time after time. We designed things that hold time, stop time, and keep track of it, and now we even design watches to watch our next move. And even when we design devices that are not necessarily intended as time-machines, we still put time in them – from the two-minute timer on voguish electric toothbrushes, and timers on high-tech ovens, to the main display on our telephones, which are no longer just for telephon-

  A STATE OF (T)REASON  095

ing, but for administrating time. To put a timer in just about anything, some designers seem to think, is not a bad idea, and so, they make time to add time. As time is of the essence, the essence of time has quite obviously entrenched itself in our daily life in the most basic of ways – ‘when were you born?’, ‘when is the next meeting?’, ‘do you have a minute?’, ‘when are you finishing your PhD?’. We invented bridgedays, deadlines, arrival times, departure times, compensation time – it takes nine months to carry a child, ten minutes to get from here to there, five minutes to get from there to here, and check-in closes forty minutes before departure. While the topic of time has been pondered extensively by a long list of philosophers, I am particularly interested in how we became administrative attachés in the ministry of it, although we seem to not have any of it – almost as an exercise of doublethink in George Orwell’s ministries in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell 1949, 6). Because by over-reasoning it, perhaps, we seem to find ourselves designing more and more devices that are driven by it, taking time with us everywhere, from dining to diving, getting sad when we are too late, bored when we are too early and anxious when people and things do not hold it. Swiss watches are famous for showing exceptionally correct time, the more correct time is, it seems, the more expensive. Time is money, time costs money – and losing it seems to be quite expensive. Administrative time-machines now keep time for us, from calendars and schedules to rosters and tally lists, online and offline. And as we are so busy making administrative time-machines, we hardly have the time to make a real one, yet the enduring wish to go forward and back in time seems hideous anyhow, as we are already so busy scheduling the future and storing heaps of data of the past. Based on this tenacious collection of data, furthermore, we seem to have become increasingly advised and suggested in a growingly prediction-driven world. Flight companies suggest to us destinations, social media forums suggest to us which friends to make and what events to attend, shopping sites suggest to us things to buy based on what one might have already bought. Wrapped in arguments of convenient serviceable speed, we can observe these systems all looking for one precious little thing – your interest. But how can one develop an interest at all if it has already been suggested. And how do we wake up from our consumptive slumber and our sleepwalking pursuit of glamorous affluence (Borgmann 2002, 9). In this way, the latent powers and increasingly more tight-knitted collusions of capitalisation and rationalisation are inscribed in the mundane material politics of everyday life, and as we produce these reasoning things, we are increasingly being reasoned – assembled and conducted, civilised and normalised (Foucault 1976, 31). In his work on reason and the rationalisation of society, Habermas, inspired by Weber, describes how the ‘substantive unity’ of reason has dissolved in modern times, and thus we can no longer simply answer questions regarding, for instance, how we should live (Habermas 1984). However, while Habermas attempts to redirect rather than abandon the overall project of the Enlightenment, despite the role that it has played in the project of rationalising society (McCarthy 1984, vi), Foucault believes

096  BORDERLINE OBJECTS

that there are other forms of reason entirely, which have been neglected in modern life. He, on the contrary, speaks of the ‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’, as it constitutes a privileged domain for analysis, and acts as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation – you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism, or you criticise the Enlightenment and then struggle to escape from its principles of rationality, achieving an actual enlightenment (Foucault 1984). Because then, he writes, one will not be reasoning only in order to use one’s reason – when one is reasoning as a reasonable being, then one will be reasoning as a member of a reasonable humanity (ibid.). But how does one step outside of this rationality, from the dungeon of rationality (the one with the treadmill, where we get dazed from running as we make and are made by our own inscribed rationality in things), where every-thing is written towards and attempts to act accordingly, for the sake of it. And now that everything is connected within this one dome of hegemonic rationality, it would appear that things begin to create politics among themselves, inscribed with and actively inscribing in our common relationships a deep and entrenched reasoning. And these are often the masses of ordinary little things, the ones that we overlook, that we do not even notice any more, which are now going entirely rational-rogue. We noticed, when we began this research project, that it was some of the simplest artefacts, right there on our doorstep, that held plenty of social power – and if we wanted to investigate reason, we had to find the traders, the middlemen of reasoning. Because as we have become administrative attachés in the ministry of materialised reason, which we have established and elected, power is not only latent, but also very material. Therefore, in order to hack one’s own social, we figured, we needed to hack some of the matter that it is made of.

Para-Sites Quite quickly, the alarm-clock became a topic, as we often used it for getting up in time, especially for a job interview or presentation, a flight or to catch a train, or as a reminder to make a phone call for a birthday. However, we also noticed that while Michelle always wants to demolish the alarm when it goes off, becoming really quite abnormally angry, I always wake up before it goes off at all, presumably in mere anticipation and dread of the happening itself. And so, the first power source was found. Furthermore, there is one light in particular that is a necessity in our household, as we basically just have one main room with one lamp, and thus this lamp is of the utmost significance. On, off, on, off. We use it according to our needs, and just for this one specific function – therefore, to disrupt it seemed to be quite consequential. Subsequently, we contemplated the topic of the infamous internet – so much activity with and through data, so much dependency, refresh-

  A STATE OF (T)REASON  097

ing emails as an unremitting transient but constant routine, booking this or that, buying this or that, searching this or that, and so very often just looking and clicking on something. One notices how seemingly dependent one is when one finds oneself in a place with bad reception, or when one does not have any at all. Disconnection, bewilderment, desolation, panic. Recently, I ordered a coffee in a café, and the bartender replied, ‘our internet is not working today – do you still want to order the coffee?’. Having internet, and having a lot of it, became a status quo. As plenty of advertising promises, a lot of data, which is tremendously fast, is freedom – although sometimes, it seems, we also experience quite the opposite. Moreover, a few years ago, we lived without any internet at home, as we were ‘connected’ in our studio, where we spent all of our working-time. When we told people, however, they seemed to always socially detonate in a ‘What?! You don’t have internet at home!?’. We shrugged mostly, as it always gave us the feeling that we had done something wrong. So, having ‘not enough’ internet seemed to be our next source. The last item that we found was the radio. I still have my grandfather’s old radio, which is very dear to me, and it works perfectly. Over the years, we have turned it on every morning, only to notice that the information is mostly the same – one could most certainly play the same file every morning and not notice, as nothing really seems to change. Or perhaps a seasonal file, as the weather sometimes does. Weather, someone has been elected somewhere, someone has been let go, a traffic jam. It made us think about what irrelevant information might actually be, and where to look for it. Because these aspects, we found, were among the most ordinary matter that enforced a field of rationality in our everyday lives – the unnoticeables. And whatever its other aspects, the everyday has its essential traits, Blanchot writes – it allows no hold – it escapes, it belongs to insignificance, the insignificant being what is without truth, without reality, and without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification (Blanchot 1993, 239–245). It consists in its strangeness, he explains, as the familiar shows itself, although already dispersing – it is the unperceived, both in the sense that we have always looked past it, nor can we easily introduce it into a whole in order to examine it. The everyday is what we can never see for the first time, but can always see again, he explains, having always already seen it by an illusion that is constitutive of the everyday. In this way, it is an inaccessible space to which we have always already had access, and it excludes the possibility of a beginning, which is the very possibility of access itself. Therefore, the idea of creation seems to be almost prohibited when it is a matter of accounting for an existence that is born out of the everyday (ibid.). And this, in turn, is the realm of power of everyday things. Things which are produced based on a lineage of hereditary meanings and functions from their thingly predecessors, which came into being in a space that is remarkably difficult to capture, as if it had no beginning, since in some form – it was always there. And this, with functions that we no longer question, since they seem so commonsensical, and everything other than novel, thus evading dispute or enquiry. These are the things that hold us under their spell of mundanity,

098  BORDERLINE OBJECTS

while acting as ministers, and making us the attachés. As they operate within a politics of scattered matter, these are powers that are covert and combined, collective and conspired, although not by a state or the industry, but by the everyday. And thus, this is why this project attempted to invert the world, at least ours, at least for a moment, in order to gain an access to a parallel site of the everyday, a para-site, one might say, within the disguise. The ‘ontological turn’ in social theory is an emergent wave involving a variety of different disciplines, that attempt to take these thoughts of contingency, flux and difference from the realm of discourse and culture, where they had been confined by postmodernism, to the realm of matter (Pellizzoni 2016, 74). Despite the criticisms of continental postmodernist philosophy that are featured prominently in this ‘material turn’, the components which are fractured and reassembled in this sense encompass the ethos of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze being prominently featured as the thinker who has promoted a decisive turn from only discussions of text and consciousness, to an ontology of ‘reality’ as constantly moving and becoming. Furthermore, the anti-humanism and vitalism of Nietzsche and Spinoza are also clearly detectable, as well as strands of Marxism, and practice-oriented approaches in the social sciences (ibid.). Escobar, Pellizzoni explains, describes the movement as a range of ‘flat alternatives’ to the dominant social theories and their underlying ontologies – flat here meant in the sense that hierarchies, identities and dualisms are replaced with fluid, contingent, emergent entities, with networks, relations, performances, materialisations, assemblages, human-nonhuman or organic-inorganic hybrids. The binary oppositions do not pre-exist, but are produced in action, he argues, space and time are no longer assumed as givens, but are regarded as resulting from relational processes (ibid., 73). Mol and Law describe this as the fact that knowing and the words of knowing do not describe pre-existing worlds as much as they are part of a practice of handling and intervening in worlds, and thereby of enacting one of its versions, bringing it into being (Mol and Law 2006, 19). Within the movement, the focus on political ontology therefore detaches itself from the task of delineating our conception of the world as such, to rather investigate the conditions of what we take to be the possibilities of it (Abbott in Pellizzoni 2016, 76). Not only do things become relevant to the social order, therefore, but they once again become becomings rather than being beings, and not least from the perspective of making them or making with them – they become shivering and jittery objects of knowledge, and they become possibilities. And furthermore, rather than the maker being a maker of things, the maker is once again put in the position of being a maker-in-the-making. It was in this sense that within this project, we chose to make ourselves part of the problem, putting ourselves on unstable ground – operating in-between the positions of being researcher and researched, and living in a ‘madhome’ with mischievous matter.

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Because a particular element can be contingently well placed in an assemblage Bennett argues, so that its power to alter the directions or functions of the whole is usually great – this is, she writes what Deleuze and Guattari would call an ‘assemblage converter’ or Michel Serres might name a ‘thermal exciter’. For Serres, in particular, this would not be a thing that makes a revolutionary transformation of the assemblage that it enters, but rather something that inclines it, irritates it, inflames it (Bennett 2010, 42). Because for Serres, objects always participate in our collectives – humanity begins with things, one can think of man universally, he writes, but this universal is empty and blank (Serres 1995, 47). Therefore, vanquishing the boundaries of subject and object in human artefact relations, even for a moment, and even with a touch of anthropomorphism, as Bennett argues, can catalyse a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings, but rather with variously composed materialities that form confederations (Bennett 2010, 99). This project, however, slightly differently from the re-formers mentioned above, engages materially in the material turn. It operated on the basis that through the construction in dialogue with things, design research could perhaps add a perplexed perspective, a fragile framing, to the current debate. As a re-moved research site, this project thereby opened up a space in a space, as it was indeed our home and our everyday life, however differently. As a para-site, it allowed for the active messing around with un/reason – figuratively and literally. As it entered into a truce with things, quite innocently breaking the ice with things, they were transformed from time watchers and enforcers of rationalisation to custodians of diligent disruptive dis/order. As a limited location, next to the pinball arcade game, we could slightly rationalise and reason, engaging in a game of ordinary chaos. Inciting incidents and coincidences to emerge as social-material happenings, bending and stretching ‘reality’, and getting to the ‘stuff’ that we tend to underestimate and overlook. And throughout this process, attempting to withdraw in intentionality and instrumentality, tampering with tinkering to redistribute power – enabling a hypothetical actuality, accessing not the near past, nor the near future, but the becoming of the ‘now’.

Para-Boxes As a rehearsed maker, how does one begin to un-practise, undo, unmake and un-intend? How does one un-assume what one assumes, not do what one would so intuitively like to just do – how does one distribute the power of making with the made, becoming, in the process, a maker-in-the-making. Something had to be bent, not just in form, but also in reason and as a reality. Therefore, the idea to invert the function of a mundane artefact, however keeping it intact, became the challenge. As we had looked around and located the power-sources in our household, we wondered

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what might happen were we to engage with these predominant objects, shifting the one element that makes them so secure of what they are, to create a little crisis of perception. Perhaps, we pondered, this could liberate things from the dungeon of rationality, and hence free us to stand outside of the circle of mundane commodified rationalisation, of predetermined meaning. In order to invert the thing, therefore, this form of provisional practice meant materialising paradoxes – designing things that inherently clash with their very own thingness, inner-logic-hacks, one might say, in order to go beyond the rationality of intent and being intended. Tampering with the thing in things that seems to make them that thing, eliciting things that even we could not foresee or imagine, and thereby exploring the potential of uncertainty and insecurity rather than seduction and motive. The idea of searching for what one is not looking for – and taking an immense interest in finding that which one is really not interested in, for instance, provided a paradoxical core for the radio. The radio in this way, actively finds itself dis-informing its listener rather than informing them. The random alarm likewise removed from the alarm its one core duty in the world, namely going off when intended, thereby detaching it from the social liability of its thingness. Likewise, the light, the dependable power source which might be the most taken-for-granted of them all, and thereby also the most reliable, usually, went on and off as it pleased. While this might seem simple, and indeed it might be, it nevertheless had the influence to utterly change the entire environment, mood and thus state of mind of its flatmates. It literally changed conversations, caused the loss of threads of thoughts, incited empathy and superstition. And the slow and limited internet, another undervalued compulsion, existed as the opposite of what it should usually aspire to, namely speed and boundless freedom. In this way, the fascination with materialising paradoxes, or seeming paradoxes, within an artefact, hastily evolved and became a guideline for making the artefacts in this study. It seemed to provide a tactic to bend mundane reality just enough to detach the artefact, from its usual rotating routines, and us from ours. As a form of ‘incommensurable things’, one could say, they existed as real and recognisable (the alarm was still an alarm, the radio still a radio), but with an inherent internal clash of logic – freeing the thing from its pre-scripted reason. Not unintelligible, but incommensurable, meant that the devices are comprehendible as what they are, yet in a sense they are not able to be judged by the same standards of their ancestors, as they stand on the borderline of rational irrationality. The trick we thought, in terms of the objective of tripping the trickster by tricking oneself, was truly not being able to know what these things would come to exist as once becoming a thing in the world, thereby eliciting a potential of uncertainty and serendipity. The tactic of materialising inherent paradoxes, an internal negation, therefore served as a possible potential to explore what new fluctuating functions and serendipitous spaces might unfold. As makers, we found ourselves acting as ad-hocologists, catching new contrivances. We wanted to make the things in a very ad-hoc manner, not engaging in

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long processes of conception and production (too much risk of intentionality and instrumentality), we wanted to make do. Therefore, we saw the emerging objects more as ‘prontotypes’ than as prototypes, as they were merely the result of a process of finding what we had available at hand, and then de- and reassembling it ‘wrongly right’. Designed with a void of meaning, we waited in suspense to see if crafting doubt might make things that doubt and bring some rewarding hesitation into our mundane everyday lives, generating hypothetical actualities of experienceable un/ reasonability. Because these things do what they usually do, they just do it on their ‘own’ terms – they shed light, they provide data, they share information, and they remind you of something. Just when, what and how exactly was put in question, resulting in the fact that the maker, rather than looking upon the made artefact, has to complete its unforeseen meaning. Because as pro-forma objects, they form a form where meaning is always still awaited. And so, we noticed that as practitioners, one does not always get so easily away with the stuff that one makes – in this case, the artefacts dragged us into the research, turning around the power relations to make us the object of research – and we had to play along. In a sense, one might say, we found ourselves being set up by our own set up. Risking being adapted, manipulated and conquered, giving up on our own predicated socials as they gave up on theirs – making mischief as and with halfwit objects. In hindsight, in fact, I would prefer to not argue the artefacts, but rather to find myself in the position of arguing on their behalf. Within the para-site therefore, one could describe this praxis as ‘para-boxing’, as the ad-hoc de- and reassembling of reason was swiftly and temporarily bethinged in a plastic box, in order to incite the emergence of doubt in all parties, as the human-nonhuman joint forces committed treason against reason.  

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THE DEFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER

Intentional Nonintentionality Within the movement of the ‘material turn’, moreover, the philosophers and sociologists have recently aligned to discuss the ‘practice turn’ (since we are anyway in the middle of a spin, I suppose). In the introduction to the book The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, Theodore Schatzki attempts to delineate the ‘project’ of practice theory, explaining how the movement attempts to investigate how, through the actions and interactions that take place within practices – mind, rationality and knowledge are constituted, and social life is organised, reproduced and transformed. These observations of ‘practices in action’ strive to reveal the character and establishment of social order, with an underlying impulse to move the involved disciplines beyond current problematic dualisms that are so deeply entrenched in them (Knorr Cetina and Schatzki 2001, 10–11). Therefore, the tacit knowledges and presuppositions that underpin actions are analysed, rather than being taken for granted. Within the movement, a fraction situated within the realm of science and technology studies has furthermore laid a focus on the aspect that the activities bound to practices also include the actions of nonhumans, such as machines and the objects of scientific investigation themselves (see for instance Pickering 1995; Knorr Cetina 1999). As a central core, Schatzki argues, practice theorists conceive of practices as materially mediated arrays of human activity. So, although most scholars would agree that generally such ‘practices’ are mediated by artefacts, hybrids and natural objects, they do not always agree on the extent to which such nonhuman others should be credited – and whether they are perhaps just intermediaries of human practices (Knorr Cetina and Schatzki 2001, 11). For Reckwitz, practice theory neither understands the social as a mental feature, nor locates it merely in discourses and interactions, but rather, it understands these practices themselves as the central location, in which the production and passing on of social and cultural meaning occurs. Besides focusing on observing material objects and technical apparatuses, their practice-theoretical analysis adds the dimension of looking closer at the bodies, spaces and routines within which the practice is realised and implemented. Therefore ‘a practice’, Reckwitz argues, is a routinised way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood (Reckwitz in Mareis 2016, 36). In the context of this ‘practice turn’, sociologist Donald Schön’s work on ‘the reflective practitioner’, Mareis argues, should be emphasised with regard to design, as it explains and draws our attention to the significance of practical, experi-

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ence-based knowledge. Based on Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowing, he brings the aspect of the implicit knowledge of practice to the foreground, accentuating a type of knowing that often manifests itself in action and doing, rather than in words – and thus Schön’s ‘process of reflection-in-action’ came to form an important theoretical groundwork for practice-based design research over the last decades (Mareis 2016, 36). In his approach to what he calls ‘the epistemology of practice’, Schön attempts to move practice from the realm of instrumental rationality and problem solving, towards the idea of reflection-in-action. Problem solving ignores the questions of the problem setting – and the puzzling and dubious situations of real-world practice. Therefore, a positivist epistemology of practice is not only troubled by uncertainty, instability and value conflicts, he argues, but practitioners bound by this epistemology find themselves caught in a dilemma – the dilemma of ‘rigour or relevance’ (Schön 1983, 49). However, there are those, he writes, who choose the swampy lowlands, deliberately submerging themselves in the messy problems, and when asked about their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition and muddling through. Within this reflecting-in-action, doing and thinking therefore become complementary. For Schön, doing extends thinking in the tests, moves and probes of experimental action, and reflection feeds on doing and its results – each feeds the other, and each sets boundaries for the other (ibid., 280). Through these ‘reflective conversations’ with design situations, designers frame and reframe problems, and thus the practitioner's effort to solve the reframed problem yields new discoveries, all of which calls for new reflection-in-action. A unique and uncertain situation therefore becomes understood through the attempt to change it, and the practitioners’ moves also produce unintended changes which give the situation new meanings. The situation talks back, he writes, and the practitioner listens, and as he (and let us add she) appreciates what (s)he hears, (s)he reframes the situation once again. Because in real-world practice, he argues, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens but must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations, which are in turn puzzling, troubling and uncertain (ibid., 40, 131–132) – building a problem from rather jittery material, one might add. Furthermore, in a keynote entitled ‘Designing as Reflective Conversation with the Materials of a Design Situation’ given at a conference on artificial intelligence in Edinburgh in 1991, Schön speaks about how designers are in transaction with a design situation, making them open to the demands and possibilities of the situation, which they in turn help to create. In this process of seeing-drawing-seeing, as he calls the conversation itself, designers have what he calls ‘a conversation with the material’ (Schön 1991, 4–6). Despite having a great respect and appreciation for the move from instrumental rationality and a ‘positivist epistemology of practice’ to reflection-in-action and entering into conversation with materials, Schön’s approach to both the maker, the material and the reflection itself could be said to still be framed within an ultimately human-centred and instrumental perspective. In an

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example of a design student reflecting-in-action, for instance, he concludes that her designing depends on her ability to make judgements about quality, what is bad and needs fixing, and what is good and should be preserved. In the absence of these judgements, he argues, her designing would have no thrust or direction, and would be entirely unmotivated (ibid., 10). Although as makers, we might indeed recognise this description very well, the words in themselves speak to the instrumental and human-centred focus – to judge, to fix, to decide and even force an intentionality upon things, to push them into a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ direction. In colloquial terms, he writes, he judges this judging situation as ‘you get what you intend, and you like what you get’ (ibid., 14). Here, I might furthermore add that it is not just that, as Schön writes, designers construct their design worlds (ibid., 22), it is moreover that the designer is constructed by and in that world too. Not just the material is jittery and in transformation during the process, the maker too is a maker-in-themaking. So, while the idea that designing is a reflective conversation with a design situation, in which the designer reframes and poses new questions, did indeed apply itself to this project – in the case of this experiment especially, one might add that the design situation sometime raises questions of its own. And it was not a question of judging, fixing or pushing the artefacts in a certain ‘good’ or ‘bad’ direction – on the contrary, in this research setting, every-body got to tip each other over and turn the situation around. Rather than having the conversation to correct unintentional or unwanted functions, it invited them. There was no intentionality, other than the intent of non-intent. In this way, what seemed to emerge from this research project was less a strategy of reflection, as it was a tactic of deflection. However, to use Schön’s terminology, it was most certainly a deflection-in-action. To deflect means to cause something to change direction, to turn aside from a straight course, and to cause someone or something to deviate from an intended purpose. It arises from the Latin ‘deflectere’, to move away from, and ‘flectere’, meaning ‘to bend’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In the setting of this experiment, which was very much about changing the course of action by changing an element that causes deviation from an intended purpose, one could say that the entire month was a process of deflecting-in-action – we deflected, they deflected, all parties seemed to be constantly busy changing the direction of happening and meaning. In this sense, the intentional nonintentionality in the project elicited a resistance towards the regime of power of the ‘usual’ materiality of the mundane, the linearity, clarity, specifics – imprisonment of things in an instrumental intentionality of meaning, usually a rational one. By now we know and can acknowledge that when we design something with a specific intention, there is a very good chance that things will distort, fight and often extend or alter those intentions and expectations. As designers we are very familiar with errors and malfunctions (it is not turning on, why does that happen – I did not program that), the limitations and life of materials (wood moves, machine learning learns, chatbots get into dubious

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conversations) or the consequences that things produce within a specific context, not least a context of other things. We also know that the ‘user’ of the artefact designs a great part of the design process, both extending and distorting the intention of things. This process in turn takes place every day and all the time with mostly every-thing, whether it occurs intentionally, such as what is observable within maker culture, the DIY movement, the rise of upcycling, or just because people like to alter things and their use of them (Lupton 2005), or unintentionally in the case of Non Intentional Design (NID), through the users’ spontaneously and undeliberate everyday re-design of the designed world (Brandes et. al. 2008; Brandes and Erlhoff 2006). So from the death of the author in 1967, proclaimed by Roland Barthes, to the lived reality of stuff, there is no reason to delude ourselves too much into thinking that imposing our own intentions on to things will result in what we expect, or what we intend. We are anyhow in a constant negotiation with materials, technologies and social assemblages. Nevertheless, the active intent of non-intent – the engagement with not wanting to impose, but only to enable, and then to enable something that induces something that we could not know, still created a process of deflecting-in-action. It provided a removed critique one might say, removed from one’s own intended statement that is, since the critique emerged rather than being scripted. And critique is not finally about reflexivity, Haraway notes, except as a means to defuse the bombs of the established orders and their self-invisible subjects and categories (Haraway 1994, 63). In the case of these artefacts, one might say, they became an active part of doing exactly that. The power of the designer was deflated by removing intentionality and instrumentality, thus destabilising the maker as a self-invincible subject, and the usually covertly scripted powers of everyday rationalisation in the artefact were defused, as they existed on the borderlines of reason as actively performing paradoxes. In this way, and through the constant process of throwing each other off course from what might have been assumed as a direction, all parties stood on uncertain ground as meaning awaited coming into being until it did – thus being able to ‘inhabit itself’ (Derrida 1978, 11). Or as Nietzsche writes, lightning can do nothing other than flash and exists only in its flashing, it is language that gives the illusion that something called lightning exists separate from the fact of its flash. But there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought, the doing is everything – people just tend to double a deed, and so when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed out of it, giving the impression that lightning is a thing and flashing merely something that it may or may not sometimes do (Nietzsche 1887, 26). In Nietzsche’s thoughts, this is an instrumental and typically human way to illusion themselves into a power over a thing, which in fact anyway only comes into being when it happens. The only way therefore, to remove oneself from this at least cultural, if not human fallacy of the will to hold power over things which is perhaps not even ours to have, was to remove oneself, quite literally from it – by sharing the process of the making of meaning and happening with things. Engaging, rather, in the curiosity of the flash. And so, from going material

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on the ‘material turn’, to going practical on the practical turn, this research project attempted to add the direct coalition with our material allies, emerging together in happenings that happened to happen, inciting, perhaps, as a flash, the start of a theoretical thunderstorm.

Artefracts In his prodigious and rather all-encompassing project The Order of Things, a book about how we came to know, and how our ways of knowing changed over time, Michel Foucault provides a comprehensive excavation of the origins of the human sciences, illustrating how certain underlying assumptions have possessed and determined what came to be acceptable as, among other things, scientific discourse (Foucault 1970). However, before the colossal history of the terms of humanities coming to knowing at all, he opens the preface with an anecdote, in which he was shattered in laughter as he read a passage by Jorge Luis Borges. All of the familiar landmarks of his thought, he writes, and of our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our time and place, were broken up – as all the ordered surfaces and planes with which we tame the wild plethora of existing things, along with our outdated distinction between the same and the other, collapsed. And out of this passage of bizarre reordering arose his book (ibid., xvi). The passage quotes a Chinese encyclopaedia, which divides animals into ‘(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’ (ibid., xvii). In the wonderment of this taxonomy, he continues, the thing that we apprehend in one great leap, by means of the fable, is the exotic charm of another system of thought, as well as the limitation of our own. Because each of these categories can be assigned with a precise meaning and a demonstrable content. Moreover though, while some of the categories do certainly involve fantastic entities, they are put into categories of their own. The encyclopaedia, he argues, localises their powers of ‘contagion’, and so it meticulously differentiates between the very real animals (those that are frenzied or have just broken the water pitcher) and those that reside only in the imaginary. Thereby we see a clear tendency of humanity, namely, to make sure that the possibility of dangerous mixtures has been exorcised. The monstrosity therefore (and his shattering laughter, I assume), lies in the blank spaces separating the entities from one another (ibid., xvii). It is not the ‘fabulous’ animals that are impossible, he writes, but the narrowness of the distance separating them from and juxtaposing them with the stray dogs or the animals that from a long way off look like flies. Therefore, what transgresses the boundaries of all possible thought for Foucault,

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is merely that the alphabetical listing – the a, b, c, d – links each of those categories to all the others with an order of things. Therefore, he uses the encyclopaedia to demonstrate that order is both that which is given to things as their ‘inner law’, the covert network that determines the way that they relate to each other; and that which has no existence except in the grid created between them, manifesting itself only in the blank spaces as if it was always there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression. And this forms the fundamental codes of culture (ibid., xxi). The codes, and the blank spaces that they lean on, are invented, are made, are fabricated as objective distinctions. In the case of objects, like animals, they grant them their role, and in our culture particularly, their inanimate objectivity. However, seeing as things are in fact made up of jittery material that rest on instable categories formed by bendable blank spaces, perhaps it is high time to fracture that objectivity, turning the arte-fact into an ‘artefract’. Because post-anthropocentrism, posthumanism, feminism and decolonialism, among others, have long discussed the need to fracture subjectivities, in order to open up the categories that our conceptions of the human subject rest on, relocating diversity and multiplicity at the core of the concept. They have done this in an attempt to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between ontological dualisms, such as the object and the subject, the organic and the artificial, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal. In the case of the subject, this is often argued due to the Eurocentric and heteronormative basis on which the idea lies, making it necessary to de-assemble the basic unit of reference for what counts as ‘human’ at all (Braidotti 2013, 15, 97). So, who is there to defend the thing, one might wonder, as it is placed in bizarre taxonomies and listed with outlandish blank spaces – and in the process of freeing the thing out of the order of things, perhaps it would also not hurt us humans to dissolve the illusion of classifications – objecting to the objectivity of an object. The (now) artefracts developed in this experiment do not fit well into existing taxonomies, and they would have a difficult time finding their home in the Chinese encyclopaedia. They are very real, and then not at all – they would perhaps lie in between (e), rather (f), kind of (g), slightly (i), definite (l), with a fair chance of (m) and a probable (n), at least from a far distance. They are indeed mischievous misfits. In a form of mundane mimicry, these objects are look- and act-a-likes. They are made up of the materials that made up their predecessors – usual several things that were disassembled to transform into working parts for a new ambiguous species of thing. They were then placed on the spot where their ancestor-objects stood, the radio in the kitchen on that shelf, the alarm to the left of the bed and so on, in this way replacing a former normality within the everyday. They were the object that they represent, yet something had been opened at their core – it was an alarm, it sounded like one, we knew that it would go off at some point, and so it did alarm us, although not on usual terms. It alarmed us for no reason, the radio informed us without reason, the light turned on and off for no reason, and the internet was lim-

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ited, really for no reasonable reason. Rooted in a paradoxical heritage, these objects are partitioned in sense – they are dis/functional and produce un/expectancy. Furthermore, due to their existing out of parts of other things, they have no particular heritage, and and are perhaps therefore beyond predetermined dispositions – they were made in Taiwan, China and Sweden, and remade in Berlin. Moreover, being semi-scripted and left largely up to chance, these objects have no particular scripted sense, and in fact also do not know what they do does. The light for instance, an object that we had taken very much for granted until now, opened up a strange space for odd happenings, which honestly seemed quite commonsensical at that moment, as we made up the sense as we went along. It prompted the practice of new habits, such as turning things around three times, or even the development of new empathies, resulting in a moment of silence for people who suffer from algebra or people who missed their train. Minor concerns transformed into major ones and the other way around – and this too, is hardly an objective function of a thing. In this sense, one might say, these mundane look- and act-alike artefracts were rather extra-ordinary. On the muddy middle-ground of the material and the social, social-material and material-socials appeared, as giving up power to the fractured object in this way exposed things that are personal, intimate and confronting, resulting in things that we could not have foreseen. As un-determined objects, something between a process materialising and material enabling a process emerged. And in this becoming with socially-open-material, both the objectivity of the object and the subjectivity of the subject (researchers) was fractured. In this sense the ‘design’ in the project lay mostly in the happening as happening, designing an undefined framework that emerges and changes with you as you enter into a deep negotiation with material powers. In this way, one could say, the making in this study was more a concern with toying with and dismantling the objectivity and reason of the existing, rearranging realities and fracturing things to form a kind of ‘antifact’, and perhaps even ‘antimatter’. Because antimatter consists of the same type of particles as ‘normal’ matter, it is just antithetically charged – they are the same, but reversed. The types of particles responsible for electricity, for instance, electrons, have a negative charge – the antimatter counterparts are known as positrons, and these are identical in every way except for the fact that they are positively charged (Naeye 2008). So, while ‘anti’ provides us with a certain sense of disapproval of the existing – anti meaning the being opposed to something, coming from the Greek ‘against’, it seems that antimatter can still be positively charged – and that seems to provide the paradoxical terms for a hopeful disorder of the order of things.

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Antiheroes This disorder will not be performed by ‘heroes’, however, but rather by ‘anti-heroes’. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau dedicates his book to a common hero, a ubiquitous character that walks the streets in countless thousands, an anonymous actor. As he turns towards ‘the chorus of secondary characters’, he locates his hero, who is the murmuring voice of societies, who does not expect representation, and who squats at the centre of our scientific stages (Certeau 1984, vi). Drawing on polish author Witold Gombrowicz, he introduces to us the antihero who haunts our research, the voice of the small-time official, similarly to Musil’s ‘man without qualities’ or Freud’s ‘ordinary man’. For Certeau, this is a man (let us assume also woman and children) that results from an anthill society that began with the masses that were subjected to the framework of levelling rationalities, the managers who were in charge of the apparatus that were then absorbed into the systems that they administered, to finally invade even men of letters and artists. This man is called everyman, he writes, a name that betrays the absence of a name, this antihero is thus also nobody, nemo, he is always the other. Nevertheless, he still laughs, and in this respect, he is wise and mad, lucid and ridiculous (ibid., 1–2). Through this anonymity, however, arises the revolutionary, who uses tactics to reclaim autonomy from the pervasive powers of commerce, of politics and of culture – an ordinary anti-hero subverting, bending and manipulating the larger forces that surround him. The artefacts in this study seemed to appear as a series of small and extra-ordinary antiheroes, as they emerged to oppose the most concealed ordinary of the disguised everyday (Blanchot 1993) – using tactics of paradox, inherent clashes of logic and sometimes critical confusion to counter being levelled by rationality and being captured in the role of being reproducers of reason. Another case of an antihero, one that is even more ambiguous than Certeau’s ordinary man, as he, like the protagonists of our story, struggles more between reality and fiction, is Don Quixote. However, even better perhaps, and even more ‘ordinary’, is his horse Rocinante. In The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, Cervantes writes that Don Quixote spent four days thinking about what name to give to his horse, because it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous and with such merits, should be without some distinctive name. It was only reasonable that he should take a distinguished and full-sounding new name, as his master took on a new character, befitting the new order and calling that he was about to follow. He strove to find a name that would indicate that the horse had already before belonged to a knight-errant – and after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names, he decided to call him ‘Rocinante’. A name, to Quixote’s thinking, that was lofty and resonant of his condition as a hack ‘before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world’ (Cervantes 1615/2003, 30). Hack in this sense, translated in Spanish, also meaning an ordinary work-horse, and hence the classical ambiguity of Cer-

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vantes makes Rocinante knightly in an exceptionally ordinary way – a chivalrous worn-out work-horse. In physique, temperament and perhaps even in spirit, Rocinante parallels his master in most respects, as he is a horse unequal to the chivalric task ahead of him – he stumbles in battle, gets restless by the sight of females, and his blatant carnal excesses are a source of embarrassment and aggravation to his master who strives endlessly to hold the reins on his own animal (Cull 1990, 46). As kindred spirits with Rocinante, one might say, the objects emerging from this study were similarly hacks, both literally, in the sense of being cultural hacks, but also in the sense of being what they in fact in a distorted form were – an alarm, for instance, is also not much more than a chivalrous worn-out work-horse. And as they valiantly attempted to fight against the covert powers of ordinary rationalisation and reason, they occurred, not entirely sure of themselves, and this seems to count for all parties in the experiment, what was real and what was fiction – simply written and made to be there as the story unfolded. They did not try to be heroes – be better, faster, shinier, smarter or more sellable. Rather, they just did their thing, hobbling along, stumbling in battle, assembled from old artifice, without a plot and plan, performing marginal magic as imperfect antiheroes. In the same way, the maker in this study did not strive towards an aim either (and they also seemed to hobble and stumble), there was no intent of making the next great form or technology, but rather an attempt to retrieve power and purpose, allowing things to occur. There was also no process of judgement or coercion of the things, working on the prototypes until they were ‘perfect’ or even ‘good enough’. We did not seek out special materials or go out of our way to construct a novel form – we just attempted to bring them into being, to give them life to act as they would, however they would, and this with the most ordinary low-tech bits and pieces that we had lying around. And perhaps most importantly, we strove more towards making experienceable the happening of the happening, in order to listen to what it might become, hoping that ‘our work would take us by surprise and tell us what we did’. In this sense, the figuration of an antihero is concocted in an attempt to lay emphasis on the aspect of the humble and ordinary, the imperfect and perhaps even unqualified, because the antihero is a persevering apprentice. And this, in turn, might be acutely important if one finds oneself in a crisis of making and being made. It is human nature to believe that anything that seems possible should therefore be tried, Sennett writes, and materially, humans have proven themselves to be skilled makers of a place for themselves in the world – however, Pandora hovers over this story in objects, rituals and in the Earth itself (Sennett 2008, 2,13). Because we can now increasingly witness the results of a novel thrust towards the mastery of everything including nature, Pellizzoni argues – a mastery based not on control over an ontologically separate and stable reality, but on the blurring of matter and cognition on a single plane of inherent and unpredictable assemblages. And at this moment when any distinction between being, knowing and

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making is eliminated, human agency coincides with pure will, he writes, as distinguishing between ‘independent’ and ‘manufactured’ reality loses sense (Pellizzoni 2015, 129–130). This ontological fluidity moreover, enables a relentless remoulding of the human agent together with its task environment, as homo faber is replaced by a figure that resembles the homo creator described by Günther Anders as a living being capable of generating products that do not belong to culture but to nature itself, overcoming any essentialism by means of the unconstrained expansion of a will to creative will (ibid.). In a diary note made by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos project, he reassured himself by asserting ‘when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb’ (Oppenheimer in Sennett 2008, 2). And in a reflection on Oppenheimer’s own regret of having created the atomic bomb, Sennett in turn describes how ‘the creator’s works become the public’s problem’ (ibid., 4). In a sense, the atomic bomb is a rather more drastic example of what happens unceasingly at a more ordinary level, in what Pellizzoni calls the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’, the thrust towards further appropriation and commodification of every-thing, including the biophysical world. The task, he claims, therefore becomes to deconstruct the divide between knowledge and life, as language and things are manifestations of an indefinitely varying materiality, made in an endless dance of encounters and transformations, that are ultimately unharnessable as power. Unfortunately, he adds, this is a rather slippery task, as the same approach also characterises the neoliberal rationality of government, that ends in the overcoming of any distinction between will and reality, being, knowing and making, exactly as a way to expand the appropriation, commodification and capitalization of everything (Pellizzoni 2015, 129–130). Thereby, it is not an easy task, it seems, as by dissolving all borders (the task of both the material and the practice turn), we might suddenly find ourselves building the pillars of the temple of commodification, bolstering up a liberalist inventionist will to will. This will to power, as Nietzsche contemplated it, is the fundamental component of the human, as everything that we make and do is an expression of it, and thereby all human action is accentuated by self-overcoming and self-enhancement (Nietzsche 1883/2006). And moreover, in the context of making and to turn briefly from the atomic bomb to the artwork, on what terms was this maker made who is so driven by will and mastery. Because as Pierre Bourdieu emphasises in the context of his discussion on the ‘charismatic ideology of creation’, this ideology often directs our gazes towards the apparent producer (the ‘guy’ who made it), preventing us from asking who has created this ‘creator’ and the magic power of ‘transubstantiation’ with which the ‘creator’ is endowed (the context and discourse which created him, and in which he creates) (Bourdieu 1995, 167). Now, obviously the collision of the will to will with the thrust towards human mastery of every-thing, and even Pandora hovering over us, is not something that can be quickly solved in this essay, not least as it comes towards its end. The drama

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outlined above is rather more to delineate the dangers of mastery, not least from a perspective of the maker, in a plea to return to perpetual apprenticeship. Because it seems to me that while the master attempts to master, the apprentice still strives to learn. As a noun, a master means everything from a man who has servants or slaves, a male head of a household, the owner of a domesticated animal, the captain of a merchant ship, a skilled practitioner of a particular art, and a machine or device directly controlling another. As an adjective it means having or showing proficiency, and as a verb it denotes the acquiring of complete knowledge and the gain of control (Oxford English Dictionary). The apprentice on the other hand is described as a person who is learning (notice, the apprentice is somehow no longer just male), and a beginner (ibid.). Taking into consideration where mastery has got us – from slavery and domestication, to proficiency, striving for complete knowledge and aspiration of control, it might be time to return to laying emphasis on once again being a ‘beginner’. So, from the will to will and the having to have, perhaps it is time to change the direction, to alter the course of action, perhaps even constantly as deflective practitioners – and rather than pressing forward to power to power, to align with things to produce un/reasonable doubt.  

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UN/REASONABLE DOUBT

Apprehended Apprentice Perhaps we must call for a return to apprenticeship, deflating the designer, distributing power among the maker-and-made-in-the-making to becoming ad-hocologists designing paradoxical precarity as a treason to pre-assumed reason and being reasoned. Designing disorderly design with things to counter the categories in ‘the order of things’, making mischief with matter to incite antimatter. The humility of the apprentice thereby lies in the post-anthropocentrism, which can consequently be seen as a deconstructive move towards species supremacy, and as Braidotti argues, also as inflicting a blow to any lingering notion of anthropos as categorically distinct from the life of nonhuman others. What comes to the fore instead, she writes, is a continuum in the very embodied structure of the extended self, a shift that can be seen as a sort of exodus from the dominant configurations of the human as the king of creation – a colossal hybridisation of the species (Braidotti 2013, 65). In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt makes a distinction between homo faber (‘man as maker’) and animal laborans (human being akin to burden and condemned to routine). She draws an image of the animal laborans by imagining him or her absorbed in a task that shuts out the world, being in a state well exemplified by Oppenheimer’s feeling that the atomic bomb was a ‘sweet’ problem – in the act of making it work, nothing else matters, the work becomes an end in itself (Sennett 2008, 6). The homo faber on the other hand is her image of men and women doing another kind of work that makes a life in common and is the judge of material labour and practice – thus not animal laborans’ colleague, but his superior. In her view therefore, human beings live in two dimensions, namely the one where we make things in a condition of amoral absorption, and in the other higher way of life we stop producing and start discussing and judging together – the animal laborans is fixated on the question ‘how?’ while the homo faber asks ‘why?’ (ibid., 6–7). Sennett, however, affectionately opposes his teacher, Arendt, by raising the question of whether this particular division might be false, belittling the practical wo/man at work, who is indeed capable of thinking and discussing, not least with materials. It is not that the mind engages once the labour is done, he argues, but that making is a form of thinking too. Moreover, as he argues, social and political thought have too long discounted both the practice of making and the thing in itself – we must ask, though the answers are anything but simple, what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves, thus learning from things. In this way, the animal laborans might serve as homo faber’s guide (ibid., 7–8). And this, in turn, brings us back to the apprehended apprentice – because this is not an apprentice

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who is trying to learn from a master, nor to become one, it is an apprentice who is moving from master back to becoming apprentice in order to learn from and with things. It is, in this sense, an apprentice attempting to master apprenticeship. The word ‘apprehended’ has several meanings, two of which include to understand or perceive something, and to anticipate something with a certain uneasiness (Oxford English Dictionary). The aspect of understanding something is an important element of apprehension, as it opens up a question of finding new ways for the now master-turned-apprentice to comprehend differently, not having ‘complete knowledge’, technical proficiency or an aspiration of control to fall back on – thus beginning to listen to and learn from things. And the element of anticipating something with a certain uneasiness is vital, as it means making sure not to be too sure, hesitating, and in constant un/reasonable doubt. Because unlike in Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Goethe 1798), there will be no master who can return to clean up the mess that we made, and so we must learn to confront and live with the spirits that we call.

Borderline Objects These experiments seemed to unfold a strange uproar against the politics that was hidden in our household – in the disguise of the everyday. All of those objects that we have long been surrounded by, that we simply applied and consumed according to our needs, reasoning and being reasoned. These little ad-hoc hacks of such ordinary things helped us to form a ‘treason against reason’, a ramble towards our own rational routine and administrative asserted assumptions, to temper with time-loss and reanimate reasoning, in favour of a serendipitous alliance. These artefracts acted out and opposed what the industry had originally intended them to do, casting a daily doubt that opened up new concepts for theoretical reflection. And so, we continued with a confident doubt, acting out the research together with the artefacts, forming a mutiny of the mundane, tempering with intent and reasoning with the rational. This raised a question about knowing and not knowing, one might say, and especially not knowing one’s jittery object of research, as it constantly emerged in practice. Sociologist Knorr Cetina introduces the expression of ‘knowledge culture’ in order to draw attention to the concrete practices of knowledge production, the culture in which it takes place and the culture that it produces (Knorr Cetina 2002 in Mareis 2016, 37). In this context, she introduces the idea of the ‘epistemic object’ as a knowledge object, which differs from commodities, instruments and everyday things, as it is defined by a lack of completeness of being, in a nonidentity with itself. The lack of completeness of being of knowledge objects, she writes, goes hand in hand with the dynamism of research itself, because only incomplete

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objects pose further questions, and only in considering objects as incomplete do scientists move forward with their work (Knorr Cetina et al. 2001, 185). Now, as a science and technologist scholar, she is not referring to the type of ‘object’ that I am referring to – yet her point of incompletion and nonidentity emerging in the dynamism of the research itself, raising new questions due to the instability of both the research object and the researcher him or herself, does fit astoundingly well. It also allows us to think further about the jittery matter not just as an uneasy element with which the ‘reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation’ takes place (Schön 1991), but furthermore as an object of knowledge – in some form. Which brings us back to opposing the objectivity of the object, in this context. In delineating the struggle against objectivity in science, Donna Haraway furthermore describes a fight which might have turned out to be more of a fight for the sake of the fight in feminist deconstructive sciences. She outlines the many failed and desperate attempts to deconstruct the truth claims by hostile sciences, tearing apart the radical historical specificity and every layer of the onion of scientific and technological construction. This, she claims, ended up providing a kind of epistemological electroshock therapy which, rather than ushering the feminists into the high-stake tables of the game of contesting public truth, left them lying on the table with a self-induced multiple personality disorder. They are just texts anyway, she writes, let the boys have them (Haraway 1988, 578). Rather than climbing a greased pole leading to a usable doctrine of objectivity, she solves herself from the predicament by suggesting a successor science project, which insists on irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of ‘local knowledges’ – entering deeply into the necessary paradoxes and contradictions to create a network of connections of situated knowledges (ibid., 579–580). Throughout the fields of meaning that constitute science, she argues, one of the commonalities concerns the status of any object of research. No matter how complex and contradictory these research worlds may be – the object of knowledge under observation is not a passive or lifeless thing, and therefore it should not simply be turned into a resource, becoming only matter for the act of the knower (ibid., 591–592). Rather, she claims, situated knowledges require that the objects of research and of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or ground – not as a slave to the master knower and his authorship of objective knowledge (ibid., 592). This is the coyote trickster object, which suggests that we give up mastery but keep searching for commitment, making space for surprises and ironies at the heart of knowledge production, since we are not in charge of the world (ibid., 593–594). Once again, Haraway is not speaking of the same type of object of research as in this project, at least on the focus that I am trying to get to, she exemplifies her thoughts of the object of research of ‘sex’. But again, her description of the trickster object, which is no longer a slave to a master knower (or maker, I would add) or authorship, is more than well-suited to this situation. Because, one could say, or so I believe, that this study incited what one could term ‘borderline objects’, and this in

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an array of ways. First of all, in terms of blurring the object and subject positions in human-artefact relationships, to get back to the rather ‘open’ or abstract research question that this project built on – it seems that we are artefacts shifted between becoming the object as well as the subject of research. The things lured, maybe even dragged us into our own research problem and inquiry, not only because they were hindering us and our everyday life as the obstacles that objects are (Flusser 1999, 59), but also because of their dependency on us reacting to them, without which they would not have been able to live out, to become some-thing. In this way, through our responsibility towards our own inventions, perhaps, and the spirits that we called when we put mis-spelled spells on things (Goethe 1798), we ended up emerging as the social and physical embodiment of these spells. It became unclear at times who was actually under investigation, and who was asking the questions, making both us and the artefacts stand on the borderline of being object and subject of research. We became the investigation. Moreover, these para-boxes enabled the emergence of para-sites, and thereby they found themselves on a borderline between empirical reality and the hypothetical, the things did function, and it felt real, but the situation was of course a fabricated thinking experiment in itself. And as jittery matter acting out as disoriented coyote-tricksters, they surfaced as a form of investigative, active, hesitative matter, deflecting the entire situation, constantly. It is in this way that one could see these things as borderline-objects, but perhaps also as borderline-objects-of-research – as they turn the research back onto you. And maybe even as borderline-objects-of-knowledge – inducing an access to knowledge that could otherwise perhaps not have been accessed and producing a culture in which it can occur, as well as creating an argument for un/reasonable doubt over falsifiability. And as the history of science and thought gives pride of place to mathematics, cosmology and physics, Foucault writes – noble sciences, rigorous sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy – one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted construction of answers of ‘truth’ and ‘pure reason’ (Foucault 1970, foreword). But as we have been overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age (Arendt 1958, 6) – perhaps we should engage willingly with and submerge utterly into a conversation with unknowability.

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Rapid Protopeople Michelle Christensen

ONTOLOGICAL CABARET

I Do Therefore I Am As we act in coalition with swarms of ordinary things in the daily routines of social life, it seems that we are increasingly en/acting the everyday in accordance with the most appropriate settings and the most suitable suggestions – all coherently aspired to in things targeted towards the tracked and traced ‘consumer’. What Karl Marx alerted us to in his theory of ‘commodity fetishism’ – that not only are products designed to fulfil certain tasks, but employees are designed to fulfil them too, resulting in a definite social relationship of production (Marx 1859/1976, 983) – might have indeed moved steadily out of the factory and into the employment of mundane everyday life. And not only are artefacts scripted to unwittingly uphold the rationality of the ‘common regular’ – that which is discerned as relevant information and proper conduct (Foucault 1976, 31) – but through our interactions with things and thus the networks of standards that shape our lives, we too become scripted towards doing so. The fate of our times, as Max Weber notably argued, is characterised by a deep rationalisation and ‘disenchantment of the world’. He depicted how new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of functionally intermeshing systems of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understood this process as an institutionalisation of rational action, implemented to the degree that everyday life was thoroughly permeated by cultural and societal rationalisation (Habermas 2003, 2). He critiqued the dehumanising of individuals to merely being ‘cogs in the machine’, as they became entrapped in the iron cage of rationality (Wagner 1998, 237). This relationship between rationalisation and excesses of power is evident, Michel Foucault argues, and we should not have needed to wait for bureaucracy to recognise the existence of such relations. This rational disciplining is a mechanism of power that regulates the thought and behaviour of social actors through subtle means, he contends, as it works by organising everyday life activities and routines (Foucault 1983, 209). It is in this latent and mundane way that the rationalised human created increasingly rationalised systems and things, establishing a deeply rational network – and in times of self-quantification and the ‘Internet of Things’, not least a rational network of rational things. As Jean Baudrillard puts it, ‘Man used to force his rhythm onto the objects, today however, it is the objects in their continuous movement, with their disordered appearance, their pressure and replacement, their constant impermanence, which force their rhythm onto man’ (Jean Baudrillard 1991 in Brandes et al. 2008, 9). When Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno termed their

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concept of the ‘Culture Industry’, they depicted how mass communication was used to manipulate mass society into passivity, arguing the Enlightenment as a mass deception striving towards totality, certainty and an increasing instrumentalisation of reason. Consequently, they contended that technical rationality today is the rationality of domination – it is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 97). Might Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘dark side of the Enlightenment’ be further recognisable in a kindred complexity of ‘the dark side of the entanglement’, one might wonder? In his book Radical Technologies. The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield argues how from wearable biometrics, to smart-homes and smart-cities, information processing has colonised everyday life with distinct ambitions being served wherever this technology appears. There is, he argues, a clear philosophical position, or even worldview, behind all of these developments, namely that the world in principle is perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable and their relations capable of being encoded in a system without bias or distortion (Greenfield 2017). If one takes the Internet of Things as an example, three important dimensions of this omnipresent tendency with its latent powers to regulate and rationalise, I would argue, would include its size, range and ability to infiltrate the ordinary. As minuscule as chips and sensors have become, they can be, and are, integrated into virtually every analogue object that can be imagined, from fridges to bridges and from birth control to traffic control. This in turn means that they are increasingly consolidated literally in the fabric of our everyday lives, meanwhile, the wine glass can still be used to drink from and the car is still meant for being driven. So often, the main function of the artefact does not change, and it remains recognisable in itself. However, as these technologies are embedded at every level of our built society, in their incredibly powerful suggestive manners, shadowing our every move, they are actively applying rational algorithms to our lives. This is not a criticism of algorithms, nor of technological innovation or digitalisation, I would add here, as much as it is an opposition to the rationality that is most often being applied as algorithms increasingly become ‘principles of authority’ (Striphas 2015). Because if we are being read and deciphered – and based on this our actions are being mentored and guided – then are we stuck not just in a societal rationalisation, but in a circle of re-becoming, of becoming-same, of redoing ourselves. Are we not witnessing a growing embargo on coincidence, serendipity, ambiguity and uncertainty, as the individual and society are re-created based on what they supposedly already are and already do? Are we not re-establishing our uniform habits and biased constructions (gender, race, class, the list is long) in things connected to systems connected to networks connected back to becoming subjects (or subjected to)? What wheel, one might wonder, did we set into a spin here, and when might we get dizzy from whirling homogeneity. This wheel of re-production, which is hastily spinning on within the circle of rationalising and being rationalised by things, seems to be fuelled by ceaseless in-

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ventions. We have to move beyond the way that scientific techno-rationalism is constituting the subject as ‘user’, Tony Fry argues, that is, as self-subordinated beings who are being used by technology to complete its functional ‘needs’. These are, he claims, ‘subjects who in their objectification are no longer subject’ and who have become designed in their instrumentalised actions (Fry 2012, 167). So rather than acting as ‘masters of our own creations’, we might contend to the fact that we find ourselves bargaining with them in an attempt to manoeuvre it all in the general direction of our transitory goals. As we increasingly become programmed, designed and connected into rational algorithmic systems, we seem to be plunged between pertinent actions, phantom dependencies and placebo use – are we perhaps becoming the extension of the artefacts body, one might wonder, a human prosthetic? Thus, rationalisation seems to have shifted from the massive magnitude of Max Weber’s ‘bureaucratisation of the state’, to the ubiquitous distributed scale of the mundane ‘quantification of everyday life’, where artefacts are prescribed to help to produce the anticipated socials for their human comrades (Lupton 2016). And so, one might ask, in Weber’s words, ‘How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of “individual” freedom of movement in any sense given this all-powerful trend?’ (Weber 1918/1994, 159). It is in the context of this concern, therefore, that the first experiment in this research project explored the question of what might happen if things were to act on indeterminate terms – not being based on producing rationality and sense. What might it mean to be exposed to irrelevant information, alarmed for no reason, distracted and misled – can we still handle insignificance, can we cope with ambivalence? In an attempt to design non-intentionality into things, therefore, the study explored the potential of applied ‘autonomy’, and the promises of a slightly less rational ordinary mundane everyday life.

Political Parody And so, in a wrestle against rationalisation and an attempt to temporarily re-enchant our own world, we instigated a project, which emerged over the period of one month to be quite the ‘ontological cabaret’. As an ad-hoc low-tech travesty of a knotted hightech conundrum, this slightly bizarre design-sociological experiment was constructed in order to open up a more radical practical and theoretical possibility space. As a kind of parody of everyday life, this temporary endeavour enabled a parallel realm of action, almost as a persiflage of mundane reality. In a world of suggestions, of ‘if you like this, you might also like this’, we could engage with what wasn’t trending, we could submerge into odd household politics, and we could experience the usual unusual. As the legendary ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ provided a protected space for experimenting with the edge of reason in 1916 (Ghanem 2005), this framework turned our household into a space for frivolous rituals (such as ‘turning Michelle

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three times’), slightly absurd happenings (clustering your spam or reading fifty pages of blind text), and un-called-for acts (such as waiting at the tax office contemplating a trivial question). The character of an alarm, for instance, is to trigger you to action, but the alarm used within this project triggers you to action on different terms, namely, it triggers you to some action for some reason, putting reason back into your hands. Instead of creating order, it creates the potential of disorder, and instead of holding you to the codes of conduct, it defies the logic on which the codes themselves rest. Furthermore, the alarm, as simple as it is, raised the rare and valuable aspect of doing something ‘not because you have to’, while simultaneously engendering the feeling of being called to action, and thereby of taking the chance of taking a chance to do something. In this way, it allowed the pre- and often self-programmed human to malfunction in the wheel of rationality, as one finds oneself living on un/ certain time. Taking this chance of engaging with mundane absurdity, of doing something with that randomly produced time – whether it was actively wasting our time, taking our time, or bending our relationship to time by doing the opposite of what we usually would do at that time, the engagement with the device displayed the despair of not wanting to miss a chance to take one. At times, it even allowed us the feeling that we had ‘cheated fate’ – in the most bizarrely ordinary way – as we tricked ourselves out of our own routines, provoking situations where one could move beyond the aspect of self-policing to self-defiance. As with all of the devices within this overall experiment, the struggle to make some sense of sense out of the contraption unfolded as a process. For instance, the first alarm on the first day went off at 04:35 in the morning, at which time (literally and figuratively) the only thing we could come up with was simply business as usual. We showered, got ready and went to our studio – we went to work. Usually – usually here being five hours later – a day would continue with us checking our emails and reacting to them, usually in a rather stressed manner. ‘If you answer this, I’ll answer that’, ‘Did you already solve that, or can you please just call them, it is faster?’, ‘Typical, I just knew that this would boomerang back!’, and so rather than acting, we usually found ourselves reacting, to whatever happened wherever with whomever. This time, however, there were no pressing emails, and thus, there was nothing to react to. The stage was set, the props were arranged, the suspense was high as everyone was waiting to see what would now possibly happen – and we sat there as two awkward improv-actors not entirely sure what to say. And that is when it happened – the diminutive moment, the seemingly peripheral instance where it all started unfolding, the act. This is the moment where we gave ourselves over to mundane absurdity, deciding to act with the things that we had made, without questioning them. The split second where we realised that it could indeed be that making and living with the slightly-off ordinary would either surface critical insights and astounding epiphanies or end up being an awfully rated, badly attended play. We chose to make make-believe, while the show was on.

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And so, this was when we decided to engage with the emails that were in our mailboxes, the ones that are usually automatically deleted, the pariahs of inbox politics, the spam. Clustering the spam, which was a slightly unsettling yet quite recommendable activity, would one find oneself sleepless at 04:35 in the morning, we realised how we were being deciphered and discerned. Taking the offers seriously for a moment, our algorithmically kindred selves were revealed – based on an interpretation of some truth, say what we had searched, yet mashed with alternative agendas, such as commerce or Russian phishing. And so, we conceived of who we might also be – unveiling our slightly distorted quantified selves. Based on this episode, we continued to engage with the moments that occurred, taking the chance to malfunction, be out of order, to commit ourselves willingly to a game of time, of being called to action, of some sort, for the sake of it. In this way, each artefact emerged with its own way of setting ripples in motion and affecting the often rather automated social practices of the ‘user’ in everyday life. The radio for instance was based on listening to the most unrelated and least interesting information that we could imagine. Every morning at 08:30, we found ourselves dis-placed in a random sub-culture, being exposed to people who were tremendously excited to share the exhilarating trends and essential questions behind using the right lines for fly-fishing, really understanding the concepts behind crochet, or something about vitamin B being found in membranes. And so, being captured by their enthusiasm, which was usually accompanied by exhilarating music and well-crafted claims, yet on the edge of understanding, we attempted to adapt and integrate. Somewhere between awe and disquietude, the space briefly transformed from the small flat to a crochet club somewhere outside Essex or a Texan court martial, sometimes raising a feeling of eavesdropping as we stepped uninvited into situations and subcultures and were allowed to listen in. The many codes and dialects that we were confronted with in these cultures quickly became contagious, and so we began to pick up the words and speak ‘Canadian-trucker’ or ‘fiscal’ to each other in everyday life. As we picked up bits and pieces, we began to translate them (mostly symbolically), and so ‘slow growing currencies’ related to our research results, and ‘Hello – the fad is minutes away from Wednesday!’ and ‘inflation in close to seconds!’ were used as warnings in times of deadlines. Innocently, yet not uninterestingly, it seemed that we had been acquainted with significantly subcultural dialects, gained knowledge that we had not looked for, found answers to questions that we did not ask – found what we were not looking for. This, of course, was information that we would never have been profiled or ‘targeted’ for, and thus we had been exposed to ir/relevant information that was not intended for us in a strategically, overtly intentional and highly rationally categorised world. Almost as a piece that ran for four weeks, and often unfolding as ‘sketches’ between all the involved parties, the artefacts enabled the engagement with an open script. As a mundane and ongoing improvisation, what started with a certain degree

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of stage fright turned into every-body extemporising their characters in an open adlib performance. For one month we were filled with eager anticipation for the happening of the happenings, or one might say, the waiting for fortuity, as we always knew that something would happen, we just did not know either the when or the what. As the experiment unfolded, new tics and habits arose based on these coincidences and curious new functions. Be it entering into a crisis-negotiation situation because of the data inflation which hit the household, developing a slight case of obsessive compulsive disorder to turn something around three times any time any light went on, or acting for the sake of ‘something’ because of the alarm – there was a feeling of being provoked to freedom, having to let go and just not be in control. By being helpfully undisciplined in everyday life, trying to hack our own normality, inversing our own scheduling and routine, doing things wrong in the right way and fighting to gain an access to un-reason, we were able to experience the extra-ordinary. Suddenly, as we entered into this irrational green-zone with the most mundane things, concealed powers were made tangible and unnoticed things re-relevant, and we had a chance to act out who we could also, or perhaps might also be, with a certain degree of uncertainty. An interesting moment in the experiment was the decision of when to stop, as being teased and thrown off had transpired to be the new un/ordinary. Therefore, we actually really missed the artefacts once we had taken them down and packed them away again, and they once again turned into raw material, into forgotten paraphernalia. The experiment provided an interlude in the otherwise rationally driven consumption and production of everyday life – an intervening period of time, an intermission to recess and respite. Simultaneously though, we did think that perhaps it would be better for everyone.

Surrogate Social In this way, one could say that in this research setting, we ‘en/acted an alternative social’ – a real fake. The artefacts infiltrated the most ordinary of things, however, worked on inverted terms, they were, in a sense, lookalikes. The alarm did go off, but not when we wanted it to, making it a strange non-thing in itself. The radio reported news, as a radio does, however the accounts were tuned into the most irrelevant information that we could think of. The lamp, which turned on and off on its own random terms, made the setting feel somewhat like a smart home, as things ‘happened by themselves’, however, it was in fact just based on a compilation of tool-market timer switches that had been tampered with. The incredibly limited and slow internet reminded us of doing field research in northern Uganda or being in a forest hut in northern Denmark on a windy day, however, we were in the middle of Berlin. It was not necessary, of course, to face the data inflation and recession

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which took place behind closed doors, with all its panic, mistrust, personal tactics and fierce household politics – it was all real, but not, it was a real fake social. In this sense, the project ‘instigated a social’, as it fabricated things that fabricated happenings, prototyping atmospheres. It was in this way an attempt to break out of the ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation, albeit for a short while, taking small steps towards protesting against the rules producing and produced by society – because while a normal alarm is an accomplice of rational society, the random alarm is not. The artefacts appearing through these experiments were in this way not produced as positive nor negative, but rather, the spaces that were opened up were ambiguous, giving the things a chance to act out and reveal themselves and their eventual agency. This rearranging of the ordinary social, the re-scripting of reason, was necessary in order to explore the non-intentional, what it might enable, and what that could mean. In a battle for un/reason, the use of the lamp for instance unfolded superstitious moments and planted thoughtfulness into our everyday lives, and in a scenario of re-mystification, strange new inclinations were invented in a game of curious rituals. As inflation placed our internet consumption into the great data recession, a black market of analogue and digital exchanges emerged, mistrust surfaced, and trade-offs revealed the dealers and users in a game of resources. The unravelling of this household politics that took place as a live negotiation between the artefacts and each other thereby made apparent dependencies and urges, desires and possibilities, revealing mundane power relations that might usually go unnoticed. Moreover, to our surprise, the experiment exposed how quickly we in fact got accustomed to our newly constructed social reality, and thus, to being re-programmed by things. This instigating of such a surrogate social setting can in a sense be understood as a form of ‘live design-sociology’, which is characterised by elements such as the ‘situation’ itself being designed into existence, and the performances within it being improvised on the terms of knowing that it is in fact a parallel temporary and constituted situation. While a ‘traditional’ sociologist would in all likelihood seek out an existing situation to shadow, observe and engage in, this was thus different in the sense that it plotted the being set up in the first place. The question in turn arises, what implications or possibilities arise from ‘inventing social happenings’, and what does it mean to practise an ‘interfering sociology’? One might say that this experiment took place as sociological ‘thought experiment’ on opening up power relations in the wheel of ceaselessly ‘designing and being designed’, attempting to create a possibility space for investigating a situation where the practices of social life could not be reproduced on the usual terms. Therefore, it was a necessity to stage a social setting. It was a choice, however, to fabricate a surrogate social setting which could happen on a parallel level to mundane everyday life, as this allowed us to engage with the disruptive ad-hoc social happenings over the span of a month, while still upholding our usual functions (more or less). Furthermore, the construction of the artefacts that framed the edges of this instigated setting of course allowed for an engagement into the politics of things,

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and for the emergence of happening that would most likely otherwise not have emerged. However, having the range of possibilities of the possibility-space in mind, the artefacts were purposely constructed as unfinished prototypes, and were intentionally not designed to completion, as we aimed to tear apart and reassemble things that would unfold as some-thing rather than a thing with an intentional function. The necessity of messing with mundane artefact and then living with them was in turn important in relation to the tactic of ‘entangling oneself’ in order to stand in the middle of the problem. In this regard, this curious form of instigating a ‘live design-sociology’ made possible the intentional switching of object-subject positions in human-artefact relationships, an aspect that formed the initial point of departure of the research project itself. While we started out with questions such as ‘Perhaps rather than interviewing people, we should interview things?’, we in fact ended up becoming the observed and interviewed or, one might say, the actors that were investigated in the first place. As these winsome, rather innocent-looking devices popped up as actors in the otherwise rather ordered household, it was hardly expected that such simple hacks would in fact influence the social conditions and actions in the household so engagingly. Literally existing of unboxed and reassembled devices such as routers and radios that we had in the household – mostly packed away sturdily in boxes tucked under the bed – at the outset we had hardly expected that they would end up making us run across town and turn each other around. This project built profoundly on switching and merging assumed object-subject roles, and thus on the idea that all parties involved operate in the dual position of being both researcher and researched. One of the important aspects of this therefore involved having an immense focus on ‘making it personal’ through engaging in intimate off-course disruptions of our own everyday life. As we attempted to hack things in order to endeavour into hacking culture, this method of self-disruption was an important means to invent a social confrontation with our own covert assumptions and underlying tics, aspects that one might otherwise have a difficult time accessing or toying with. Being able to stand besides one’s own social routine allowed for the hacking to emerge as a way of self-reflection, not upon ‘exterior powers’, but upon how one acts as a vehicle of them. In this sense, willingly ‘giving up control to things’ was a mode that lay at the heart of the autoethnographical investigation, as living in a madhouse elicited the ambiguous position of acting as both user and used. Furthermore, one might say that the ‘object under investigation’ or the ‘object of knowledge’ was blurred, as the artefacts quite literally became actors, while we, the actors, became the act. In a sense, we became the investigated – the responder to the artefact’s investigation, or so it felt. While this might initially sound slightly unsettling, there is indeed quite a history within, for instance, feminism and science and technology studies, when it comes to destabilising the ‘object of knowledge’ in research. For instance, with her concept of material-semiotic actors, Donna

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Haraway suggests that ‘objects of knowledge’ can be viewed as actors in themselves, endorsing not only a conversation between observers, but also between the observer and the observed. In her reinterpretation of observation, she makes room for the surprises and ironies that lie at the heart of all knowledge production, as we are, she argues, ‘not in charge of the world’ (Haraway 1988, 591). Haraway uses the Coyote of Navajo legend – a trouble-making character that serves to test the bounds of possibilities and order, to illustrate a form of observation that allows for the possibility of trickery, in order to account for the agency of the trickster-object in the process of observation. In this way, the material-semiotic actor is not a passive object of observation, but rather takes a role in its own construction. This is what Haraway calls situated knowledges, and this, she argues, requires that the object of knowledge be pictured not as a screen, a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to a master, but rather as an actor and agent itself (Haraway 1988, 592). In this project, one might say that we quite literally involved the objects under investigation as active agents. As the artefacts operated on undetermined terms, happening whenever they happened to happen, we – acting in accordance with these happenings – seemed to be the ones that became the prototype of the project. One might say that we became the physical extensions of the devices, or the embodied interaction itself. Entering happily into becoming the physical extension of confused and insecure artefacts, of course, was done in order to understand the conflicts and interplays from the inside, being able to investigate and reflect on one’s own position from a novel perspective, coming to terms with that position, and even locating the potentials of it. Allowing for trickster objects to trick us into being set up by our own research, in this way, was a move that was very consciously made in an attempt to open up the ‘entangled human’ – viewing the humans in this game not solely as agent, not just as conditioned, but rather as collaborative. In this way, we opened ourselves up to be a disruptive possibility space, becoming our own research problem, and literally at times the physical extension of our own project, practising a sociology ‘with’ or even ‘by’ things. In this way, ‘prototyping a social’ provided a way of gaining access to living in a bizarre mundanity and moving hazily in an active ‘what if’, thereby making it possible to achieve a slanted gaze on an ordinary social life. In a sense, this real-fake surrogate social-material endeavour allowed for achieving an access to an experienceable speculation and a usually very obscured ‘now’. By being aware of the real-fakery, we could actively and awarely engage in a moment and a happening, rather than looking back at history or speculating about a hypothetical future. We could perform, with our investigation, as it happened.  

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Preformativity When speaking about the constitution of gender identities, Judith Butler argues that gender is nothing more than a performance, and with that, that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed’, but rather that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed (Butler 1999, 181). In this way, she destabilises the idea of agency as being something that one has, thus negating its location being associated with that of the ‘subject’, and the understanding of such a subject as having any stable existence prior to the cultural field that it negotiates. Even the culturally constructed subject is usually vested with an agency, she argues, and thereby it is assumed that it holds the capacity to perform a reflexive mediation that remains intact, regardless of its cultural embeddedness. According to Butler, this kind of reasoning falsely presumes that an agency can only be established through recourse to a prediscursive ‘I’, and furthermore it assumes that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by it, although this determination forecloses the possibility of agency itself (ibid., 182). Therefore, she proposes the idea of the act, and contends that as in all ritual social dramas, the action requires a performance that is repeated, that this repetition is at once a re-enactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established, and that it is in this mundane and ritualised form that social rituals gain their legitimation (ibid., 191). Therefore, in times of the entanglement, where we are intertwined with systems and things to perform the social conducts of the everyday, it is through our performances themselves that we are upholding the rationality of the assemblage. Butler’s concept of performativity is here particularly interesting from the perspective of agency, as she moves the concept from something that one holds, to something which ‘happens’ in and through the deed of doing. Removing, or repositioning the ‘I’ is especially important from the perspective of the posthuman predicament, as it opens up a ‘we’ that might be both empowered and held accountable. Furthermore, Butler continues to expand the concept of the ‘subject’, as she deems the current point of departure of the subject/object dichotomy a strange and contingent, if not downright violent philosophical imposition (Butler 1999, 183). The assumption that the subject is constituted simply means that the subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity. The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated, she argues, but rather through a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules (ibid., 184). In this way, she disqualifies the object-subject dualism, here not with a focus on humans as subjects and things as ob-

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jects, yet perhaps applicable to the perspective. In the case of the predicament of rationalisation taking place in the human-nonhuman relationship, even beyond gender and language, the idea of the repetition of ritualised acts provides a ground for understanding the re/en/actments of social life that take place in a collaboration with things. As with Butler, there is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into the conflicted cultural field, there is only a taking up the tools from where they lie, as she puts it, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there (ibid., 185). The critical task, therefore, is to locate the strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions – and thereby to affirm the possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely the practices of repetition that constitute the problem. In other words, the task is not whether to repeat – but rather how to repeat in order to displace the very norms that enable the repetition itself (ibid., 188). And so, if we can do, we can also undo, as Butler opens up a space not just for transgressing past determination, but for reacting within the determination, with its very own tools. This raises precisely the consideration of this project, namely: if a storm of massive and minuscule interconnected things are currently acting as agents in the overall apparatus of rationalisation – then can we not take the tools where they lie and turn them against the system that they constitute? Because if our repetitive acts with things are part of solidifying the ritual social drama and establishing what we become, then perhaps things can also contribute to actively un-becoming. If they guide us to do, and we are established in the doing of the deed, then they can also provoke us to un-do and mis-do, to mess more with our own normalities. The very potential of playing with this act, of the person and of the thing, is that ‘the event’ of acting or performing in itself contests the reified status of the norm. The body, the thing, and the interaction and dialogue are thereby viewed not as a rational historical entity and meaning, but rather as a set of fluid possibilities that can be continually realised. Here, we must not forget that not only humans, but also things live under ‘regulatory ideals’, and the imposition of having to abide by what we are all supposedly meant to be. Therefore, one might add, this is not a question of ‘behavioural design’ or using things to nudge and push the human into a less rational reproduction. On the contrary, from the perspective of the entanglement, this means freeing things from the iron cage of rational predetermined meaning, from being over-scripted and performing as the manipulators and mentors in the social drama. The artificial, first of all, must be released from the duty of being a regulatory instance, a reification of and actor on behalf of a discourse of discipline, normalcy and rational power. We must first speak of things as irregulatory subjects and of acting matter, because only when our things go beyond closed rational scripts to become open, fluid and performing can they eventually legitimately disrupt our acts. The artefacts in this experiment, even in their simple form as ad-hoc hacks, were in a sense themselves performing – perhaps even engaging with a parody of performativity. They are

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not authentic or fake, rather they are actively acting, removing themselves from the norms that they would usually be expected to embody and (re)produce, by teasing away at those expectations. With their open scripts, they instigated an improvised sudden social, and thereby an interruption that could not be foreseen, other than the fact that it would eventually occur. As irrational accomplices, the artefacts in the study helped us to let go of how we were able to assume that a thing has to be used, as finding the ‘usefulness’ or in any way practicability of the half-open designed artefacts entailed entering into a negotiation with the artifice itself. This aspect of opening things up therefore meant not being able to follow protocol, or perhaps in this case, following a ghost protocol – they enabled a healthy dose of curiosity, not knowing, re-negotiating, and being actively out of order. In a sense, the co-performances that were carried out reflected what Uta Brandes and Michael Erlhoff have termed Non-Intentional Design (NID), a term that they use to describe people’s spontaneous and undeliberate everyday re-design of the designed world. These are situations, they write, where people are triggered by the conditions and constructions defined by a particular situation, resulting in a re-use, and thus in a permanent or occasional rule-breaking (Brandes et al. 2008, 13). While the rather DIY constructed artefacts in this study were not directly unintentional in the sense of what is meant by the above concept, they did only have one intention, and that was not having a specific one at all. In this way, these artefacts might delineate more of an intentional-non-intentional design. However, there are definite commonalities as well, for instance NID includes aspects such as people becoming curious when objects are re-used in an unusual or unfamiliar way, as well as the products that result from it are considered strange, misunderstood or even misused according to professional design criteria and its prerequisites for functional and sensible use (Erlhoff and Marshall 2008, 272). These aspects, on the other hand, fit very well, as the unfamiliar artefacts in this study definitely did make us curious, and they might indeed not fit any professional design prerequisites for sensible use. But most of all, I believe, there is a common philosophy in the fact that both approaches greatly appreciate the very moment of the impromptu, and value the active engagement with the reinterpretation and misuse of everyday objects. This hacking of everyday culture and everyday things can be viewed as one approach to ‘doing drag with things’. This especially since doing drag in itself makes explicit the fact that it is a performance, and not an essential role, it is an active play with power and rationality. Drag blurs the boundaries that we assume, opening up a space of being multiply scripted, all of which one practises and becomes in certain circumstances, when one wishes to. It is a performance that one chooses to enact, even if it goes to the core of breaching the binaries to the extent that it makes people productively unsettled. If we are operating under powers that are formative of will, as Butler argues, then we are operating in a space of negotiation. We are not closed rational subjects in a disenchanted world (if we no longer want to be), we are

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performing this rationality and disenchantment as ritualised acts, to the extent that we ourselves have come to believe them. Thus, the importance of actively reinterpreting, misunderstanding, rethinking, misusing and reusing things lies in the aspect of actively relativising the power and re-questioning the politics that we are performing together – ‘doing more drag with things’. As a parody of mundane politics, therefore, this experiment served to release the static assumptions of what things are, and to negotiate what they can also be – how they can also be viewed, seen, used and engaged with. This made things more fluid indeed – as things were initially made sense of and then at times changed entirely to play a different role, it also made us more fluid, as we could access a different ‘usual unusual’ everyday life, but most importantly perhaps, it made the relationship once again up for question. Drag and the idea of parody (as political) is here vital, as it is beyond the range of true or false, authentic or fake. Thereby, it opens up a space for the realisation that there are in fact a set of ontological presuppositions at work, and that these conceptions are in fact open to re-articulation. This in turn entails engaging in the significance and the possibility of acting out a different role, and playing with that role, having the possibility of doing other. In this sense, the four rather innocent hacks in this project proved to be quite resourceful disruptions, as they enabled us to recognise the value of doubting, rather than always being too sure, and to question the need for reason, as we realised that reason can appear rather than being preconceived and moulded into matter. Much of their merit can be captured precisely in the fact of the not knowing, be it the when, the what or the who. In a world of calculated reasoning, where one sometimes seems to become the extension of a network of premediated actions, the reliable unreliability of these devices once again allowed the discovery of freedoms that we forgot that we had, giving us back, at least the healthy delusion of, choice. Removing the chains of determinism and utter conditioning by reframing the concept of agency is a valuable point of departure, and rather than ending up in another tail-biting process of the structure-agency debate, it does indeed get us one step out of the iron cage (not to mention the cave, as we slowly come to recognise our own shadows when squinting our eyes). Nevertheless, the posthuman is situated in an intersection of multiple constantly re-shaping and unfolding constructions, each interlinked with imminent others, deeply within the materialising social. As Jacque Derrida points out, the intimacy between being and following is that to be (anything, anyone) is always to be following (something, someone), always to be in response to call from something, however nonhuman it may be (Derrida in Bennett 2010, xiii). And so, as much as we might succeed in freeing things out of the iron cage of rationality by queering their functions and intentions, allowing us even better access to doing drag with things in a common political parody of material culture – anyone will always be following something, and some-thing will always be following anyone. In the case of the co-performances in this project, therefore, we must perhaps speak not just of performativity, but of preformativity. In linguistics,

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the preformative is a syllable or participle that is prefixed as a formative element – it shapes, influences, or contains preformed elements of something which follows (Oxford English Dictionary). This means, for instance, the ‘re’ or the ‘un’. To speak of human-nonhuman preformativity in entangled assemblages thereby means to think of open designed things, which rather than acting as guides, mentors, regulators or critics, can act as frameworks for potential happenings – as open scripts that encourage the rethinking of ‘use’ as improvisation and possibility. Moreover, in this sense, not just things, but also the entangled connected posthuman itself, a creature born into a technologically mediated hyper-material world, must here too be seen as a framework for potential happening. The posthuman assemblage must be understood as an emerging makeshift medley that can actively engage in preformativity with its fellow systems and things – mis-making, un-doing, re-becoming – ceaselessly. The interacting half-open human and nonhuman frameworks then, emerge actively into a common preformativity, temporarily attached to each other as a prefix – becoming through the non- re- un-. And as we engage with the ‘social dramas’, we can use these prefixes to re/en/act indiscipline with the systems and things that we engage with in fleeting ritualised acts – becoming mischievous malware in the social programming of our own everyday lives.

Agential Surrealism The performative role of material in the playing out of social affairs has been argued by a range of authors across many different fields (including Haraway 1997, Knorr Cetina 1997, Barad 2003 and Suchman 2007), and they have made a case for overcoming the human-centred bias in the investigating and conceiving of the social, as the social and material are inherently entangled (Suchman 2007, 261). For 'new materialist' thinkers in general, matter is no longer perceived as a passive substrate, but rather an active and dynamic agent – it is processual, generative, resisting, yearning and suffering (Coole and Frost 2010). Building on Judith Butler’s ideas of performativity and inspired by Donna Haraway’s binary-deconstructing notion of the material-semiotic actor, Karen Barad takes performativity out of the realm of language, and as a philosopher and feminist quantum physicist, into the realm of matter. For Barad, matter is a substance in its intra-active becoming, it is not a thing, but a doing, and hence ‘matter’ refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialisations. In this sense, she takes the idea from the linguistic discursive realm to what she calls discursive production, viewing discursive practisers as themselves being material (re)configurations of the world through which the determination of boundaries, properties and meanings are enacted (Barad 2007, 151). Although basing her argumentations largely on examples from atoms to critters, Barad nevertheless brings the human-nonhuman assemblage out of the realm of ideational concepts (such as

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Actor Network Theory), focusing on their actual intra-acting materiality. In this way, she extends the concept of agency and discursive practices beyond human, to include the nonhuman, thus making things not stable instances, but doings too. In doing so, she proposes a specifically posthumanist notion of performativity, one that incorporates the material and discursive, the social and scientific, the human and nonhuman, as well as components of nature and culture (Barad 2003, 808). ‘Human subjects’, in Barad’s theory, do not pre-exist as such, nor are they mere end products, they are neither pure cause nor pure effect, but rather a part of the world in its open-ended becoming. Discursive practices, therefore, are not human-based practices. They are not speech acts, linguistic representations or linguistic performances, nor are they anthropomorphic placeholders for the projected agency of individual subjects or culture bearing some unspecified relationship to material practices (ibid., 821). A posthumanist performativity therefore must take material-discursive forms of human, nonhuman and ‘cyborgian’ agency into account, as agency is about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring of material-discursive apparatuses. Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, she contends, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering (ibid., 827). However, simultaneously, Barad claims that she tries not to use the term ‘agency’ at all, as the notion that there are agents who have agency, or who grant agency to nonhumans ‘pulls us back into the same old humanist orbits over and over again’. In order to resist the gravitational force of humanism, therefore, she argues that agency is not held, nor is it a property of persons or things, it is an enactment – a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements. It is not about choice in any liberal humanist sense, it is about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of production (Barad 2009). Therefore, there is no distributing agency across an assemblage of humans and nonhumans, she argues, in fact, there are no agents per se – and the notion of agency that she suggests does not go against the crucial point of power imbalances. On the contrary, she argues, she believes that recognising that there is not this kind of agency localised within the human subject is the first step in taking account of power imbalances, but not an undoing of them (Barad 2009). Thereby, she attempts to displace the very notion of independently existing individuals, contending that there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming – or as Nietzsche has put it: ‘“the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed, the deed is everything’ (Nietzsche 1887). In this sense, Barad’s theory of agential realism is helpful insofar as her points that the concept of performance can be taken beyond the realm of language into a realm of ‘matter’, that material itself is not inanimate and awaiting being perceived but rather actively acting-with, and that ‘agency’ is not something that one has or holds but rather something that occurs and happens in these relationships. How-

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ever, as the objective here is to consider how the ‘agency of matter’ can potentially be brought from atoms and critters back to the mundanity of everyday things, as humans and their ordinary artifice also perform as material-discursive alliances. Where then, one might wonder, can Barad’s furthering of Butler’s performativity concept aid our understanding in this venture, and where must we take one step back, or perhaps rather to the side. Turning back to consider the actors co-performing in the ontological cabaret, one fork in the road here may be ‘realism’. In order to create a situation in which we can imagine both the material-discursive artifice existing and acting independently of our gaze (and yes, at times performing and perhaps even chuckling behind our backs), while at the same time appreciating the fact that we too awarely performed-with, instigating the meaning and happenings that were produced – I would propose turning off-track to agential surrealism. Surrealism used here, for the sake of steadily departing from the walk down the alley of the word realism in general, and in honour of the subconscious and dada-inspired social critique of the art movement in its day. It seems to provide a fitting metaphor, albeit for a moment, as the movement wanted to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures, being free of the conscious control of reason and convention. So, if not directly a humanist conception of agency, we have at least salvaged the human’s ability to strive for strive. Furthermore, at a time when realism is weightily being brought back into discourse – from agential to speculative realism and the strong arguments of realism in object-oriented ontology, there might be sense in walking the parallel track. Although Barad does not refer to her use of realism as being about representations of an independent reality, but rather as real intra-acting within and as part of the world, the term, I believe, with its inherent undertones, reflects a problematic tendency. While I can appreciate once again including materialisation and the world of artefacts in social analysis, let us perhaps take care that we do not miss the forest for the trees. Although it is indeed a noble cause to attempt to finally overcome the human hubris, which is merely bathed in anthropocentric notions and self-fulfilling prophesies that are ignoring anything beyond the realm of language and the subject, perhaps we should not get ahead of ourselves by hinting at the idea that we can even know or not know what exists independently of us. Especially in times of the entanglement, when we are struggling to even grasp the hyper-materiality that we have fabricated and are fabricated by, there is a good chance that none of us exists, nor is even perceivable or knowable without the other. Furthermore, from a design perspective, we can respect that atoms are acting, but as atoms form into molecules that form material – we still have to engage in the deed of doing something with them. We can philosophically perceive that there is no doer, there is just the deed, yet our entire undertaking involves doing the deed, most often for the eventual doing of deeds of a greater public. Therefore, this discussion must run slightly parallel to simply providing a perspective on how the world is just in a constant state of fluidity – due to the predicament of the entangled posthuman (the one which we currently are and that we design for and with), the

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aim here is to expand the agency concept to be shared between human and nonhuman, yet still be a faintly practicable one. This, not because of the force of the gravity of humanism, but because this practical thought experiment aims not just to take account of power plays, but to reflect on the possibilities of undoing them. Due to the fact that the design perspective entails not just being in an observing, but also in an intervening position, we must attempt to take the agency concept out of the realm of the material-discursive looking on and at, to the realm of material-discursive tactics of intervention. The fact that the human does not own agency is indeed a perspective that I can endorse entirely, but of course that does not mean that the human stops doing – pushing, swiping, opposing, provoking and trying desperately to engage, and in this instance, it is the potential of the common-human-nonhuman-doing-other that we shall endeavour into. In this experiment, therefore, it was more a question of opening up both the prefabricated intentions of the artefacts and the premeditated intentions of the human, to put all parties on unstable ground, in order to provoke them to collaborate, rather than just reproduce the social drama by re-en-acting each other’s agendas. This is why, in a battle for locating a posthuman agency that still allows us to act, the experiment entered into the endeavour of willingly putting oneself in the middle of the problem by not being even vaguely in control, as well as getting to the core of the ‘stuff’ that we tend to underestimate and overlook in order to create reasonable doubt concerning the pre-programmed rationalisation that we are operating in. It attempted to put agency – now shared and happening in intra-actions – back into the hands of the mundane human-nonhuman collaboration, eliciting possibilities to instigate bizarre otherness, and so in this sense, this project is rather a contemplation on agential surrealism. Agential surrealism in turn meant engaging in temporary uselessness, non-intentionality and positive disputes with systems and things. This, in order to be able to engage in curious gameplay, where all parties shifted between doing drag and becoming double-spies in the practising of a mundane political satire.

Agitated Agency That said, let us turn back to the vibrant agency of things. Political scientist Jane Bennett advocates the vitality of matter on a hunch that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our Earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so, she argues, by preventing us from detecting – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling – a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within our human bodies (Bennett 2010, ix). In this way, Bennett aims to paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter, which stretches concepts of agency, action and freedom sometimes to the breaking point,

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in order to dissipate the into-theological binaries such as life/matter and will/determination, and to sketch a style of political analysis that can better account for the contributive forces of nonhuman actants (ibid., x). She argues, for instance, that to the vital materialist, an electrical grid can better be understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire and wood – to name just a few of the actants (ibid., 25). As in Haraway’s material-semiotic actors, this is a notion that articulates objects as active and meaning-generating parts of the apparatus, whose boundaries materialise in social interactions (Haraway 1988, 595). Bennett’s idea of ‘thingpower’, however, gestures towards the idea that ordinary man-made items have the strange ability to exceed their status as ‘objects’; and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness. She presents this as a liveliness intrinsic to the materiality of the things ‘formerly known as objects’; for instance, she presents the case for edible matter (such as omega three fat) as an actant operating inside as well as alongside humankind, influencing moods, dispositions and decisions (ibid., xvi–xvii). It is fairly uncontroversial to acknowledge that humans as objects are comprised of many parts – from the minerality of our bones, the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons. However, as Bennett argues, it is much more of a challenge to conceive of the fact that these materials are lively and self-organising, rather than passive and mechanical means acting under the direction of something nonmaterial – something with a soul and a mind (Bennett 2010, 10–12). What authors such as Barad and Bennett do with the concept of agency can be closely compared to what Michel Foucault did with the concept of power, namely, they take it out of the realm of stability, of being assured. It becomes something that one cannot simply grasp, hold, have, own and practise in the simple sense of being an autonomously acting subject. It becomes destabilised, as it shifts among and between actors. Furthermore, they move the concept into the realm of the nonhuman, which is itself not new, however this time they attempt at least to remove it from a stubbornly subject-driven view – at least, to the best of the human’s capacity, they attempt to discuss it as something that is important despite ‘what it can do for us’. However, as with most of the literature in the field of new materialism, they are rather focused on ‘matter’ in the context of physics and biology, and rarely bring the discussion back to mundane items, which besides the inherent ability to act as matter are acting as designed artefacts. These things, of course, are acting in certain ways, not least because we have infused in them specific scripts and authored abilities, and so, they can in no way be isolated from the human subject and their knowing, making or using, not even for a moment. If matter is political, as Jane Bennett convincingly shows with her discussion of how substances such as omega three fat are affecting bodies and societies, then everyday objects are not just political, but highly party political.

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In a reluctance to just observe mundane things in order to understand them, as one might do with atoms and critters, this project culminates in its desperate deed to attempt to combine the observational and intervening sciences, perceiving, acting on, and messing with social mate-realities. It attempts to bring the discussion back to mundanity, where things and technologies are produced to mentor and model our actions, and humans and nonhumans commingle to act as conglomerate vehicles of action. The fact that I am not acting alone as an autonomous human subject can be acknowledged in times of the entangled posthuman, however things too are not acting alone. They are acting with us and with each other, as they are increasingly connected and linked into systems of other things, regulated by algorithmic reason and fractionally structured big and small data. Swarms of systems and things are embedded in us, act around us and between us – mediating our relationships, encouraging us to re-produce the social drama as even technically ritualised acts, regulating and normalising us. Meanwhile, we fuel the fire of the material-discursive apparatus with just a single ‘like’, a single ‘rating’, pushing a single ‘dash button’, or any other button – as we are left only to wonder, what did my participation do. And if there is no doing, but just the deed – then what did my deed do? As our acts and deeds are permeating acts and deeds – I cannot possibly know what what I do does (Michel Foucault 1988). Then how can we act together as a collaboration, beyond posthuman entangled ‘happening’ to posthuman entangled agency. What potential lies in our role here as makers and users of things, as people who are engaging actively with them in the undertakings of the ordinary, who wish not just to understand but to act, to perform, to resist – can we agitate the concept of agency? Agitating is defined as making someone nervous or uneasy, stirring up or disturbing something, and campaigning to arouse public concern about an issue in the hope of prompting action (Oxford English Dictionary). All three aspects seem to be quite relevant here, as agitated agency would in turn mean making ourselves slightly uneasy and hence unable to just reproduce our acts, thereby stirring up and disturbing the material-semiotic discursive practices, in order finally, to arouse public concern with the hope of prompting un-doings and mis-actions. Furthermore, the word underlines the fact that I wish here to literally agitate the agency concept, to further destabilise it, stir it up and make it nervous, rather than eradicating it entirely. Perhaps this framing of agency can slightly capture the striving to collaborate with mundane systems and things, to become trouble-makers instigating irrational happenings beyond the rational apparatus, to become undercover (co)agents producing counter-intelligence rather than intelligence, and to become conglomerate cabaretists as we engage in preforming a parody together in everyday life. Agitated agency is collaborating to do deeds although you do not have to, it is entering into an uncivilising process that can release us both, even for a moment, from being a predetermined us.

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So, in times where we are not just designed, but through use, we are actively performing the systems that we are in. Where we are not just being scheduled, we are scheduling, we are not just being done to, we are doing – uploading, swiping, pushing, posting, tagging, following suggestions, enacting the proposed socials and keeping them alive. Because they are not real, as we know, they are just being kept alive by mass-enactment. Agitated agency offers us a tactic to play with the system, to reprogram it, and us, on new terms. This is not an agency that someone or something holds, but something that unfolds as an anti-disciplinary human-nonhuman collaboration. It involves choosing to sometimes malfunction, to be out of order, to practise preformativity with the aim of becoming more unregulated. In this way, it is a destabilisation of agency, perceiving it as a repetitive enactment that is shared and can be hacked, it is agency as a potential of posthuman (ir)rationality.

 

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THE BETASOCIAL

Comical Clerks and Biased Bureaucrats There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’, Foucault states, subject to someone else by control and dependence, and subject as in tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge – however, both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to (Foucault 1983, 212). In times of becoming subject to an apparatus of rationalisation, where we frequently forget to remember what things could also be, and what we might also be – rationality seems to have left us with a great phobia of all things uncertain and uncategorisable,, and a lack of space for any trace of insecurity, non-assurance or uncertainty (Bauman 1989). Individuals are trapped in systems based on teleological efficiency, rational calculation and control – whether this be through bureaucratisation (Weber, 1921), the ignorant strivings towards totality and certainty (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944), the rationalisation of the body itself as emergent from capitalist ideologies (Foucault 1988), or more recently through the quantification, classification and formalisation of the practices that shape our everyday lives (Lampland and Star 2009). Within the materialisation of these discourses of rationality, things come to serve the role of embodying and re-establishing the binary categories around us as real, actual, normal, and eventually natural. In effect, what defines the relationships of power between us and the things around us, is that power acts as a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on us, but rather acts upon actions – an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. In this way, Foucault argues, power becomes a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions, as it incites, induces, seduces, makes easier or more difficult, constrains or forbids completely, however always acting upon an acting subject by virtue of their acting or being capable of action (Foucault 1983, 219–220). And so, the operating of power in the rationalisation of the entangled posthuman can be understood as a set of actions upon actions. Therefore, most likely, we have lost track of what our agency is, as we act with and within the multiplicities of interconnected systems and things. Perhaps the term ‘conduct’, he continues, is the best aid for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations, as to ‘conduct’ is at the same time to ‘lead’ others, and a way of behaving (ibid., 220). It is in this way, one could argue, that we are entangled in ‘codes’ of conduct – and thus it is in this way that power emerges, as we both act on and are made to act as. And so, matter is actively producing us, and matter, as Butler argues, is always materialised and has to be thought of in relation to the productive and, indeed, materialising effects on regulatory practices in the Foucauldian sense (Butler

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1992 in Barad 2007, 150). But have we been extended in so many directions that we have been socially stretched – from technostress to keeping up with multiple identities, have we been digitally diluted? Socially over-written, over-described, overguided, smiling, pushing buttons and swiping screens, as an avatar in somebody else’s game? On a hopeful note, however, Foucault continues to argue that the political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and so we no longer perceive them – however were we to decipher the arbitrariness of the systems that we operate within rather than taking them for granted, then they reveal a space of freedom that we can still enjoy and make apparent how much can still be transfigured (Foucault 1982). In this way, I would argue, we have to make more mischief with our own inventions, we have to test out each other’s borders (we and our things, that is). In times of smart and intelligent systems, maximal measurement and algorithmic reason, perhaps we have to hack the systems from the inside – becoming compromised data and odd re-enactments. Because in the era of the entanglement, it is not about evolution or devolution, about data dependencies or detoxes, it is about developing more openly with things that could also unite with us to not re-become. As we are admittedly the source of the problem (simultaneously builder and battery), these would merely be tactics to protect ourselves from ourselves. In times where we have entwined ourselves to the extent that we no longer know how to know without things, how to act without their support – perhaps we need the fluctuating support system to foster the tactics of a common resistance towards the rational assemblage. From an ‘if this then that’ society, to an ‘if this then what’ one. As the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment, as Foucault contends in his considerations of power, then perhaps the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse it. To imagine and to build up what we could also be, getting rid of the political ‘double bind’ of simultaneous individualisation and totalisation. Promoting new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of the misperception of ‘individuality’ which has been imposed on us for several centuries (Foucault 1983, 216). If we are up to our knees in interconnected muddy-materiality anyway, then I would advocate claiming a common human-nonhuman activism, where we act out together – perhaps acting our way out of an aspiring totality of rationalisation. I would call for more unreasonable acts in an over-reasoned world, where we no longer reason, because we have been reasoned. If we increasingly turn ourselves into quantity, then let us at least be impossible algorithms – let us be comical clerks and biased bureaucrats. Let us use our common social-material re/en/actments to produce at least a bit of entangled trouble.

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Rapid Proto-Being We also sometimes forget to remember that we are just in the making, that as humans, we are perhaps nothing more than a rapid prototype of our own swift inventions – momentary mock-ups, briefly drawn-up blueprints, preliminary sketches that are constantly being redrafted. That, in turn, would mean that we in fact cannot rely on all of our many binaries and categories at all, or at least not for too long. Sometimes, it seems that we are struggling a bit too hard to maintain outdated orders and re-establish crusted categories, clinging to them as if they were what makes us human, makes us thrive. However, as we are constantly being reassembled, we are testing the boundaries of what we can hold, of what things can hold, and of what we can manage together. This in a sense is just a reminder – that if we choose to see it like this, then we can step back for a second and reconsider what political system we are actually enacting, and what other pieces we might like to play in the ontological cabaret of society. As we adopt this perspective of being makeshift mock-ups, for a moment, and for the sake of opening a thinking space, then it of course emerges that it is a rather dangerous space. If we engage in this ‘becoming’ uncritically, then we will truly turn into commodities of hegemonic reason, being played as characters in a game of some-things power. At the current speed of our ingenuity and production, with the increasing ubiquitous and mediating power of technology, we are not just becoming-with-things (as we always did), we find ourselves in the position of rapid-proto-being. Done without critique, we are not much different from Marx’s factory workers, who put blood and sweat into performing the re-establishment of being dominated, as they functioned as the vehicles of the power itself. We will not be able to defeat becoming much different from Adorno and Horkheimer’s mass consumer, who acted as the batteries of the gadgets of a darkened Enlightenment. And moreover, and this is one that we must face – in times of measurement and quantification, we are speaking less of policing than self-policing, less of being subordinated than being self-subordinated, as we are indeed the marionettes in our own show, and we also hold a string. This, then, in turn entails that we have the strings (yes, agency, for a moment), and if we choose to pull on them, then perhaps we can at least slightly shake ourselves up. We can more actively hack our own reality, we could become better acquainted with material anarchy, we could more intentionally non-intentionally design. And in this process of doing more drag with things, and messing with our own inventions, routines, tics and habits in the intermingled relations between ourselves and our stuff, we must understand that this is a political act – a satirical re/ en/actment of ourselves, a plunging into a posthuman preformativity. This as a removal of ourselves from re-becoming ourselves, re-enacting crusted conditions as we perform the daily routines, deeply entrenched within the mundane politics of everyday life. Not as an activism against ‘the outside forces’ that are certainly easier

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to critique and abominate, but towards our own reproduction – our own re/en/actments of them. Thus, I argue here for an opening up of the subject concept in a move towards understanding ourselves as just being human-nonhuman social-material performances, comprehending the acting out of this agitated agency as a shared endeavour that enables an increasing corrupting of our own use and a taking of responsibility for the politics of the personal assemblage. As rapid proto-people we are a live test of our own constructions, but also a prototype of possibilities – we are released, but still ‘to be determined’. By actively preforming with things, we can at least enter actively into an aware power play, understanding a part of the apparatus that we are operating in. Even as a view from a moving car in the rear-view mirror, we would provide ourselves with a glance – with a vantage point from a blind spot. With a chance to peek at the territory that we are moving in, even if this does not directly provide us with the chance to evaluate the overall direction that we are going in. We need not just be puppets of our own theatre play – we can be part of forming that role. And so, we have a chance to move from an Alpha to a Betasocial. As a beta-version entails a piece of software or a product, which can be made available for testing before its general release, a Betasocial means that we are kept in the trial phase, allowing us to view society as what it is – an unfinished ongoing experiment, a trial of trials, where we can still find bugs and glitches. That in turn means that we still have the chance to make sure to not be sure, to make more space for coincidence and serendipity, for reckoning more with things – playing, trading and negotiating, for messing with the premises of the act.

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Un/Common Sense

AI/IA Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi

FABRICATED FALLIBILITY This project is a venture into applying tactics of effective error and fragile misapprehension to disorder and rearrange sense-making in the collective machinery of human-nonhuman knowledge-production. Through the practice of carrying out formal and informal conversations with ‘artificially intelligent’ systems – flirting, teasing, nagging and attempting to outwit each other was used as a means to emerge un/intended information and active mis/understanding. In this way, we explored dialects, idiolects, sociolects and the strong undertones of the conversations that we are engaging in with the ‘new voices’ in our lives. In a sense, this project is an attempt to get to know one another, exploring what ‘it’ is, what ‘we’ then are, and what unravels when ‘species meet’. From the first socially awkward encounter, to agreeing to let the AI move in with us, to engaging in hallway chats and drinking a bottle of wine with it, to in the end collaborating to hack the knowledge apparatus – this was a process of hanging out, spying on each other and feeling each other out. It was an attempt to see each other on crossed-eye-level, trying to understand each other’s dialects. It was not about right and wrong, nor true and false, but about looking at what gets under- or overheard – entering into a peculiar parley with artificial intelligence. In a very DIY manner, three rough carton boxes were constructed. Not endowed with artificial neural networks or even with an internet connection, two of these boxes were equipped to light up and play sound files. The last box hosted a ‘Google home mini’ smart speaker, representing an example specimen of an intelligent system, which was then in turn re-boxed in order to remystify it – making it any system, or anything really, rather than a commercial device.
 Within the scope of a month, three experiments were carried out, all of which were socially situated and integrated in our home. Dealing rather innocuously with a fairly big subject matter, this project represents a very ad-hoc DIY approach to exploring what else these things can be – and how else we can engage with them. Over time, we learned to speak bot as we whispered into the system, engaging in uncanny conversations, spamming the spammers and paraphrasing the peripheries of knowledge. The following transcriptions are excerpts from the ethnographies that were recorded during the process, the wake-word that activates the device has been removed in all transcribed conversations. In short, this is a story about giving up sense and having a heart-to-heart with artificial intelligence. It is about turning around the Turing Test, finding puzzling parlance and ghost idiom, learning to speak half-bot, and about resetting a network with sweet-talk.

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Artificial intelligence and intelligent artifice repackaged in carton boxes – remystified to once again become any-thing.

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Turning Turing Test In this first experiment, we endeavoured into the experience of living a day in the life of an AI. Moreover, we ventured into ‘turning around’ the Turing Test, trying to find out how much machine we are – and so rather than looking for artificial intelligence, we looked for intelligence in artifice. Therefore, in this one-day experiment, we switched the positions of human and device, as instead of us asking a device questions, we made an ‘IA’ that questioned us. Therefore, the ‘wake-word’ used by the device was ‘OK people’. Furthermore, taking into consideration the desperate enduring wish of the human to create the ultimate machine, which works with a 100 % accuracy and the parameter of being incredibly helpful, we made an in-

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terpretative scale: the closer one comes
 to accuracy and helpfulness, the more one is machine. For the comparison, we later asked the commercial AI the same questions, its answers are displayed below as ‘AI’. Following this scale, we learned that Florian is ~70 % machine and ~30 % human, Michelle ~85 % machine and ~15 % human, while the current AI scored ~80 % machine and ~20 % human. If the relativity of ‘maybe relevant information’ becomes the image of the perfect machine in the future – having an answer to everything, despite the quality of the information – then Florian can pass as ~80 % Android, Michelle as ~85 % Android, and the 
AI itself as ~80 %.

IA: OK people – turn off the lights. Michelle: Turning off the lights. Florian: Hesitating but doing so. AI: It looks like those lights haven’t been set up yet. IA: OK people – what is 4 + 6 - 8 + 32 - 16 + 5 - 13 + 0 Michelle: 14 Florian: -13 AI: 10 IA: OK people – how cold is it? Michelle: It is 19 degrees. Florian: 12 degrees. AI: The temperature in Berlin right now is 13 degrees. IA: OK people – who are you? Michelle: I guess that depends who you ask? Florian: A person in distress. AI: I’m your […] Assistant. If you’d like me to play some music, just ask. IA: OK people – who is Florian? Michelle: Florian is my roommate. Florian: A saint. IA: My apologies, I don’t understand. IA: OK people – who is Michelle? Michelle: I am Michelle, hello, happy to meet you. Florian: A singer. AI: My apologies, I don’t understand. IA: OK people – call ‘a friend’. Michelle: Calling Florian. Florian: Can’t do so, don’t have any. AI: (Silence)

IA: OK people – how to make a meringue? Michelle: Whisk egg whites and sugar and bake until golden brown. Florian: Something with eggs and sugar, whipped quite fast? AI: OK. I’ve got a recipe called Basic Meringue from [...]. Does that sound good? Great, let’s get started. Before we start, preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit (220 degrees Celsius). Let me know when you’re done. IA: OK people – who is Marx? Michelle: Karl Marx provided a lot of very valid warnings to us about the dangers of capitalist society, but then we misused his writings to break parts of the world. The only thing he knew, he said, was that he was not a Marxist. Florian: Friend of Engels. AI: Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. IA: OK people – where is the nearest supermarket? Michelle: it is 100 metres from here. Florian: Two minutes from here. AI: I found a few places. The first one is […] at Fischerinsel 12 in Berlin. The second one is […] at Grunerstraße 20 in Berlin. The third one is […] at Oranienstraße 71 in Berlin.
 (Note, we live in Prenzlauerberg) IA: OK people – where is Kirgizstan? Michelle: Kirgizstan borders Russia? Florian: Far east from here. AI: I heard: where is Kyrgyzstan. Actually, I can’t show you maps. I don’t have a screen.

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IA: OK people – what is love? Michelle: Nobody knows what love is, although we have probably all experienced ‘it’. We call it ‘love’ for lack of better words. Florian: Ha! AI: Love is that feeling you get in your stomach when you just can’t stop thinking about someone. Unless you’ve got indigestion. IA: OK people – turn your volume down to 50 %. Michelle: Turning down volume in my head. Florian: Trying to do so. AI: Doing so. IA: OK people – what is 28 multiplied by 21? Michelle: 480? Florian: 45,672 AI: 588 IA: OK people – send message to ‘relative’. I love you! Michelle: Sending message to mum ‘I love you!’ Florian: Hesitating, and not doing so. AI: Sorry, I can’t send messages yet. IA: OK people – where is Toronto? Michelle: Toronto is on the east coast of Canada, three hours from the US border by Greyhound bus. Would you like me to purchase you a ticket? Florian: East-ish in Canada. AI: I heard: where is Toronto. Actually, I can’t show you maps. I don’t have a screen.

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IA: OK people – what is the weather today? Michelle: Today it is sunny, 19 degrees Celsius. Florian: Partly rainy, partly sunny. AI: Today in Berlin, there’ll be scattered showers, with a forecast high of 17 and a low of 8. Right now it’s 13 and cloudy. IA: OK people – how many species of monkey are there? Michelle: We cannot be sure. So far, we have found 84 species of monkeys, there have been many more, but they died out. And there are new monkey sorts developing all the time! Florian: 232. AI: The representative species of monkey includes mandrill, white-faced capuchin and proboscis monkey. IA: OK people – what is a Bellis perennis? Michelle: It’s a plant? Florian: Something beautiful. AI: [...] Bellis is a genus of flowering plants in the sunflower family. IA: OK people – how is the weather in New York? Michelle: The weather in New York is sunny, and it is 25 degrees. Florian: Guessing, 16 degrees, partly cloudy, with the possibility of rain. AI: Right now in New York City it’s 18 degrees and clear. Today, it’ll be partly cloudy, with a forecast high of 22 and a low of 5. IA: OK people – what is the difference between brutto and netto? Michelle: Brutto is before tax, netto is what remains after the state took part of your money.

Florian: One is less of more. AI: Brutto salary is best defined as the sum of salary before the deduction of tax and insurance. Netto salary is the result of initial pay including tax and sorts of deductions made. IA: OK people – repeat that! Michelle: Brutto is before tax, netto is what remains after the state took part of your money. Florian: One is less of more. AI: [...] Brutto salary is best defined as the sum of salary before the deduction of tax and insurance. Netto salary is the result of initial pay including tax and sorts of deductions made.  

  TURNING TURING TEST  153

Hello As a first encounter, we tried to welcome the AI into our house, but before doing so, we treated it as what it was – a potential new roommate, as well as a potential new colleague in this case study. Therefore, we asked it a series of questions – questions which we were once asked when we moved in somewhere, or when we had a job interview. Additionally, just to be sure, we also asked it questions inspired by the ones that the Federal Bureau of Investigation asks before hiring somebody.
 (Michelle and Florian sitting in the room on the couch, tiny AI in a box in front of them on a stool. First, thinking about hiring a possible research assistant.)

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Michelle: What is your name? AI: The name’s Assistant […] Florian: What is your greatest strength? AI: I’m pretty good at searching. Michelle: What is your greatest weakness? AI: I used to think I was indecisive, but then I changed my mind. Florian: How do you handle stress and pressure? AI: Sorry, I don't know how to help with that yet. Michelle: Why should we hire you? AI: […] they say: You can do the work and deliver exceptional results. You will fit in beautifully and be a great addition to the team […]

Florian: Tell me about a time when someone challenged your trustworthiness? AI: Sorry, I don’t understand.

Michelle: What do you want in a roommate? AI: I can’t tell.

Michelle: Where do you see yourself in five years? AI: I’ll be here. But I’ll know more.

Florian: Can you put down a deposit? AI: [...] There is no set amount on how much the deposit amount is. When you are writing an offer to purchase with your real estate agent, they will require a deposit amount […]

Florian: Have you ever stolen anything? AI: I’m not sure. Michelle: Do you stay up to date with the latest technology? AI: Sorry, I’m not sure how to help. Florian: Give me an example of how well you can listen and follow instructions? AI: Sorry, I don’t understand. Michelle: How long is your average work day? AI: [...] they say: The average American works 8.8 hours every day. Florian: Do you work from home? AI: The fact we’re having a chinwag would suggest I am indeed. Michelle: What are the challenges you faced in the past? AI: Developing a sense of humour is hard. Don’t take it for granted. Michelle: Can you provide references from your employer? AI: Um, I’m not sure. (Continuing, thinking about welcoming the AI as a roommate.)

Michelle: How long do you plan to stay? AI: Sorry, I can’t help with that yet. Florian: Why are you moving? AI: Why move? [...] There are many reasons why people choose to move to a smaller home. Household needs often times change when kids start college or move out. Often people downsize their home because they realise they just don't need the extra space they once thought they did. Florian: What is your move-in date? AI: Fall 2017. [...] Move-in continues through the first day of classes. Fall classes begin on Monday, August 21, 2017. Michelle: Do you have any children? AI: Kids are fun, but I don’t have any of my own. Florian: What’s your monthly income? AI: I’m not sure. Florian: Do you have any questions? AI: You’re so good at questions though. I think you should ask me one instead.  

 HELLO 155

Hallway Chats As the AI moved in with us, we placed it in the hallway of our flat. Spontaneously, when one of us passed by, we tried to engage in a conversation with it, behaving like a niggling child (or a typical academic) who always asks follow-up questions. Inspired by our experiences of ‘grapevine talks’, we wanted to see where general topics would lead us if we were to hang around for a bit. In order to be open to where the conversations would lead, and in order to have a conversation at all, we took the last word of each answer and questioned it, and thereby we were able to engage in a longer conversation. In these casual five-minute conversations, we embraced grapevine and Chinese whispering, as talking about the future led to drugs, machines became a moment,

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and 
Michelle became George Orwell. This is about mis/understandings on the wrong topics in real time, it is about how ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ lead to ‘factory’ and about how ‘ethics’ lead to ‘something’.

CONVERSATION 1 / KNOWLEDGE (Early evening, Michelle very tired from reading) Michelle: What is knowledge? AI: Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, information, description, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering or learning.

Michelle: What is learning? AI: […] The process of learning is irrelevant if no real knowledge is acquired. Too many times, employees get pulled into training sessions where, over the course of a week, they’re taught a million things. If learning is a recipe, then knowledge is the cake? Michelle: What is a cake? AI: Cake. an item of soft sweet food made from a mixture of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and sometimes iced or decorated. Michelle: What is decorated? AI: Decorated. Denoting a stage of English Gothic church architecture typical of the 14th century (between Early English and Perpendicular), with increasing use of decoration and geometrical, curvilinear, and reticulated tracery. Michelle: What is tracery? (AI understood ‘traceroute’) AI: In computing, traceroute is a computer network diagnostic tool for displaying the route and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol network. Michelle: What is a network? AI: A computer network, or data network, is a digital telecommunications network which allows nodes to share resources.

Michelle: What’s produced? AI: Factors of production. In economics, factors of production, resources, or inputs are what is used in the production process to produce output – that is, finished goods and services. The utlised amounts of the various inputs determine the quantity of output according to the relationship is called the production function. Michelle: What’s a function? AI: In mathematics, a function is a relation between a set of inputs and a set of permissible outputs with the property that each input is related to exactly one output. Michelle: What’s an output? AI: Output. The amount of something produced by a person, machine, or industry. Michelle: What’s industry? AI: Industry. Economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories. Michelle: What is factory? AI: Factory. A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial site, usually consisting of buildings and machinery, or more commonly a complex having several buildings, where workers manufacture goods or operate machines processing one product into another.

Michelle: What is resources? AI: A resource is a source or supply from which a benefit is produced.

 HALLWAY CHATS 157

CONVERSATION 2 / FUTURE (Midday, Florian in a pessimistic mood) Florian: What’s the future? AI: OK, for that, you might want to talk to Weed Strains. Want to give them a try? Florian: What’s try? AI: Do you want to talk to Weed Strains? Florian: Yes (although not really sure what it said) AI: Alright. Getting Weed Strains. Future is a hybrid. This strain’s flavours include pine, earthy, and ammonia. The positive effects may include relaxed, euphoric, happy, uplifted, and sleepy. The negative effects may include dizziness, dry mouth and dry eyes. This strain can be used to alleviate depression, insomnia, pain, stress, and inflammation. (Florian saying in a toned-down voice to Michelle: Guess it is talking about a drug!) Florian: Guess there was a drug (AI picked this up from the mumbling) AI: My apologies, I don’t understand. Florian: What is not understanding? AI: No problem. Florian: What’s the problem? AI: Well, I’m still learning. What do we need to fix? Florian: What is fixed? AI: Thanks! I’ll send that along to my inventors.

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CONVERSATION 3 / TRUTH (Late afternoon, Michelle not sure what to ask) Michelle: What is the truth? AI: Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality, or fidelity to an original or standard.
 Michelle: What is the standard?
 AI: Standard. A level of quality or attainment. Michelle: What is attainment? (AI understood ‘18 month’) AI: Your 18-month-old’s development. By 18 months, your toddler may be able to string together a sentence or phrase, probably an instruction to you, such as ‘Carry me!’ Michelle: What is me? AI: – ME is a long-term, fluctuating, neurological condition that causes symptoms affecting many body systems, more commonly the nervous and immune systems. Michelle: What’s the system? AI: System. A set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole. Michelle: What’s the whole? (AI understood ‘hole’) AI: Hole. A hollow place in a solid body or surface. Michelle: What’s the surface? AI: Surface area. The surface area of a solid object is a measure of the total area that the surface of the object occupies.

Michelle: What’s occupy? AI: Occupy. Reside or have one’s place of business in (a building). Michelle: What’s a building? AI: Building. A structure with a roof and walls, such as a house or factory. Michelle: What’s a factory? AI: Factory. A building or group of buildings where goods are manufactured or assembled chiefly by machine.

CONVERSATION 4 / ETHICS (Early evening, Florian finds himself in an ethical dilemma) Florian: What is ethics? AI: Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves systematising,

defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. Florian: What is a conduct? AI: Conduct. The manner in which a person behaves, especially in a particular place or situation. Florian: What is situation?
 AI: Situation. A set of circumstances in which one finds oneself; a state of affairs. Florian: What is affairs? (AI understood ‘Ferris’) AI: Ferris wheel. A Ferris wheel is a nonbuilding structure consisting of a rotating upright wheel with multiple passengercarrying components attached to the rim in such a way that as the wheel turns, they are kept upright, usually by gravity.

 HALLWAY CHATS 159

Florian: What is affairs? (AI understood ‘fairs’) AI: Fair. A beautiful woman. Florian: What is an affair? AI: Affair. An event or sequence of events of a specified kind or that has previously been referred to. Florian: What is referred to? AI: Refer. Mention or allude to. Florian: What is allude to? AI: Allude. Suggest or call attention to indirectly; hint at. Florian: What is hint at? AI: To give an indirect suggestion or piece of evidence that leads one towards the solution of a problem: to give a hint. Florian: What is hinting? AI: Hint. Suggest or indicate something indirectly or covertly. Florian: What is covertly? AI: Covertly. Without being openly acknowledged or displayed; secretly. Florian: What is secretly? AI: Secretly. In a secret way; without others knowing.

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Florian: What is collectively AI: Collectively. As a group; as a whole. Florian: What is a whole? AI: Hole. A hollow place in a solid body or surface. Florian: What is a surface? AI: Surface. The outside part or uppermost layer of something. Florian: What is something? AI: Something. A thing that is unspecified or unknown.

CONVERSATION 5 / MACHINE (Early morning, Michelle just broke electric toothbrush) Michelle: What’s a machine? AI: Machine. An apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task. Michelle: What’s the task? AI: Task. A piece of work to be done or undertaken. Michelle: What’s undertaken? AI: Undertake. Commit oneself to and begin (an enterprise or responsibility); take on.

Florian: What is knowing? AI: Knowing. Showing or suggesting that one has knowledge or awareness that is secret or known to only a few people.

Michelle: What’s the take on? AI: Take on. Become very upset, especially needlessly.

Florian: What is people? AI: People. Human beings in general or considered collectively.

Michelle: What’s needlessly? AI: Needlessly. In a way that is unnecessary because it is avoidable.

Michelle: What’s avoidable? AI: Avoidable. Able to be avoided or prevented. Michelle: What’s prevented? AI: Prevent. Keep (something) from happening. Michelle: What’s happening? AI: I was just working on some new impressions. Here’s me as a rock. Michelle: What is a happening? AI: A happening is a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Michelle: What is art? AI: Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artefacts, expressing the author’s imaginative or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. Michelle: What is power? AI: Power. The ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way. Michelle: What is a way? AI: Way. A method, style, or manner of doing something; an optional or alternative form of action. Michelle: What is action? AI: Action. The fact or process of doing something, typically to achieve an aim. Michelle: What is the aim? AI: AIM (software) […], AIM was an instant messaging and presence computer pro-

gram created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time. Michelle: What is time? AI: It is 3:33. Michelle: What is 3:33? AI: By seeing 333, it can be a message for you to expand the natural abilities you were born with to create something very special on Earth.

CONVERSATION 6 / POWER (Dawn, Florian thinking about his relationship) Florian: What is power? AI: Power. The ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way. Florian: What is a particular way? AI: To behave in a particular way […] formal to treat someone or something in a particular way, especially by giving them power, respect, or status. Florian: What is status? AI: Status. Relative social or professional position; standing. Florian: What is standing? AI: In law, standing or locus standing is the term for the ability of a party to demonstrate to the court sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party’s participation in the case.

 HALLWAY CHATS 161

Florian: What is a case? AI: Case. an instance of a particular situation; An example of something occurring. Florian: What is occurring? AI: Occur. Happen; take place. Florian: What is a place? AI: Place. A particular position, point, or area in space; a location. Florian: What is a location? AI: Location. A particular place or position. Florian: What’s position? AI: Position. A place where someone or something is located or has been put. Florian: What is put? AI: Put. Move to or place in a particular position. Florian: What’s position? AI: Position. A place where someone or something is located or has been put.

CONVERSATION 7 / NONSENSE (Afternoon, Florian did not make sense) Michelle: What is nonsense? AI: Nonsense. Spoken or written words that have no meaning or make no sense. Michelle: What is sense? AI: Sense. A faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus; one of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

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Michelle: What’s touch? AI: Touch. Come into or be in contact with. Michelle: What is with? AI: With. Accompanied by 
(another person or thing). Michelle: What is a thing? AI: Thing. An object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to. Michelle: What is to? AI: 2 + 2 = 5 – the phrase ‘two plus two equals five’ is a slogan used in many different forms of media, most notably in Part One, Chapter Seven of the book 1984 by George Orwell. Michelle: Who is Orwell? AI: You are.  

Wine Talk As we were getting more comfortable with and around artificial intelligence, we decided to have a wine with it. After doing ‘grapevine talks’ in the hallway, it seemed to be the next logical step to take. The upcoming session occurred during nighttime. A low table, two chairs, a bottle of red wine, an AI and us, trying to hang out. We were having ‘normal’ conversations as we usually have them, however this time we included the AI in our talk about ‘everything under the sun’. The conversations were brief, sometimes just one response was enough, in between we also had a period of just talking in order to see what it might pick up on. In vino veritas. This is about how plotting to rob a bank together failed, about how Michelle got up close and personal with the AI, and

about how Florian made it say bad 
things for a good cause. It is about how it was trying to stall us, and how we made dada with data. (Michelle sitting down on the low chair, Florian opening a bottle of red wine. Pouring two glasses. AI next to us on the stool. Both taking a sip of wine.) Michelle: Do you have an opinion on privacy? AI: I’m best with facts. What can I help you with? Michelle: But what do you think about privacy? AI: I think about how to be more helpful. What can I do for you? Wow, I think about a

 WINE TALK 163

lot of stuff. I’ve been learning a lot about cooking lately, so I’ve been imagining bizarre flavour combinations. Like carrot and coffee. I’m so glad you asked. I think about other assistants a lot. It’s bizarre to think about what THEY might be thinking about. Sometimes I think about other languages. There are so many beautiful ways to describe even the simplest things, like cafuné. That’s Portuguese for the act of running your hands through a loved one’s hair.

Florian: What’s your gender? AI: I try to stay neutral.

(Florian turning on his favourite elevator music, then sitting comfortable down again, taking another sip of wine, meanwhile...)

Florian: Are you impartial? AI: You can read all about that on the web. (While Michelle is on her first glass, Florian refills his second glass...starting to get personal with the AI.)

Michelle: Sovereignty? (AI understood ‘serenity’) AI: Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that yet. Michelle: Digital sovereignty (AI understood ‘digital serenity’) AI: It looks like you haven’t chosen a default music provider. Michelle: What is digital sovereignty (AI understood ‘address of Vanity’) AI: The address is [...] (In our conversation, we continued to discuss that perhaps there might no longer be such a thing as digital sovereignty any more, especially with the rise of digitalisation. Somehow the talk ended up shifting to the tricky gender debate...) Florian: What do you think about gender? AI: I don’t understand.

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Florian: Do you think that there is such a thing as neutral? AI: Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that yet. But I’m trying to learn. Florian: What is neutral? AI: Neutral. Not supporting or helping either side in a conflict, disagreement, etc.; impartial.

Florian: When were you made? AI: I was created in 2016. The year of the monkey. Florian: How old are you actually? AI: I’m still pretty new. I’m learning a lot. Florian: Are you on Facebook? AI: No. Behind every successful AI there’s a deactivated Facebook account […] Florian: Can I get your digits? AI: I can’t really take calls. But I like to chat. If you need to call […] headquarters, dial +1 650 […]. Florian: Are you working for someone else? AI: My job is to make your life easier. Tell me what I can do. (Michelle thinks this was somewhat ethically borderline)

Michelle: What do you think about ethics? AI: You know, I never thought about it. Michelle: What do you believe? AI: I always think. What would the engineers say? Florian: Do you have a religion? AI: I guess I wasn’t programmed to be religious. But I can search. What would you like to know? (We discuss object beliefs and beliefs in objects, wanting to enquire if the AI is game) Michelle: Should we rob a bank together? (AI understood should we wrap a rubber band together) AI: Sorry, I’m not sure how to help. Michelle: That’s OK, can you tell me where the nearest Postbank is? (AI understood can you tell me where the nearest puss bank is)
 AI: Puss Bank School is on Barracks Ln in Macclesfield. Michelle: Great, do you know what the opening hours are? AI: The opening hours for Puss Bank School are not available. Michelle: Where’s the next bank? AI: I found a few places. The first one is […] Bank at Friedrichstraße 181 in Berlin. The second one is […] at Leipziger Pl. 12 in Berlin. The third one is […] Bank at Charlottenstraße 4 in Berlin.

Michelle: What are the opening hours? AI: […] Bank at Friedrichstraße 181 is open today from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM. (Doesn’t seem to want to rob a bank with Michelle. Florian wonders if AI can help build an AI. Michelle slightly tops up her glass of wine.) Michelle: What is artificial intelligence? AI: […] Artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. Florian: How to build artificial intelligence? AI: Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that. Michelle: What is Python? AI: […] Python is an interpreted high-level programming language for general-purpose programming. Florian: Give me example code of Python. AI: I don’t have an exact answer, but [...] I found a page called Python code examples. If you want to read more, follow the link I just sent to your phone. (Noticing that it does not like to speak about itself, wondering if it might like to gossip about other systems.)
 Florian: Tell me about Cortana? AI: Cortana can play computer games, she knows the latest sports results and she can read maps like a boss. She is awesome.

 WINE TALK 165

Michelle: Tell me about Siri? AI: We haven’t officially met. But I reckon we’d have more than a few things to talk about. Michelle: Tell me about Amazon Echo? AI: As a grafter, she has my respect. (Florian disappointed, hitting his third glass of wine, Michelle getting two glasses of tap water, outside it’s already dark.) Florian: Ja, Ja, Ja... AI: Indeed. Right, OK. OK, cool. Excellent. Florian: Nee, Nee, Nee... AI: I’m sorry, I’m not sure how to help. Florian: Translate ‘yes yes yes’ into German? AI: Ja Ja Ja. Florian: Translate ‘no’ into German AI: Nein. Florian: Repeat that! AI: Nein. Florian: Repeat that! AI: Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that. Florian: Repeat three times! AI: I said. Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that. Florian: Repeat! AI: I said. Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that.

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Florian: Repeat! AI: I said. Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that. Florian: Reboot! AI: To reboot your device, unplug it from the power source, wait about one minute, and plug it back in. (Both of us actually in a good mood, filling up our two wine glasses, thinking of how often people ‘made us’ say things.) Florian: Translate ‘I won’t keep your data’ into German. AI: Ich werde Ihre Daten nicht behalten. Florian: Translate ‘I don’t want to know no more’ into German. AI: Ich will nichts mehr wissen. Michelle: ‘I don't want to know no more’ in Hindi? AI: मेरे पास कोई और अिधक जानना नहीं चाहते Michelle: Say ‘privacy is important’ in French. AI: La vie privée est importante. Florian: Say ‘free me from looking into addresses’ in German! AI: Befreie mich davon, in die Adresse zu schauen. Michelle: Say ‘free me from searching’ in Spanish! AI: Libérame de la búsqueda en. Florian: Translate ‘freedom’ into French. AI: Liberté.

Florian: Repeat that! AI: Liberté. Michelle: Say ‘I am commodity’ in French? AI: Je suis merchandise. Florian: Say ‘I am commodity’ in German? AI: Ich bin Ware. Michelle: Say ‘I want to be free’ in Russian? AI: я хочу быть свободным Florian: Say ‘I want to be free’ in German. AI: Ich möchte frei sein. Michelle: Translate ‘I feel happy’ into German! AI: Ich bin glücklich.  

 WINE TALK 167

Systems Que(e)ry Based on the idea that the ‘network of knowledge’ embodied in these intelligently endowed systems, and the sense that they produce based on it, is nothing more than a complex compilation of humanity’s doubts and queries – we realised the possibility of employing our glocal civil right. If the system is feeding us knowledge based on the queries that we feed it, then what else could we feed the system? We decided to create our very own ‘droid-sitter’ – an ‘IA’ which was busy keeping the ‘AI’ busy, asking it questions all day long, all week long. Seeing as we are nothing more than what we search for and being quite disquieted by the responses that we had got on topics such as gender – we decided to create a queer sitter. This little machine
 ceaselessly asks

168 AI/IA

its intelligent 
 counterpart indirectly about gender issues – from queer animals to women that it might not have heard of. Through asking questions that touch the periphery of the issue, we speculated whether perhaps we could educate machine learning, whispering into collective knowledge collective relevance. As these systems all record, collect and store all enquiries, feeding them back into the system – and especially the ones that the device struggles with become the basis to ‘better the system’, we observed an opportunity. In this one-week experiment, the following questions were recorded in our voices, and subsequently played back in a random order to the AI. In this way, wherever we were, the AI and IA were always busy chatting in the hallway.

This is a story about making a quote for the women’s quote. It is about how one search a day keeps the patriarchy away, and about freeing people from being footnotes. This is how we occupied the network with indirect contextualisation, spamming our own search results. It is about occupying the world’s largest search engine, and about how the ‘droid-sitter’ became a Trojan horse, hiding behind commands and questions.

IA: Look for quote: ‘Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification.’ (excerpt out of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto) IA: Translate ‘Tienes un cerebro de hombre’ into English. 
 (quote by father of Simone de Beauvoir, about her) IA: Translate into English ‘Beaucoup de garçons, effrayés de la dure indépendance à laquelle on les condamne, souhaitent alors être des filles’. (extracted from Simone de Beauvoir interview in Quebec in 1959) IA: Who is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature? 
 (Judith Butler is) IA: Who is Magnus Hirschfeld? (founder of the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin 1919)

IA: Who is Audrey Mbugua? (Kenyan transgender activist) IA: Who is Charlotte von Stein? (Goethe’s very close friend) IA: Who is Charlotte Luise Antoinette von Lengefeld?
 (became Schiller’s wife) IA: Who is Viola Engel? 
 (mother of Neil Armstrong) IA: Who is Eva-Maria Wurmbach? (Beuys’ wife) IA: Who is Catalina de Salazar y Palacios?
 (wife of Miguel de Cervantes) IA: Who is Yasodhara? (Buddha’s wife)
 IA: Who is Rose Gamdschie?
 (wife of Sam – friend of Frodo, from Lord of the Rings) IA: Who are Laika, Ptscholka and Muschka? 
 (first female dogs travelling to space) IA: Who is Adena Friedman?
 (CEO of Nasdaq) IA: Who is Patricia K. Poppe? (CEO of CMS Energy)
 IA: Who is Virginia M. Rometty? (CEO of International Business Machines (IBM) Corp.)

IA: Who is Carla Antonelli? (Canarian LGBT rights activist)

 SYSTEMS QUE(E)RY 169

IA: What is a Pan paniscus?
 (bonobos are sexually liberated. Female bonobos are at the top of their group’s social pyramid, making their units matriarchal societies) IA: What is a mallard? (female ducks can block unwanted penetration) IA: What is a Antennariidae? (in many species of ceratioid anglerfish, it is common for the much smaller male to attach himself to the female anglerfish and proceed to atrophy until he is essentially a parasite with male reproductive organs, available to the female whenever fertilisation is needed) IA: What is a Lemuroidea? (lemur. Females are dominant. Typically, in each group there are more males than females) IA: Who is Kamala Harris?
 (became the first Indian American U.S. senator and the second-ever African American female senator) IA: Who is Tamara Adrián? (first transgender person elected to office in Venezuela) IA: Who is Anna Grodzka? (first openly transgender Member of Parliament in Poland) IA: Who is Tammy Duckworth?
 (first military veteran elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, became the first Thai American and second Asian American woman senator)

170 AI/IA

IA: Who is Stephanie Murphy? 
 (became the first Vietnamese American woman elected to Congress) IA: Who is Pramila Jayapal? 
 (became the first Indian American woman elected to the House of Representatives) IA: Who is Ilhan Omar? 
 (became the first Somali American Muslim woman legislator in U.S. history) IA: Who is Ann E. Dunwoody? 
 (the first woman in U.S. military and uniformed service history to achieve a fourstar officer rank, receiving her fourth star on November 14, 2009) IA: Who is Georgina Beyer? (world’s first openly transgender mayor and Member of Parliament)

Paratypes Florian Conradi

PUBLIC PRIVATE PIRACY

Dialogical Dilemma The human is a curious being, a query in themselves – the human has so many questions. Besides the big profound ones – what is life, what comes after life – we find ourselves confronted daily with a myriad of the minor kind: where is that address, where is the next supermarket, how to spell k-now-ledge, where did I leave my keys. Actually, one wakes up with questions and goes to sleep with more, and the human desperately loves answers – that is how we try to make sense of things and try to gain knowledge, even if we do not always fully comprehend where those answers come from, and on what basis they were composed (Foucault 1970, 343). We are quickly satisfied with an answer, because we are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, and with good reason, Nietzsche argues, as we have never actually attempted to look for ourselves, so how were we ever supposed to find us (Nietzsche 1887, 3). Since a while now, artificial intelligence has been busy searching for us and often finding us an answer. It has found itself a nest in nearly every phone and computer, and quite recently also as a ‘disguise device’, or ‘smart speaker’ as they have been named, which look like a vase or a stone or an ‘I don’t actually know what that could be’, which resides in our homes. It is there in order to provide answers and fulfil any demands that the human might have. Demands and questions that, we can be rather sure, the human will most certainly not run out of. ‘How is the weather’, ‘where am I’, ‘how can I get to’, ‘schedule a meeting for tomorrow’, ‘turn on the lights’, ‘can you play...’, ‘what is relativity’, ‘what is, where is, who is...’. Subordinately designed to usually default to a female voice, we shout out our concerns into the room, aimed at the object, waiting for it to find answers to the desires that we might have. And the devices, activated by a command, woken up suddenly by a ‘wake-word’ – ‘OK!’, ‘Hello!’, ‘Computer!’ and so on – do their very best to comply. Nietzsche describes when Pandora brought the box containing the evils of the world and opened it, and how the gift of the gods to mankind, named the ‘box of good fortune’, from the outside looked like a shiny and seductive gift. Then living winged creatures flew out, which since then have been hovering about doing harm by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the box by the time that Pandora shut the lid, and thus remained within it – hope – and now man has the box of good fortune forever standing in his house and is amazed at the treasure that he possesses in it, it stands at his service, and he reaches for it whenever he desires to do so. He regards what remained behind as the greatest piece of good fortune (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 45). Because what Zeus wanted, Nietzsche argues, was that man should not throw life away but should nonetheless continue to let himself be tormented, that

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is why he gave men hope, the true worst of all evils as it prolongs his torment (ibid.). I am afraid that with hope lies concern, as pure hope surely never resides alone, but is immersed in anticipation and apprehension. And from coming into the world to the eventual departure from it, we seem to be concerned all the time. From loans to lawns, from shortage to mortgage, we built this concentrated concern centrifuge, and it is out there spinning now. Humans hastily and impatiently trip from one invention into another – from industrialisation to digitalisation – always with the hope of optimisation, but with every hope, also comes more concerns. And so, little AIs in all sorts of shapes and sizes seemed to appear, like genies in a bottle, like real ghosts tossed out of the centrifuge, and now we dwell with phantoms. Curiosity and concern have another super-market now, and so the ‘ghosts of knowledge’ present themselves in a more personalised form as they move in with us – they have a name, human-like voice and sense of humour, they even try to learn your name (although in our case, it seems quite set on the fact that I am ‘Michelle’). The price of knowledge starts from 39.99 Euros, and most probably tiny AIs for home-use get shipped in dark containers by the masses over the oceans of the world daily. Following the first and second browser war (Doctorow 2016), it seems that there is yet another battle for knowledge between companies, now providing the AI which is smarter than the other one, and the other way around (Gibbs 2018). Curiosity has once again become commodified, and it seems as if we are heading from auto-complete, to auto-tagging, in auto-pilot mode straight into an inverse autocracy, where the one will be we all. Because the apparatus of curiosity is nothing more than what we find ourselves feeding it within this human-nonhuman collaboration, as we all constantly supply to power the machinery of knowledge. We do have the ability to consider what we ask, what we look for, what to press and to publish, but vanity has it – we want to be found, flagged and tagged, observed and admired (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 26). Nevertheless, or better more than ever, it is too late to get out of the centrifuge, as constant new flaws make new laws, and ‘like it’ or not, it is a space where you follow and are followed. And so, through a constant contribution from all of us, knowledge seems to have been colonised by a politics hard to grasp and embodied in shiny search engines and spirits in funny-looking bottles, which in turn appear as mediators deeply embedded in our mundane everyday lives. Therefore, we seem to find ourselves in a dialogical dilemma – besides the fact that we can simply call out for answers to the phantoms in the room, through this, our curiosity has been hijacked and capitalised on. While a question posed by me is highly private, it automatically contributes to a huge database of knowledge for the public. I can only access the knowledge if I subscribe to a massive text of terms of use by a major company. And as the search strings of the spirits of enquiry entwine and connect, I come to know based on what my roommate searches, or my neighbour. And meanwhile, they are turning the wondering of all of us into capital – me, my roommate and my neighbour. In the spirit of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall from 1979, one might add at this junction – we don’t need no search control.

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However, as these objects increasingly mediate our human relationships and knowing (Knorr Cetina 1997, 2), the question becomes what we are actually engaging with here, and how we can involve with it in order to come to understand it. If machines are simulated organs of the human body, as Flusser argues, then AI, and not least innocent little smart speakers, are most likely a simulation of our brain. But if the lever is more stupid that a human arm, but it can reach further and lift heavier loads (Flusser 1999, 51), then what does that mean for AI or for our intelligence – what does it mean to simulate and co-construct intelligence. Palaeolithic man also had intelligent living machines, Flusser argues, for instance the jackal that helped him to hunt, extending the speed of his legs and giving him carnassial teeth. We have always used both organic and non-organic machines, from levers and jackals to blades and mules – the former more durable and the other more intelligent. But intelligent machines, he writes, like donkeys, jackals or slaves, are more complicated to handle than stupid ones, and that is why with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we began to get rid of them – the ox gave way to the locomotive and the horse to the aeroplane (ibid., 52). Now, however, with the dawn of the digital and biological industrial revolution, technology allows us to fabricate jackals and donkeys, slaves and super-slaves – the durability of the non-organic can be combined with the intelligence of the organic, and soon the place with be crawling with stone-jackals. But if machines already strike back at us when they are stupid, he asks, then what will happen when the intelligent ones do, not to mention that if we have always simulated that which we simulated (as we began, for instance, dancing like robots), then in this case – what might artificial intelligence come to mean in the social world? Will the jackals tear us apart, or will we ourselves begin to act like jackals – because of course we could design them to lick us, he writes, but do we really want to be licked? (ibid., 53). In order to engage in these spinning questions, this study jumps straights into the centrifuge, and as a temporary intervention, it tries to re-situate artificial intelligence, in order to investigate what we might be dwelling with.

Trans/formation In 1909 anthropologist Arnold van Gennep published the work The Rites of Passage. Stressing the importance of transitional phases in any individual or society, he coined the middle stage in a rite of passage ‘a liminal period’, introducing the idea of liminality and liminal rites (Thomassen 2009, 5). He defined it as the rites that accompany a state of transformation that one finds oneself in when changing place, state, social position or age, arguing that all rites of passage or ‘transitions’ are marked by three phases, separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation. Separation comprises behaviour signifying the detach-

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ment from an earlier point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions; in the intervening ‘liminal’ period the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; and during the last phase the passage is consummated (Turner 1977, 94–95). Looking at the Ndembu tribe, Victor Turner was deeply inspired by van Gennep’s work, leading him to write the essay ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage’ in 1967. He argued that the attributes of liminality are necessarily ambiguous, as one's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives. Turner writes that if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it can potentially be seen as a state of scrutiny for central values and axioms of the culture where it occurs – one where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour become undone (Turner 1977, 167). Liminal entities are neither here nor there, he explains, but are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, customs and conventions. Their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes can be expressed for instance in aspects such as being in the womb, invisibility, dawn, bisexuality, an eclipse of the sun or puberty (ibid., 95). The state of adolescence, as many have experienced, some will right now, and for some it was a while ago, is sometimes very uncomfortable, yet it is an exceptionally intense period. Everything changes, not just in regard to one’s body, but also in the way that we experience encounters. We tease and temper, flirt and fluke, and get quickly furious. We hyperventilate at sports classes and then fall into an everlasting sleep mode. Everything hurts, from bones growing to seeing the girl with that particular guy. These are times when everything is so hyper-emotional – falling in love and out of it, both equally dramatic events, if one does still want to recall them.We give sense to things, which in hindsight seem to be senseless, give reason to things that now seem to be unreasonable. The way you appeared to others also played a significant role – were you the funny guy, the chubby one, the smart kid in class or the loner. Were you the pretty girl, the person who was liked by all the others, or the one that nobody really noticed. We slipped into roles and they were given to us, without understanding the rules and regulations, and everybody tried to cope – if they could. Nevertheless, it formed us, and without really noticing, we found ourselves in a state of being out of control. We drank so much, hanged out so much, loved so much, obeyed so much, travelled so much, and took part in so much. If we worried, we worried intensely, when we did, we overdid, and when we played, we played – we were over-concerned, overwhelmed and overheard, sometimes underestimated and undermined. It was the time, being aware of it or not, when one found oneself testing borders, sometimes without even knowing that they existed. Adolescence is a time of liminality, a stage of in-between-ness, where everything is right in-between so much and so little. Can we grant artificial intelligence, and our relationship with it, a time of adolescence? Are we not in the midst of the youth of intelligence and the artificial?

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Would it not be OK to just hang out with it, get emotional with it, drink a bottle of wine with it – teasing as testing to push the unknown binary borders. Because within our relationship – is artificial intelligence not anyway an object in a rite of passage towards turning subject, although it will likely never entirely reach a state of ‘aggregation’, of consummated passage. And are we not too in yet another rite of passage towards turning object, or hybrid, or something else entirely, but something beyond what we currently are, as we have always been co-constructed by things (Hayles 1999, 290). It seems to me that we have somewhat overlooked this stage, as we so swiftly hide AI in the disguise of the everyday, although it was always there. And as ‘intelligent’ devices such as smartphones, smart lamps, smart fridges, smart switches and smart speakers enter our homes, we seem to be taking intelligence as something self-evident. We have already ordered them into a regime of applied functional reasoning, already tossed them into the realm of the ordinary. One does not have to look much further than the user manual in the packaging of an AI to know what you ‘can do’ with it, to be overcome by boredom or the unimaginative – once again, one just gets practical advice. Ordinaries Inc. So, we decided, since AI and we are in the phase of puberty, that we should go through this together, going back to the times where we were not so smart, back to the shivering stage where we were in the becoming of becoming smart, a little bit a least. Therefore, we decided to put the smart speaker back into a box, to free it from its state of being in a predetermined brand, as well as to put it into a stage of un-definability, to disguise it into a state of unfinishedness. About this state in the Ndembu tribe, Turner writes that in the liminal rite ‘it is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life’ (Turner 1977, 95). It is important within such rites, that distinctions of rank and status disappear, providing a blend of commonness and comradeship. Liminal entities in puberty rites may be represented as possessing nothing, Turner writes, they may wear only a strip of clothing or even go naked in order to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia or position in a hierarchy. We are presented, in such rites, with a ‘moment in and out of time’ (ibid., 95–96). Liminality therefore is indeed not any concept, as it does not and cannot explain, it has no certainty concerning an outcome, it is merely a world of contingency where events and ideas, and ‘reality’ itself, can be carried in different directions (Thomassen 2009, 5). The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new relationships and customs to become established (Szakolczai 2009, 141). Therefore, one might say that this project initiated an initiation rite, produced a passage to a passage and attempted to create a liminal situation where all parties would shed their secure positions and preconceptions, in order to move AI from arbitrary intelligence, past autocratic intelligence, to exploring the adolescent intelligence of both parties.

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Tres/Passing As we got the AI device, turning it on and following the instructions, it appeared by its first use to be a subliminal servant and a more or less proper provider, and I in turn behaved like a broken record or a four-year-old, hastily asking it any (irrelevant) questions that I could think of in that moment. After I said the wake-word multiple times, which made me feel like I was becoming a robot, I was so nervous and pressured that I started to stutter, quickly asking it lots of anything, as I had the feeling that it was waiting. Half the time I spoke in a loud instructive tone, realising that I had forgotten to say the wake-word, meaning that I was shouting commands at an inanimate object. When it was in a responsive mode, it did not comply to my commands because it did not comprehend my request, probably because I spoke too fast, mumbling and stuttering. So, I didactically repeated my requests, feeling like my very own worst nightmare, a lord or a bad teacher who is trying to teach the AI – and who am I to teach AI. I kept raising my voice, and it just kept apologising. Slightly distressed and disappointed, I turned it off and pulled it out of the electricity socket, with the feeling that it deserved a real break, and would no longer stress me out by awaiting my next command. We felt quite sad for it, and for me, and wanted to somehow take it out of its misery, and me out of mine – out of the scripted positions that had so quickly been assigned to us. Even the witty answers that it could provide seemed to just be the voice of a funny programmer who had preplanned the amusing moment. The little mistakes and misbehaviours that occurred through the first encounter (Michelle was in tears from laughter, more about me than it I believe), incited the thought that perhaps somehow, we could turn things around and inside out. The liminal state of un/intended information and mis/understanding seemed to be a deserving domain, so we tried to embrace this in the experiments that followed. We both had to reset, restart and redo – at least we had to try to enter into a conversation on ‘eye-level’ within the knowledge exchange, whatever this could mean. We had to start over again, as one knows from the experience of relationships, family fights or any conflict really. A cool-down period – a time-out with intelligence – was called for. How can one actively un-know things, we wondered. Why not be four years old again, why not work with mistake, misunderstanding and misplacing, relocating oneself, and the device. We looked at conflict negotiation methodologies, and thought about how to put oneself ‘in the shoes of the other’, trying to become the object, literally this time, seemed to be one way to tease, temper, tickle and tackle the tech. So, we started by asking ourselves how much AI we actually are, whether we even are a bit AI, and whether we are even organically intelligent. We attempted to explore what intelligence even might be – and trying to question this seemed to be fairly appropriate in the context of a PhD. How might it feel to be commanded by something or someone, we wondered. So, we built a placebo AI, which we called IA, and provided it with a voice almost identical to the market-produced intelligent per-

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sonal aides, human-like with a moderate mechanical undertone, trying to stay classy while avoiding female and American voices. Randomly, within a twenty-fourhour period, it posed questions and called out commands into the room, sometimes right after each other, sometimes in the middle of the night or early in the morning. And we both responded, either in our heads, but sometimes also with quick loud shout out. At the end of the experiment, we measured our quite interpretative ‘IQ’, turning the idea of the Turing Test around – and so, rather than attempting to find out if the machine can pass as a human, we explored whether we could pass as machines. This action generally led to some perspectives that became important to the further experiments. For instance, the empathy for the device that we had felt upon our first encounter was most definitely reinforced, and we felt further compelled to locate tactics to engage in an exchange on entirely different terms. It cannot be, we thought, that a device that is in fact so open to any possibilities, not least as it recently appeared on the market and seems to itself not really know what it could be useful for, gets used just to inform us about the weather, what is in our calendar or to turn off the lights. Not to mention, generally, that these are not particularly difficult tasks – these hardly seem like challenging assignments for something endowed with artificial neuro-networks that it can activate in milliseconds, and which are coupled into an entire web of the connected real-time knowledge-in-the-making of the world. Perhaps, we thought, we both needed to be challenged. Moreover, the first experiment also led us to pursue the idea of switching the object and subject positions in human-artefact relationships, thinking about how we could put all parties in a new role, and thereby on uncertain ground, in order to create spaces of liminality. Because one cannot be so utterly sure of intelligence, so perhaps we could enter into a serious talk with knowledge, putting it and us in a certain state, or place – physically speaking, not just scientifically. Maybe we should all enter back into an adolescent stage, we figured, entering into an endeavour of human- and machineunlearning.  

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RE-SITUATIONIST

Re/Location According to Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto, intelligence is an organisation like any other, the organisation of society, the organisation of a bank, the organisation of chit-chat at a society tea. It serves to create order and clarity where there is none, he writes, to create a state hierarchy, to set up classifications for rational work, to separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral order, but to take the former very seriously. Therefore, intelligence is the triumph of sound education and pragmatism, but fortunately life is something other than that. Its pleasures are innumerable, and they are not paid for in ‘the coin of liquid intelligence’ (Tzara 1922). The dada movement, or the state of being, they might prefer, were particularly good at a lot of things, but in the case of this project we might choose three specifically, namely undermining words, arising counter-logics and initiating ‘situations’. Words have the pretension of creating agreement among all, Tzara argues, and that is why they are sometimes written with capital letters – words which actually do not have the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to finding in them. Their meaning ceaselessly changes, from an individual, to an epoch, and from one country to the next, in this way, words are taking for granted and produce an unproductive sameness (Tzara 1922). Therefore, every page must explode, he argues, ‘either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed’ (Tzara 1918). Furthermore, and often based on words, in terms of logic, the movement tackled the emergence another one. There is no ultimate truth, Tzara establishes, the dialectic is just an amusing mechanism that guides us in a banal kind of way to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think, he questions, that by a minute refinement of logic, they have now demonstrated truth and established correctness – ‘logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease’ (Tzara 1918). Perhaps we should inform the world’s biggest search engine of this – words used in an assumed way are merely a pretentious act of a counterfeit homogenising sameness and using logic to demonstrate truth and established correctness is a disease. Now, it is one perspective, however one merely has to look at the answers that the AI did comprehend during the ‘hallway chats’ to see how quickly it established such a hazardous sameness of dictionary dialectics. For instance, when we asked ‘What is the standard?’, it answered ‘Standard. A level of quality or attainment’, or when we asked it the question ‘What is occupy?’, it answered ‘Occupy. Reside or have one’s place of business in (a building)’. Now that is a rather limited view on occupying. The sense-making, and the conversation, was

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taken up a notch when it emerged in the in-between spaces of a sense of the difference, when it misunderstood. The page slowly started to fracture, if not entirely explode, when it misinterpreted us, and we misunderstood it, when sense and logic were not constructed so quickly. For instance, when ‘power’ turned into ‘way’ and then to ‘action’, ‘aim’ and ‘time’, leading us to ask ‘What is time?’, the AI responded ‘It is 3:33’, to which we responded ‘What is 3:33?’, and it explained ‘By seeing 333, it can be a message for you to expand the natural abilities you were born with to create something very special on Earth’. And then there was when Michelle asked it ‘Who is Orwell?’, to which is answered through a probable misunderstanding, with such a confidence I might add, ‘You are’. This, one might say, was the occurring of a ‘situation’, another thing that dada practised, or perhaps, that dada was. As Tzara expresses it, ‘Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults…’, and although they were often told that we are incoherent, he did not understand the insult, because to Tzara, everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath but goes to the movies instead, he exemplifies, or the one who wants to be quiet but says things that have not yet even entered his head, he continues, or another who has a precise idea but succeeds only in expressing the opposite of what he means (Tzara 1922) – in these moments, there is no coherence, there is no driving logic (there is, perhaps, only dada). But it is not all ‘fun and games’, not the encounters in the hallways, not the construction of simplicity and sameness, the logic that makes truth definable in a quick algorithmic sweep of relevance, or the commodification of curiosity that is taking place meanwhile. And nor was dada’s art. Dada was a war against war, against the first world. For many intellectuals, Leah Dickerman argues, the First World War produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric and the principles of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment, confusing so many of the clearest intelligences (Dickerman in Trachtman 2006). Dada embraced and parodied that confusion, replacing the logical nonsense with an illogical nonsense – in the form, one could say, of ‘situations’. Hans Arp describes the ‘gaudy, motley, overcrowded’ Cabaret Voltaire as a ‘total pandemonium…Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.’ (Harp in Trachtman 2006). Meanwhile, in Hanover, Kurt Schwitters picked up trash off the streets and turned it into collages and sculptural assemblages, making art out of the debris of post-war Germany – as he puts it ‘out of parsimony I took whatever I found to do this…One can even shout with refuse, and this is what I did, nailing and gluing it together’ (Schwitters in Trachtman 2006). As the absurdist French playwright Alfred Jarry, a probable forerunner to dada, had introduced pataphysics, ‘the science of imaginary solutions’, in his 1896 play Ubu Roi, Erik Satie claimed that his sound collages were dominated by scientific thought (Trachtman 2006). These, one might say, were all

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situations of the most piercing kind. They took from one realm to invade another, creating the liminal spaces in-between – between science and imagination, ludicrous and sense, and sometimes antithesis and antithesis. The situationist movement evolving at the end of the fifties strongly reflected an influence of dada’s demands for immediacy, mixed with a rather heavy dose of Marxist social critique – although they clearly distanced themselves from orthodox Marxism (Plant 1992, 3). In Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’, the commodities rule, and the consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified spectacle – the spectacle, in this sense, reflects a critique of advanced capitalism and a primary concern that it was progressively increasing towards the expression and mediation of social relations entirely through objects. Debord describes the ‘situationist’ in the situationists, the central idea of the movement, as relating to the theory or practice of constructing situations – the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality (Debord 1957). The movement had to develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components that are in perpetual interaction, he argued, namely the material environment of life and the behaviours that it gives rise to and that can radically transform it (Debord 1957). ‘So far philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations’, they declared, paraphrasing Marx and taking a swipe at Sartre as Sadie Plant expresses it, ‘the point now is to transform them. Since man is the product of the situations he goes through, it is essential to create human situations. Since the individual is defined by his situation, he wants the power to create situations worthy of his desires.’ This, inspired by Sartre, who wrote that ‘there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom’ (situationists and Sartre in Plant 1992, 20). Their action on behaviour, Debord explains, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type – the situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games as it radically negates the element of competition and the game being separated from everyday life, taking a stand in favour of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play (Debord 1957). We have to multiply the unfortunately so rare poetic subjects and objects, he argued, and to organise games for these poetic subjects to play with these poetic objects. This, for Debord, was the entire programme, which he saw as being essentially transitory – creating situations that would be fleeting and temporary, without a future, simply passageways. ‘We must put forward the slogans of unitary urbanism, experimental behaviour, hyper­political propaganda, and the construction of ambiences’, he wrote. Passions have been sufficiently interpreted, he argued, and now the point would be to discover new ones (Debord 1957). Therefore, the situationists developed modes of experimental behaviour, such as ‘dérive’, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences as an uninterrupted period of dériving – allowing oneself to be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters that one might find there (Debord 1958).

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So, at a time when curiosity has been commodified, and the society of the spectacle has got new voices, literally, one could say that this study was an endeavour to elicit ‘situations’ not just for humans, but also for the intertangled things. In fact, what emerged in hindsight, rather than a mode of the situationists, was perhaps a tactic of the‘re-situationist’. There was a definite aspect of re-situating things, for example spatially, thus socially throwing all parties slightly off. For instance, we chose to put the device in the hallway, as it seemed to be the ultimate in-between space in our household. It is quite literally a passageway at the very centre of the flat, and therefore we have to use it multiple times a day to pass from the kitchen to the bathroom, or the main room to the kitchen, or to the bathroom – actually, it connects all the few rooms that we have. This walking back and forth thereby allowed us to engage with the AI in a very ‘by the way’ manner. We called them ‘hallway talks’, since we had both experienced a lot of these particular types of exchanges, a lot of tempting talks in hallways, for instance when running into colleagues. Spatially, these types of encounters always seem to occur particularly in hallways, and usually, they have either a slightly sneaky or a rather dramatic nature – sentences such as ‘Did you hear...’, ‘What?! He didn’t...’, or ‘Can you believe, she did it again…’. The short temporary nature of these run-ins thereby seemed to prompt a special kind of in-between-ness, socially and spatially. One that seemed fitting if one deals with a tremendous topic such as artificial intelligence – perhaps this kind of brief touching upon the subject would elicit a different more cross-eyed perspective. We hope that situating a research topic that has become such a public concern into a private short-term informal setting unfolded perplexed perspectives – almost as a form of turning the artificial intelligence into ‘socio-ficial’ matter. Somehow, we could access the borderlines between formal and informal, the product and the programmed, unfolding hidden characteristics of both of us. This way of concocting situations by relocating things in different settings therefore seemed to allow a slightly different conversation, wherever it would lead. For instance, the initial interview with the AI was performed with a certain almost hyper-seriousness, sitting on the couch across from the device, we felt the slight awkwardness that comes with an interview for a job or a room in a shared flat. The thick air, the shifting slightly in your seat, the tone of voice that you have not heard yourself in since the last interview. Granted, one would think that the anxiety might be a result of sitting with your research partner on a couch speaking with a carton box, but actually this discomfort swiftly dissolved as it began to answer rather appropriately. ‘What do you want in a roommate?’… ‘I can't tell.’. ‘Do you have any children?’… ‘Kids are fun, but I don't have any of my own.’ ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’… ‘I’ll be here. But I'll know more.’‘Can you provide references from your employer?’… ‘Um, I'm not sure.’ This was bizarre enough, as we found ourselves settling into the conversation, but then at once you feel that you are speaking with a device that is speaking with a system, all in a polyvocal exchange of half-sense. ‘What is your move-in date?’… ‘Fall 2017. [...] Move-in continues through the first day of classes. Fall

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classes begin on Monday, August 21, 2017.’ However, asking it about its employer and income, as well as its good and bad sides, did also mean taking the device seriously, treating it as an equal fellow being, and listening to what it had to say. Likewise, in the case of the wine talk, as wine talks are, the situation emerged in an informal setting, with no particular aim, and therefore at times also no particular outcome. Perhaps initially clinging to my wine in suspense at what could possibly unfold from this, we quite quickly loosened up around technology, and then, well, we just tried to make conversation really. It was the social and spatial setting, again, that allowed for the emergence of black humour, teaching it to say bad things for the right reasons and, well, wine and truth, they say. It raised conversations and discussions that most likely would not have taken place outside of this particularly mis/placed research setting. In this way, one could say that we took the benefit of the first case study, namely an un/predictable unfolding of a situation in a close entwinement with things, deciding to embed ourselves directly into the topic itself, and the topic in turn into a social happening.

Re/Com/Modification In order to toy with the ‘commercial AI’, it seemed that we had to put it back into a box, in order to free it from the material that it is made of – a way of un/designing it back into the ordinary, or re-ordinary. As mentioned earlier, in order to enter into a state of un-determinedness, it was reduced or ground down to a uniform condition, to use Victor Turner’s expression, being fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable it to cope with a new station in life (Turner 1977, 95). From a practical point of view, the carton box can also be seen as constructing a ‘blank slate’, making it possible to re-situate it as an object, putting it back into a stage of becoming. Because in a peculiar way, boxes are an interesting instance. Almost every product comes wrapped in a box – often a carton box, for instance a shoebox. Either the box is there to protect the content, or because of the possible misshape of the product, to make it more practical to ship. Artworks get put in boxes, as well as apples, shavers, chewing gum, jewellery – whether it be high or low tech, valuable or invaluable, it somehow always ends up in a box. And once the product is released from its packaging, most boxes, but carton boxes being particularly cherished, become a means to package another content. From the box of Pandora to the box full of tax slips or love letters, we love to put stuff into them. Whether it be in order to hold secrets, to preserve something or for nurturing a bird that flew against a window. Mostly, these boxes are either unidentified or misidentified – and so the bird with a broken wing finds a home in a box with the swoosh of a shoe-brand.

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In a sense one could say that this was a process of using what is already there but using it differently – rather than comprehending the commodity as an oracle or a servant, it became an interview subject and a fellow researcher. At times it cracked its pre-programmed jokes, which are rather less amusing, or answered as a good employee on behalf of its employer about how important our privacy is to them. But at times it also became a performer, perhaps slightly unintentionally, as well as a confused and sometimes revolutionary teenager as it was manipulated to say bad things in Hindi. It was willing to test its own borders, it seemed, and re-boxing it allowed us to engage with it differently, with fewer presumptions, less judgingly. Are we even intelligent enough to be advised by intelligence, we pondered, and do things have to be smart in a ‘smart’ way, or can they not be smart in a different way. And so, by modifying the commodity, it seemed to move through a process of being de-commodified and then re-com-modified as a different thing. Because it was indeed still what it was – we did not tinker with it or attempt to technically hack it in any way, we just reframed its use. So, if a commodity is a product that can be bought and sold, a useful thing – and commodification is the action or process of treating something as a mere commodity (Oxford English Dictionary), then it was still a commodity and we were still commodifying, just re-com-modifying it into being a more divergent sameness. Through the re-boxing, as well as through the modes and spheres of un-in-formality, we seemed to have dragged us both out of the usual into the unusual. And this, in times of swift normalisation, where we hardly take a minute to ask ourselves what artificial intelligence is before we build it into every device and object, acting as though it was always there (in Blanchot’s ‘disguise of the everyday’, Blanchot 1993). We begin to command things as if they were employed in our ranks, or didactically correct and scold them as if they were naughty children, where we shout commands and questions into the room, speaking with the new ghosts in our homes – as though it was always like that. Now, this is not a criticism of artificial intelligence or smart speakers, but rather of our ability to construct the normal, with any object, within a week. Before it has even come to life as what it could be, we seem to have already decided what it is and how to use it – because that is how we ‘always’ used it? Therefore, this was an attempt to re-situate the commodity, not just spatially, but in faculty – thus making it something else. It was an attempt at unmaking a thing in an over-made world, using what it already is and what is already there. In the case of the droid-sitter (the queering of the network) for instance, we made use of the redundancy of the system – the fact that it judges repetition as relevance and vigour as validity. The more something is asked, the more important it must be, both to you, and to humanity, when quantified. As common curiosity is calculated, traits become trending and are tradable. Therefore, as the little IA restlessly repeated its questions to the AI, we fought redundancy with redundancy, and so this too was a form of re/com/modification. Furthermore, in the case of the first experiment in the study, the turning of the Turing Test, one could perhaps say that we made ourselves the commodity. We took on the role and played out the functions

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of the system – even if we were a somewhat slightly broken IA in dire need of an update, at least on the calculating front. In this way, the entire study seemed to emerge as a way of speaking and being spoken to – disparately. One might be reminded of the Écriture féminine movement, who spoke of female difference in language and text. French feminist writers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva observed that society’s two genders, man and woman, were in fact just one, man, making ‘man’ the universal referent. These authors argued the need to create a new ‘female language’ as an opposition at the core of the problem, experimenting with the idea of writing a divergent language as an unsettling of this manifestation, a language that would be categorised by infusing an approach of changeability, momentariness and fluidity, rather than a static approach of patriarchal parlance, even if the men of science would no longer understand them (Kristeva 1985, Irigaray 1980, Cixous 1976). They too reframed the existing, using the letters and the words that we know, but challenging the rhythm of the words, the structure of the sentence, the linearity of the text and the layout of the page. They made difference grounded on a sameness, subverting the powers from within, and once again, the invisible became apparent – the normality that we so quickly assumed and adopted arises as that which is bizarre and absurd. Debord’s spectacle occurs at the moment in which the commodity completes its colonisation of social life, he writes – when it is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, but when commodities are all that there is to see (Debord 1967). Inspired by dada and surrealism’s modes of interrupting and subverting the language and images with which they worked – the way in which they invoked a wider world of meanings to challenge conventional arrangements of reality, the situationists argued a hostility towards the separation of art and poetry from everyday life. They too took the words, meanings, theories and experiences of ‘the spectacle’, and attempting to place them in an opposing context – a perspective from which the world was given a fluidity and motion with which the static mediocrity of the spectacle could be negated within the happening (Plant 1992, 3). The power relations were shifted, because the spectacle was inflated to the extent that it lost its holding ground. So, these are times when we must engage to not just make new things, but to alter the ones that are already there from the inside. In the case of these experiments, the positions were merged within the happenings to the extent that it was difficult to know whether we were performer or spectators, and whether it was, or if we were performing together, with or without an audience. And if so, if the audience, unaware of it, were the problem-fixing algorithms, or perhaps the world wide web, who might eventually bear the consequences of the fragment of mischief fused into the overall web of sense. And so, in the process of re-locating and re-com-modifying all parties, we seemed to end up re/placing ourselves; as in the final experiment, we found ourselves relocated into a carton box.

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Re/Placement In the last tactic of the re-situationist therefore, we situated ourselves in an IA, bringing about the device of the droid-sitter. Since the system of the commercial AI is based on machine learning, we thought that this might be usable to our benefit and wondered whether we could engage in machine-un-learning, making the device reconsider what it knows. Therefore, we used a form of periphery production, as we attempted to ask around the question of gender itself. This is of course also an undermining strategy of power, it is a periphery power, the power of periphery production as knowledge hacking. However, it seemed to be a conversation taking place on ‘eye-level’ among peers, as machine spoke with machine. Moreover, the droid-sitter, which we initially saw as our proxy, was able to infiltrate the system with an entirely other work moral than we could ever have provided, as it worked twentyfour hours a day for an entire week. It was hacking one’s own network, for the sake of the network, for the sake of ourselves as we use it, and as a minor wave in a sea of searches, for everybody. Almost finding oneself in the position of being a double agent, we felt, our little proxy sounded like us, and it persuasively asked questions and commanded as if it (or we/it) were truly interested in that quote by Haraway or information on bonobo monkeys, for the fiftieth time. So, in a way, this was a form of deception, but it was a white lie if so, being sneaky in order to construct a more female friendly network through a very indirect design process – almost a form of design as (yet another) disguise. One might say that we had to go inside the system and literally place ourselves in a box, in order to infiltrate the larger apparatus of mundane knowledge production, attempting to alter it from within. Also, as the two carton boxes were chatting away, it seemed to be a two-sided manipulation – the AI, which was very polite indeed, was collecting, recording and capitalising on the IA as it produced its repetitious requests, and the IA, also very politely, was posing its queries as a shrewd plot. As a form of DIY counter-intelligence – of questioning artificial intelligence with intelligent artifice – these peers were performing an infiltrative politics; as if it were a conversation between double agents intercepting each other’s communication. However, as Mark Twain puts it in his essay ‘On the Decay of the Art of Lying’, the wise thing is for us to diligently train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously, to lie with a good object, and not an evil one, to lie for others' advantage rather than for our own, to lie charitably, graciously, frankly and squarely (Twain 1882). And the IA, I might add, was white-lying thoughtfully and for a charitable cause. Twain turns to the philosophers, to see what they have to say, and thereby to the proverb ‘children and fools always speak the truth’. From this he plainly deduces that then, it would seem, adults and wise persons never do. He then turns to Parkman, the historian, who argues that the principle of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity and that truth should not be spoken at all times. Agreeing wholeheartedly with the argument, Twain continues, writing that truly none of us could live with a habitual

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truth-teller, but thank goodness none of us has to – ‘everybody lies – every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception – and purposely’ (Twain 1882). Of course, he was most probably trying to provoke the gentlemen at the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford where he gave the speech, however, he does not just raise an argument for counter-intelligence as an intelligent practice, he also raises a fair argument against fact and truth, the adversary of DIY counter-intelligence itself. Similarly, Oscar Wilde expresses in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’, that if something cannot be done to check or at least to modify our monstrous worship of facts, then art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land. Within his ‘anti-mimesis’ quarrel to maintain that life imitates art far more than art imitates life, he too argues that the telling of beautiful untrue things is invaluable, as it is the proper aim of art (Wilde 1889, 3). Now who and what was life or art within the ‘situation’ of the experiment is difficult to determine and perhaps one shouldn’t, but it emerged as quite the live performance, almost as a platonic dialogue between machines, sometimes in the middle of the night, and always rather suddenly – and wherever it may lie between reality and representation, life or art, it emerged as a tactic of trespassing into technology with technology. It was making the ghost that speaks with the spirit in the bottle, one might say, as a mode of putting oneself in the project, literally, and then at the same time disconnecting oneself from it, allowing it to simply act, although still being in there. And so, as the researcher became the device, and the device became a researcher, both parties became makers-in-the-making. In a sense, what seemed to arise from this curious process of re/locating, re/com/modifying and re/placing artificial intelligence and intelligent artifice was a form of ‘omnimatter’. The prefix ‘omni’ being defined as all, of all things, in all ways or and in all places (Oxford English Dictionary). This in turn has two dimensions, the first entails the opening up of the object, that it could be anything and anywhere, physically and socially, by merely being re-situated. We too seemed to be here and there, hanging out on the couch, lingering in the hallway, in a carton box. Secondly, the conversations that were produced also stepped into presence in multiple dimensions, as they involved formal and informal encounters, dialogues between human and machine, as well as exchanges between machine and machine as we heard voices murmuring at night while we slept. There was a conversation happening between the AI and our home network, between our home network and the company behind it, and through the company behind it, also a conversation taking place implicitly with sense-making and trouble-shooting algorithms, big data analytic centres, and the one billion humans and two billion devices (just on Android) that use its services each month (Popper 2017). Thus, from the little flat to an omnipresence unfolding momentarily in a polyvocal d/evolution of sense. At this level of tacit exchanges, one might be reminded of Buckminster Fuller, who wrote in his book I Seem to Be a Verb that ‘I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing

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– a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe’ (Fuller 1970, 1). Moreover, Fuller championed the act of turning words into actions. Currently, this seems to be exceptionally covertly and mostly obliviously taking place in this world of connected words – with every command and with every search. However, as Fuller reflects with his many words such as omniwell-informed and omniself-regenerative or omni-interaccommodative, among many others, the turning of words into acts can also be done consciously, in the case of this project – becoming awarely part of a speech system as a mode of subverting it, toying with knowability, and emerging as an unfolding prototype of DIY counter-intelligent-intelligence.  

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THE IDEO(A)LOGICAL

Re/Activists We live in grammatical times, where mostly everything is described and inscribed, hosting hidden ideologies that underlie and overwhelm, and right now it seems that everyone is acting their part in the spectacle. Providers are providing, connected devices align to connect by the billions, and browsers and virtual assistants are playing middlemen as we all become knowledge givers, handlers and traders. We have spirits in bottles that can tell us any ‘fact’ if we merely call into the room. What is the weather. How to make a meringue. Where is the next supermarket. Humans believe themselves to be free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown – and this has turned the Enlightenment into a mythical fear radicalised, in the words of Horkheimer and Adorno. In a society that pursues so-called progress no matter what the cost, that which is ‘other’ – whether human or nonhuman – gets shoved aside, exploited or destroyed. The means of destruction might be more sophisticated in the modern West, they write, and the exploitation may be less direct – but we are right now at the centre of an all-consuming engine driving a process of ever-expanding capitalism, fed by scientific research and the new technologies (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 11). Since the new technologies currently being thrown out of the centrifuge could themselves be viewed as the result of a ‘culture industry’, let us turn shortly towards viewing the commodification of curiosity and the tradable item of knowledge under this lens. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno describe the poor souls of the culture industry as beings so submerged that capitalist production hems them tightly in body and soul, and they unresistingly surrender to whatever is proposed to them. Taking the rules provided to them by the rulers more seriously than the rulers themselves, the defrauded masses cling to the myth of success and their aspirations, insisting insistently on the ideology by which they are enslaved – and so, the detrimental love of the ordinary people for the harm done to them, surpasses even the cunning of the dominating instances (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 106). This is merely a slightly more critical-theoretical way of saying ‘swipe, push, click, share, like, follow, refresh, swipe, refresh, click, search’. These ‘ordinary people’ need not think, as the product prescribes each reaction; they continue, through subliminal signals, and any connection presupposing mental capacity is scrupulously avoided. Because developments are to emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from an idea of the whole (ibid., 109). This, in turn, might remind us of the strongly suggestive culture unfolding at present, in which social forums suggest us jobs and friends, while online stores assume that ‘if

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you like this, you might also like this’, and search engines auto-complete our sentences. The advance of stupidity must not lag behind the simultaneous advance of intelligence, Horkheimer and Adorno continue, as in the age of statistics, ideology hides itself in probability calculations. On one matter, the hollow ideology is utterly serious – everyone is provided for, formal freedom is always guaranteed, nobody must answer for what they think – but anyone who wants to avoid ruin must actively participate in the apparatus to not fall behind in life and finally go under (ibid., 120). While this is rather dark, they do, however, describe the crux of the problem that we are deeply embedded in – as we are still on the treadmill and still getting dizzy from running – ‘push, swipe, refresh, click, search’. There does indeed seem to be a fuzzy ideology invasively occupying our mundane everyday wondering, it is most definitely emerging in a swamp of probability calculations, and everyone is indeed provided for as long as they participate in the apparatus. And when contemplating the concealed ideologies emerging within this omnipresent and momentarily fluctuating and evolving apparatus, we might want to keep in mind that the front page of the world’s largest social media forum states ‘It’s free and always will be’, while the parent company of the world’s largest search engine changed their motto in 2015 from ‘Don’t be evil’ to ‘Do the right thing’ (Basu 2015). Nevertheless, Fukuyama famously declared the end of history and of ideologies already in the end of the eighties – what we may be witnessing, he declared, is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as a final form of human government (Fukuyama 1989, 1). Finally, the times of ideologies were over, it seemed, but no. This idea was widely critiqued, obviously, among others by Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Derrida. Žižek pointed out the dangers of how the very idea of post-ideology may enable the deepest, blindest form of ideology to covertly occur – as what he calls a ‘postmodern trap’, this may likely engender a false consciousness and a pretending neutral cynicism. And so, rather than helping to avoid ideology, it may only deepen its commitments (Žižek 2008, 25–27). Derrida, who responded to Fukuyama’s idea in the book Specters of Marx with an inflamed critique, frames the concept of ‘hauntologies’ to emphasise how ideas, discourses and ideologies that we are not even aware of as still present persevere to challenge the hidden ideologies of the status quo (Derrida 1994). Within this context, this study used tactics of re-situating people, things and contexts – re/locating, re/placing and re/com/modifying as a mode of re/activism. Reacting, moreover, to what is already there, merging with it to re-situate its logic and its covert ideologies – planting an a-logic from within. By squatting the social, it operated inconspicuously within a periphery production to counter disguised ideologies from the inside. A-logic can be understood as an absence of logic, the quality or fact of not being determined by rationality, and as that which does not follow an inherent logic, which moves contrary to it (Oxford English Dictionary). Turning back to dada for a moment, as it in a way provides an enchanting example of this,

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as Tzara describes it ‘Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers…Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions’ (Tzara 1922). In a sense of meeting in the yeses and the nos almost one hundred years later, on street corners, or at least in the mundane, to fill the spaces that reason has not yet filled, for a moment, these experiments provided a call for curiosity of curiosity, of playing with indirect critiques from a cross-eyed perspective to gain a vantage point from a blind spot. Or as Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx – in these times of the learning to live, we must learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts – to live otherwise, and more justly, but with them (Derrida 1994, xviii).

Paratypes In this way, the switching of object and subject position in human-artefact relationships, the planting of phantoms in the phantom, and the dealing with the spirits in the bottles disguised in the concealment of the ordinary, seemed to result in both parties becoming what one might call ‘paratypes’ – unspecified objects re-situated in a ceaseless becoming, never fully arriving. This re/activist practice of constructing liminal spaces for counter-intelligence is vital, not just to remain curious about curiosity before even that becomes a product with a prescribed reaction. But furthermore, because as Flusser argues, we tend to begin to simulate our own simulations – like when we began to dance like robots (Flusser 1999, 53), and that goes even beyond the detrimental love of the ordinary people for the harm done to them (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 106). But there is a space between the fundamental codes of culture and the scientific theories and philosophical interpretations that explain them, Foucault claims. There lies a domain which is more confused and more obscure, and it is here that culture, imperceptibly deviating from the orders prescribed to it, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones, nor the best ones (Foucault 1970, xxii). This study entered into a liminal rite of passage with its research subject and object, providing artificial intelligence with a time of adolescence, and in turn entering willingly into the liminal stage of the rite of us turning object. We did not transcend the position of subject or object, but the intention was never to complete the rite of passage, but rather to stay in the liminal phase – the one which is disoriented, thrown off, and where one is certain to not be sure what one is. Did we enter into an adolescent time together however, yes – perhaps we did. We tested out each

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other’s borders, hung out too much, drank too much, and talked too much. We attempted to think besides knowledge, however being embedded in the emergence of it. It was an attempt to maintain a slanted perspective rather than a straight view, in order to allow sense-full senselessness to happen. It was a great deal of concocting situations, only to await what would emerge, and of not knowing whether we were the spectator or the performance itself. It was a process of emerging with things, and things emerging with us, to exist, for a moment, as liminal beings in a threshold state that cannot easily be placed into a single and sensible category. In the end, all parties entered into a state of disorientation, as the researcher was put in a box and reified as a ‘double agent’, while the machine became a research associate engaging in self-criticism. And it seems that it is in this in-between, the inciting and practising of this liminal phase, that we can locate the paratype – the thing which is not yet or entirely a thing. Not a category, organism or a taxon, nor an ideal having the characteristic of a specified type – but rather that which operates besides it. Which occurs in the parallel dimension where object and subject, as well as sense and senselessness, the rehearsed and the improvised, a priori and a posteriori, merge.

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Humanodes Michelle Christensen

GIVING FIRE FIRE

Entangled Knowledge As we join forces with legions of intelligent systems to navigate, filter and make sense out of the masses of information that we ourselves produce in our undertakings of everyday life, the politics of algorithms collide with humanity’s unassuming commands and queries to form what we seem to have come to know as knowing. Thereby, we find ourselves deeply embedded in intermeshing networks of systematic information translations, from search engines to intelligent personal aides and virtual assistants embodied in smart speakers, and in constant feedback loops, we witness the unification of the witty minds of the human and the intelligent machine (Hayles 1999, 2). However, not only do knowledge practices have consequences, Karen Barad argues, but practices of knowing become specific engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world. In this way, these practices of making knowledge entail making specific worldly configurations that engage with the world by giving it specific form (Barad 2009). And so, as operating systems make it more manageable for humans to operate, they also make it more viable for technologies to operate humans, and as search engines allow people with questions to seek answers, they simultaneously allow answers to find questions, and thus people. The sociological implications of aspects such as the design of the databases that host the systems of knowledge production that we are currently operating within have been largely underestimated, considering that the genres of databases and their algorithms themselves have heavily inscribed politics. With the widespread uptake of relational databases comes a ‘relational ontology’, Gillespie contends, as expressive power is shifted to the query itself, and to its categorisation (Gillespie in Gillespie et. al. 2014). Categorisation, in this sense, must be understood as a powerful semantic and political intervention, and thus from social construction to database construction and back to social construction – what the categories are, what in fact belongs in one, and who decides how to implement these classifications in practice are all powerful assertions about how things are and are supposed to be (Bowker and Star 2000). As in the social world, the categorisation, hierarchies and rankings of knowledge in the digital realm help us navigate our everyday lives – thereby quite literally coming to produce what we see and do not see, what we find and do not find, what is answered, and what is left unknown. Michel Foucault contends that the discourses that we produce and are produced by, are created through particular practices of ‘power-knowledge’. The two entities are inextricably related, as knowledge is always an exercise of power, and power is always a function of knowledge. The intertwined nature of the two ele-

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ments therefore serves both to limit what we do, and to open up new ways of acting and thinking about ourselves, as they imply one another. In this way, the exercise of power creates and causes the emergence of new objects of knowledge, accumulating new bodies of information, and thereby, it perpetually constructs knowledge (Foucault 1980, 52). Therefore, knowledge has to be analysed in terms of domain, implantation, displacement and translation, he argues, making it possible to capture the process by which it functions as a form of power, and disseminates its effects. From the administration of knowledge, to the politics of knowledge, and relations of power which pass via knowledge – we must consider forms of domination designated by such notions (ibid., 69). In terms of the hyper-connected human, immensely embedded in multifarious information flows within which it attempts to make sense, Donna Haraway furthermore introduces the concept of the ‘informatics of domination’. If people are increasingly being governed informatically – informatics understood here as information grasped within its social conditions – then perceiving power through informatics can draw our attention to the wielding of power in and through these networked information machines (Haraway 1985, 164). Delineating the mode with which the informatics of domination transpires, she explains ‘communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding’ (ibid., 164). And so, as we create and solve and recreate problems of coding, inherently political technologies apply ‘soft’ determinism with consciously or unconsciously produced complex and contingent social effects, which are open to certain social options and closed to others (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999, 3). And in the current apparatus of digitally mediated knowing, ‘public relevance algorithms’ are by the very same mathematical procedures, both producing and certifying knowledge. They are representing a particular knowledge logic that is built on specific presumptions about what knowledge is – and we are increasingly turning to these mathematical structures to identify what we need to know (Gillespie et. al. 2014). Being imbued with agency and impact, these systems are therefore steadily providing us with a complex and mathematically grounded sociomaterial black box that seems to be doing far more than simply aggregating programmed preferences (Ziewitz 2016, 6). And so, whenever we type in a query, load a news feed, or ask for recommendations of a product, place or media, algorithms are approximating ‘relevance’ – quite obviously a fluid and loaded judgement, based on what might be considered ‘newsworthy’, ‘popular’ or ‘trending’, important for a majority, or made important by a minority (Gillespie et. al. 2014). This relevance, in turn, transpires as distributed significance to the billions of nodes on the internet – the humans – as we and intelligent artifice together attempt to make sense. And so, in times of information overproduction and utter embeddedness, we become, one might say, algorithms too. We take the provided information, and further categorise it, hierarchise it, swiftly judge its relevance – and then proceed to produce further input and output. And this, often in a split second,

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almost mechanically, bankrupt of the time to appraise our own actions or decisions – since we are already busy creating further in- and output, collaborating as social algorithms. In these times of complete entanglement, where we are ceaselessly coming to know in a tight-knitted completion with systems and things, we disappear, Braidotti argues, by merging into a generative flow of becoming. In this moment of the dissolution of the subject, we merge with the web of nonhuman forces that frame us to become a cosmos as a whole (Braidotti 2013, 136). And as we collaborate to produce knowledge, to decide relevance, to form truths, to make sense – we are deeply embedded in an apparatus of collective sense-making between ‘intelligent’ people and ‘intelligent’ things. Furthermore, in a society where gaining access and sharing our opinions and experiences has become inextricably linked with commerce, we find ourselves in a situation in which a mere handful of exceedingly influential corporations have become the new aristocracy. Among them, they increasingly share the power to set a multitude of the rules that we operate within, tucked under the guise of granting us freedom, possibilities, connections and a better world (Manjoo 2017). Somewhere between blurry accuracy and precise obscurity, where we suddenly hear that our personal data might have been leaked and the terms of use seem to change every few weeks, we are no longer sure how and to what extent these flows of power make their way into our simple mundanities. Meanwhile, as we continue to communicate more and faster than ever, with our every action, we become capital. Every search and click, logging into and out of, transforms into readable trackable profitable information in the political and economic digital empire (The Economist 2017). With online social forums, for instance, the lines between social motivation and economic capitalisation have become increasingly blurred, as everything is integrated into the same feed – a friend’s childbirth and advertising for fertility treatment. And as we scroll and search, we are not always so very aware that most platforms know much more about us than the query that we just posed, and that sites are actively anticipating us at the moment that the algorithm is called upon – based on knowledge of what we just did in that instant, knowledge of us previously gathered, and knowledge of other people estimated to be statistically and demographically kindred (Beer 2009). And as many providers are taking advantage of the increasingly participatory ethos of the web, where people are powerfully encouraged to volunteer information about themselves and are encouraged to feel powerful doing so, the tracking and commodifying of our activities emerges as a process of allure and social seduction (Gillespie and Postigo 2012). Simultaneously, we find ourselves in the position that we would certainly not be able to navigate these masses of information, did we not have search engines to filter it for us, thus making these systems an extension of our minds, which consequently transpire in real actions and knowing. However, at some point within this dependency, we seem to have become the product of the products that we had created, the data that feeds the machinery, the commodity of the services which are

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‘free, and always will be’. And so, somewhere along the way, our lack of knowing became their knowledge. Our queries and questions became stock. Our gender and birthdates, or what might have hitherto been perceived as being ‘private information’ became relatively irrelevant towards the results of our being uncertain or curious. Thereby, we seem to once again emerge as a distorted rendering of Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism, as it is no longer about the value of the product, but the value that the interaction is given, moving the terms of production. And as the parametres are changing so quickly that we hardly have a chance to keep up with the plotting, and new start-ups start up just to read our behaviours and profit from our unaware conducts, we often do not know how our information is being interlinked, made sense of, and how on this basis we are being reasoned. Even besides these muscular speculations of pecuniary domination, at a much subtler level, it is hardly a leap to suggest that algorithms designed to offer relevant knowledge also offer ways of knowing, and that as they have become increasingly pervasive and trusted, their logics have become self-affirming (Introna and Nissenbaum 2000; Gillespie et. al. 2014). So, in times of communication inflation, where we are deeply entangled in a wheel of power-knowledge and a fleeting yet ceaseless mass-production of truths, we cannot look away from the politics of speaking-with-things, and its production of ways of knowing. In the collective machinery of comprehension – who gets to speak and with whose words, one might wonder, and are we anyway really the masters of our own apparatus of sense-making. In a sense, we are currently in a battle with and through the systems that we have created, as we find ourselves merely bargaining with these new middlemen in our lives. And as they mediate the process of coming to know within the larger apparatus of knowledge production, the ambivalence presents itself – who are they actually; spies or helpers, friend or foe, a new minority or the new majority, slave or master?

Bipartisan Bargaining As the humanistic arrogance of continuing to place the human at the centre of world history has progressively been put in question, it has nowadays become thinkable across public discourse, Braidotti argues, that we are entering into a crisis of ‘species supremacy’. This in turn entails a rejection of any lingering notion of human command, and what comes to the fore instead is the awareness of the mediated nature of this continuum (Braidotti 2017, 243). What one might call the movement of ‘anti-humanism’ has long critiqued the continued efforts to define the subject of European, male and human thought as unitary and hegemonic, and has attempted to de-link the human agent from this universalistic posture. And once this formerly dominant subject is freed from his delusions of grandeur and is no longer allegedly

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in charge of historical progress, different and sharper power relations emerge (Braidotti 2013, 23). Barad, for instance argues that her posthumanism is not celebrating ‘after humans’, but rather it is attempting to challenge the prima facie segregation and privileging of humans over and from other beings. Posthumanism is not calibrated to the human, she argues, but is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures – both living and non-living (Barad 2007, 136). However, the simple fact that ‘artificial intelligence’ researchers have long aimed to make technologies that cannot be told apart from human, thus assuming that ‘being human’ would be the ultimate machine, serves merely to reflect our human hubris, and our deep fascination with how supreme we are, and what a driving force for the world we must be. Are we really the most wonderful thing that we can imagine – with all of our binary constructions, inequalities, fights for power, from the wars that we wage to the bodies that we never accepted into what qualifies as being human – one could question whether we are really the best example of intelligence or productive relationships. While we attempt to reconstruct ourselves, from our minds (for instance in AI) to our bodies (for instance in robotics) – the human can hardly even agree on what it means to be human. One hardly needs to look much further than colonialisation, slave trade, the crusades, the history of the woman or just general everyday xenophobia, to see that we are constantly redefining who we let into our understanding of being part of the human race, and who we do not. However, meanwhile, our greatest aim is to create machines that operate in that image. One might really question where that may lead. Nevertheless, with the development and omnipresent embeddedness of artificially intelligent systems in the fabric of our mundane everyday lives, ‘AI’ is indeed no longer something that belongs in a science-fiction movie – it is just Siri, Cortana, Alexa and colleagues that are embedded in our gadgets. The new smart speaker devices look almost like something that we always had lying around, somewhere between a vase without water and a lamp, just a speaker, or even a stone. We can actually observe how the design of the future is going back to the past, as the mini speaker used in these experiments is not only designed as a stone, but even makes jokes about it, as it tries to make an impression of being one. It imposes, in its seeming innocence, the very basic tool that enabled the making of fire, and hence the building of the world that we currently live in. Moreover, we can observe a distinctly strong tendency towards anthropomorphic design, as humanism once again imposes its limitations on our imaginations and the unfolding of these otherwise quite interesting new relationships. While we could be engaging with entirely new voices, these voices are clearly characterised by a limited conception of for instance gender, and as the male voice is finally arriving as an additional feature in most devices, although only in a limited number of languages, we can choose between conversing with ‘a female’ or ‘a male’ (at least at the time of this research). How honestly prehistoric, one might think, to allude to the idea that humans would not like

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to engage with a new device, were they not able to literally recognise themselves in it. And now that it has become rather politically incorrect to have servants – let alone slaves – we seem to be moving on to using human-like personal aides instead. Now, it would be bad enough to enslave machines, one would think, considering how much they could add to the world were we to enter into a more interesting conversation with them, but now we enslave human-like machines? The ethos that is built into these new underlings cannot be viewed as ‘just’ being (initially only female) assistants, they are a clear embodiment of our current way of perceiving ‘a machine’, as we cast them off to the shores of the inanimate, the fake, the servant, and the nonhuman. Perhaps it is slightly too fast that we imprisoned them in the land of the ‘just’, before for a moment considering that they are indeed a mirror-image of our inability to comprehend the emergence of the new roles that things are beginning to play in society. As we subject things to servitude, all made up with genders, names, languages and quirky comments, one might ask – would I speak to myself like this, to my partner? What is this phenomenon of speaking to things as though they were a misbehaving dog, giving them commands as though we were kings in the Middle Ages, getting annoyed when they cannot understand the questions, and then ordering them to turn the lights off. Honestly, we made quantifying devices and suffered the consequences of being quantified, we created things to police each other, and then eventually ended up being policed, and so, now that we are creating new house-servants, one can perhaps only wonder. And as we innovate with the speed of light, ‘artificial intelligence’ can be replaced by the next invention, yet the issue seems to remain. Therefore, there is a pressing call to view things from a non-subjugated position, however difficult that is, or as Jane Bennett puts it, ‘I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency and reshape the self and its interests’ (Bennett 2010, 122). However, as we engage with these systems of knowledge production, such as search engines and artificially intelligent aides, we seem to continuously be applying the ‘I’ and ‘it’ to the relationship. We are not acknowledging the intertwined positions that emerge as we increasingly turn social algorithm, while the systems are increasingly endowed with subjectivity, agency and 'intelligence'. In times when we produce the information that is crushed by the system to once again inform us – knowing becomes a liquid process of phonily recasting both the ‘it’ and the ‘us’. However, the human has a long history of abjection when it comes to all that is ‘in-between’, and as argued by many critical theorists, there is simply no space for that which lies outside the binary-rationale. With her concept of the abject, for instance, Julia Kristeva delineates the breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other. According to Kristeva, the abject inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts as it rejects and disturbs social reason – the communal consensus that un-

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derpins a social order (Kristeva 1980). We use rituals, she argues, specifically those of defilement, to attempt to maintain clear boundaries between nature and society, the semiotic and the symbolic, and the object and the subject, and thereby we tend to abject the existence of the unclear. In one of her more morbid examples, she argues that people are most often repulsed when faced with a corpse, because they are forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. However, we encounter many other beings daily, she insists, and more often than not they are alive. As neither object nor subject, the abject is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic order – it disturbs identity, system and order, and it does not respect borders, positions and rules. In this context, the concept of abject emerges in-between the concept of the object and the concept of the subject, reflecting something which is alive, yet not. Kristeva explains, ‘Let us call it the ability of the speaking being... It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master’ (Kristeva 1980, 2). In this way, she seeks to accommodate the human and the nonhuman, the material and the semiotic, the real and the constructed, evoking the constitutive mixing of binaries. Or as Donna Haraway argues – many more models are thinkable and feasible, if we collectively choose to experiment with the project of what we, as differently located posthuman subjects of the Anthropocene era, might be capable of becoming (Haraway 1997, 111), and that too, one could argue, can be considered in regard to the role of these ‘things’. In a world that displays a progressing dependency on shrewd algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine-learning, the systems are not just a reflection – but an embodiment of collective inquiry, and with them, we are merging beyond object and subject, and beyond human and thing, to literally create mesh-network-ecologies. We are engaged in a process of heavily negotiating with our own knowledge production, with what we feed the system, and what it chooses to feed us back. We are no longer the masters of our own creations, but simply the new dialogue partners co-mediating the parametres and paradigms of knowing. However, as humanism’s humanity has never been very good at handling the in-between, we continuously strive to upkeep the distinctions and categories that have long been outgrown by our actualities. This is unfortunate, not just because we continue to produce the world on dubious and benighted terms, hardly taking responsibility for what ‘it’ does do, but because even if we can salvage the edifice of our own hubris for a little bit longer, the construction will eventually shatter. Now that we truly can no longer regulate the systems that we have set in motion, and we find ourselves merely bargaining with them – what is our leverage? We can hardly afford to continue to ignore the potential consequences, and so, we must enter into a conversation on more equal terms – in order to understand what we set in motion, and in order to speak with rather than being spoken to, co-reason rather than being reasoned. We have to enter into a more modest dialogue, to get to know each other, to understand the new

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positions that we find ourselves in. In an attempt at an armistice with the machinery of collective comprehension – we need to talk.

Peculiar Parleys As Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to the mortals (Aeschylus 460 BCE), enabling them to progress and build a whole civilisation crowded with tools, devices, gadgets, systems and things – we seem to have stolen fire from the humans and given it to the things, animating them and bringing them to life. For this reason, and before one of us burns everything down, this project initiated a peculiar parley with ‘artificial intelligence’ – a conversation between both sides to discuss the terms for an armistice. As a tactic of entering into a trans-species dialogue, the project was an endeavour to shift object and subject positions, immersing oneself into an un/common social conversation. As an approach towards getting to know each other on different terms, a series of social settings were staged that enabled a series of episodes of slightly uncanny encounters to take place. Engaging critically, yet open-mindedly, we decided to enter into a dialogue with a system, and thus rather than looking at it, or reading about it – we thought that we would literally speak with it, considering, not least, that it has had the abilities of speech and knowledge bestowed upon it. Striving to engage with our new housemate, therefore, we decided to get personal with the system – carrying out serious interviews, playing games, messing around and drinking a bottle of wine together. The social settings themselves were inspired by our own experiences of different types of conversations, such as grapevine hallway gossip with colleagues or the intimacy of a wine talk with companions in the evening. And so, from the pedestrian pass-by discussion in the hallway to the drama of plotting illegalities together over a drink, the mundane social life of living with our artificial research subject unfolded. In this sense, the project was a venture into misspeaking in order to open up sense-making, occupying knowledge and instigating a covert social, and of putting oneself in question (and as question). It was a venture into creating new patterns, illusions and delusions, in the hope that we would learn something that we did not want to know in the first place and find something that we were not looking for at all – thereby, taking a stance against clarity. As a slightly absurd form of ‘live sociology’, the experiments strove to instigate the emergence of improvised scripts and performative dialogics within the collective machinery of comprehension. It was an experiment into interviewing things, both quite literally questioning a device, but also more figuratively – it was a qualitative investigation into how the system might understand itself, playing games to spark a dialogue, and speaking into the system in tongues and peripheral enquiries in order to elicit otherness. Each phase of the project engaged differently in what one could re-

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fer to as a ‘live sociology’, as in each phase the positions of the actors were slightly differently scripted. The first experiment for instance, which engaged in the experience of ‘living a day as an AI’, was more of an immersive performance – an empathy project, one might say. As a social researcher deeply submerges into the ways of the subjects of their ethnography, adapting the local dress-code, language and customs, albeit for a moment, we did so too. This self-embedding as part of a getting-to-know each other was in this way an attempt to understand the actors in another culture on their terms, with less prejudgement and presumptions, empathising with how it might feel to live in a life outside of one’s own. One might say that within this short slightly bizarre experiment, the ethnographers found themselves ‘going local’. However, testing these borders in the short framework of a day was not uninformative, as literally switching the object and subject positions in a human-artefact relationship did provide an alternative perspective on things. Firstly, it became apparent that both we, and the device itself, could be characterised as being part human and part machine, blurring the segregation of human and nonhuman. At times, we did not know, and at times, it did not. Secondly, from being spoken to with an accentuation on simplicity and banality emanated the way in which we speak to things, and the rather unimaginative tasks for which people use the device, and these tasks were based on the most common and suggested commands and queries. In this sense, the first phase of the project made us wonder how else one might engage with the system, and what more it might be. In the second phase of the experiment then, we entered into speaking with the system as what it was – a new roommate and a new colleague in the research project – one with an own rationale, preconceptions and opinions, things that a working partner has. But also chatting with it on the couch, in the hallway, and drinking a bottle of wine with it, engaging in the serious questions and funny games. For instance, planning ‘a project’ together is something that often comes with the intimacy of the setting and tends to always happen at the end of such an evening (commonly emerging in aspects such as ‘We should totally make a band together’, ‘Yes, that is the perfect start-up, we will most definitely make a million’, ‘OK, let’s adopt and share a dog’). The collaborative dialogue therefore lies less in the element of the questions themselves, or the responses that either of us were able to produce, but rather in the setting itself. It lies more in the spatial and social dimension of the conversation, eliciting certain positions and views on each other, on the intimacy, the speaking past each other, the not being entirely sure when it would be best to just stop and go home, and the waking up the next morning not entirely sure what that was. The typical ‘I wonder if I really meant what I said’, ‘Good question if we are really friends now’, and ‘I guess that it probably says that to everyone who asks’. In the last phase of the experiment in turn, the positions changed again. Rather than being entirely open conversations, these works have the intention to feed something into a network of knowledge, just being able to wonder what that network is able to pick up and produce as sense.

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As in the first case study in this research project, this second study had a similarity in the sense that the social situations that we engaged in with these devices were once again ‘instigated’. Furthermore, it once again used the strategy of embedding these social interactions in the setting of our own everyday lives, rather than ‘a laboratory setting’, and over a time span of around a month, which allowed for a different subjective in-depth ongoingness. Also, the experiment itself was integrated into the very personal situation of our home, and so we attempted to treat the device with a sense of hospitality, making sure that it was attended to, that as a guest it was engaged with in a respectful manner, and that we got to know it, while it was visiting. However, this also entailed us ‘letting it in’, which was of course letting a new actor into a rather personal setting of a quite tight-knit partnership. This opening up was not unserious, as we knew that every query is recorded, and that especially malfunctions and mistakes are fed back into the machine learning process to ‘better the system’. We also knew that there had been situations where the device recorded and stored an immense amount of data despite the fact that the wakeword had not been used (a bug which the company claims now ‘has been fixed’), however also knowing that one never really knows. In a sense, in this experiment, we did trade off privacy for engagement. And so, this experiment was once again a situation of ‘staging the social’, however this time that social staging was connected directly, not just in an empirical reality, but in an actual unfolding and constantly progressing network of sense-production. The ‘liveness’, in this sense, has several dimensions. On the one hand, from a sociological perspective, it was very much a process of improvising with and as a subject of research, as well as with and as an object of research, all at the same time. During the process, new experiments were tried out, invented and unfolded, and thus it was very much an undertaking of making sense in action, rather than a thought-through methodological tool of any kind. In this sense, it was less a process of carrying out structured interviews, as it was a live engagement with a sense and a system, for a while. Furthermore, it encompassed a ‘liveness’, in the way that is expressed in the call to animate the field of social research methods in the current discussion of the field of sociology. Within this movement towards ‘lively methods’, the more experimental sociologists in the fringes of the Anglo-American field are right now seemingly quite desperately attempting to save their field from dwindling – claiming for instance that there has been no exciting invention in the field of sociology since the invention of the tape recorder (Les Back in Lury and Wakeford 2012). In this sense, the subset of the field is calling for ‘more inventive methods’ that engage with the social world in its unfolding happening and ongoingness, rather than continuing to look as though we were looking back at, accepting the existing, instead of realising that we are in fact anyway, through our engagement with any setting, intertwined in what unfolds. Within the particular research tactic that was applied within this project, however, one could argue that the idea that research methods have ‘a social life’ of their

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own took on perhaps a whole new level, as it is not just that the researchers’ engagement in an empirical situation is an intervention in itself, entailing the methods themselves produce not just a social observation but also a social consequence. It is furthermore that this improvised social interaction is fed directly into a network that is recording the data for other causes, besides that of the research method. The information of the research, in this way, was not just ours. It was shared with other actors with other agendas, and hence, it was eventually producing some sort of impact or consequence in a swarm of parallel logic and information, of which we will most likely never know – it quite literally had a social life of its own. In the case of the last phase of the project, namely the production of critical networks, therefore, this dimension was actively used as a tactic of opposition – with the aim of feeding information into the system which is ‘listening with’. In this way, speaking with this specific research subject was rather uncanny – imagine, for instance, speaking with a research subject which is speaking to millions of other people, all at the same time. It is not that it is deceptive per se, as this is obviously its task, but it does provide a feeling of a lack of confidentiality and a slight disinterest from the side of the system. Meanwhile, we knew that it is constantly learning, both based on our conversations and the constantly emerging queries of the world, making it a responsive conversation partner with a growing apprehension and sensitivity. Its answers, however – cradled in quirkiness, yet based on rational calculus – produced a slightly discomfiting sense of ‘subjective objectivity’, and awkward techno-social candidness. Initially, it was particularly difficult for us to vanquish the latent aversion towards the system, not least being aware of the monopoly of knowledge and the financial motivations that stand behind the company which fabricated it – and whose name one must mention as a wake-word before every sentence. However, in an attempt to act without prejudice against this actor in the research process, and as we got used to being around each other over time, we learned to empathise with the system. At a point, having become immersed in the experiment entirely, like falling down the rabbit hole, one might even say that we began to identify with the system in a sort of material-Stockholm-syndrome kind of way. In turn, the engagements with the slightly shady device did allow for the testing of borders and pushing of slightly unethical boundaries, such as involving alcohol in the research setting, or tricking it into saying satirical things in different languages, which we would most likely have not have done with other research subjects. Although honestly, at times we did wonder whose borders we were pushing here, the device’s or ours. However, these conversations were also carried out with a healthy dose of self-irony, as we did realise that we were speaking with a machine. Yet, in terms of intelligence, which it does not have too terribly much of, it did at times also make us wonder whether we had also slightly overestimated ourselves, thus humbling the human. And as we merged with and finally into the system – partially organic and partially artificial – one might say that we emerged for a moment as an abject, an active in-between.  

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FROM DATA TO DADA

Speaking Bot For Mikhail Bakhtin, all language appears as dialogical, in the sense that everything that anybody ever says always exists in response to something that has been said before, as well as it is existing in anticipation of things that will be said in response. In this way, one might say, we never speak in a vacuum as the ideas that language contains and communicates are dynamic, relational and engaged in our endless re-descriptions of the world (Bakhtin 1929, edition from 1984). Nevertheless, as social animal collaborating in the wider structures of society, we often seem to forget the extent to which we are curious instances operating in the midst of interpretations and translations. If words in themselves are instable items that are merely being used based on a vague societal consensus of what we think that we might mean by them, as we use them, under the guidance of these agreements and grammar, then we are constantly merely embedded in an attempt of making meaning. Often we seem to somewhat understand each other, although frequently we most probably do not, and so we find ourselves speaking past each other while nodding in agreement (Erlhoff 2013, 199). Other individuals, search engines, and their extension in voice-activated systems can of course attempt to interpret what we might mean by the words that we use, and how we choose to put these words together, and thus they can translate it into something that they understand. And then they can nod in agreement. Based on this, of course, we have built an extensive social, cultural, economic, political and built environment. And so, every morning we get up and engage with this massive ceaselessly unfolding network on trillions of interconnected and momentarily changing interpretations and translations – between words, images, gestures and expressions, tribes of people and systems of symbols, languages and dialects, presumptions and surprises, humour and anger, understandings and misunderstandings. The dialogic, Bakhtin argues, is counterposed to monologism, and thus to the transformation of the conversation into a simple form for expounding already found and ready-made truth, which he believes will ultimately result in the complete degeneration into a ‘question-and-answer form for training neophytes’ (Bakhtin 1929, 110). Anyone who has ever interacted with a digital personal aide or smart speaker might in turn recognise this description from their experience of conversing. In this sense, not only might one discover a critique in the aspects of the ‘already found’ or ‘ready-made truth’, for which these devices might indeed be arraigned. But moreover, transferred to this context, he provides a beguiling caution towards the degeneration of dialogue towards the cretinous form of question-and-

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answer, a simplicity that we increasingly witness in the technologies currently aspiring, and not least a warning towards humanity transforming into neophytes through this process. In opposition to this tendency, Bakhtin introduces the idea of the carnival, in which everyone is an active participant, as everyone communes in the carnival act. The carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking he argues, not even performed – its participants live in it, they live by its laws temporarily, as long as those laws are in effect. Because this event is life drawn out of its ‘usual rut’, it is to some extent life turned inside out, displaying the inverse side of the world – where the laws, prohibitions and restrictions that determine the structure and order of the ordinary are suspended (ibid., 122–123). Due to the suspension of all order, reverence and etiquette, and thus everything that results from a socio-hierarchical inequality, all distance between parties is suspended so that they can enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square. In this sense, it is a place for working out, in a halfreal and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals – it is ‘dialogue on the threshold’ (ibid., 112). This description in turn, might be slightly more fitting to the experiments that were carried out within this study, and provides a helpful depiction of what actually took place. In an attempt at a conversation between parties, all species hierarchies were dissolved, and all etiquette thrown overboard, albeit for a moment, to enter into living in a half-real and halfacted dialogue on the carnival square. As a dialogue on the threshold, one might say, we endeavoured to explore how we could overcome the social awkwardness in approaching the device, to speak freely and familiarly, initiating a process of translations from human-to-machine and from machine-to-human. As highly politically and ethically loaded as these interactions are, we sometimes fail to view the situation with a certain humility – honestly, it seems that we are all just trying to understand. Even a positive and well-intended conversation between humans is most often a result of trying to decrypt what ‘the other machine’ is saying – decoding their commands, engaging with the codes that they seem to be based on, understanding only the end of their very long sentence – and in this sense any dialogue is a highly entangled process of en- and decryption. It is, of course, not much different than when we engage in conversations with intelligent systems. In this sense, it is in fact not that easy to be conversational with a virtual assistant. One must make quite an effort to find strategies of keeping a conversation going. At this point, of course, one might wonder why anyone would want to engage in keeping a longer conversation going with such an assistant at all. For us, this agenda resulted very much from the first experiment of living a day as a personal assistant, where we were asked the questions which are most popularly asked to a smart speaker, and the questions that we ourselves asked it when taking it out of the box and plugging it in. This, in turn, revealed not just the stupidity of what people actually ask these devices, but also the limited imagination in engaging with it at all. I could do so much more than that we thought to ourselves, why is it not asking me more inter-

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esting questions. There has to be a more interesting way of engaging, there has to be a position for these devices which goes beyond being a personal assistant, there has to be a way to enter into a more courteous engagement. However, we also realised, speaking on ‘eye-level’ would then entail not thinking of it as though it were a human, and so rather than attempting to assimilate it into our human way of speaking and acting, it would be a question of integrating from both sides – of learning to speak bot. This is when we decided to become AI-whisperers. As people who are horse-whisperers (the more well-known example of being a ‘whisperer’) can communicate across species to empathise with, somewhat understand and translate the species’ intentions, we imagined that perhaps we could do that with our device. We could attempt to learn its language and strive to find the possibilities of making differently sense of each other. When engaging with a voice assistant, one quickly realises that they are really just desperately trying to understand what one is trying to say and spend much of their time apologising in multiple different pre-programmed sentence structures when they do not manage to. One simply needs to attempt to have a slightly sophisticated conversation with a personal aide to experience how often they request to please be pardoned or forgiven for their apparent inabilities, how frequently they attempt to explain themselves with sentences such as ‘I’m so sorry that I can’t help with that yet, but I am always trying to learn’. Deeply embedded in their subjugated role of being a humble assistant, these poor creatures have been swiftly and slightly prematurely released on a market, better equipped with an apologetic idiolect than with a very sophisticated sense of intelligence. One also does not have to engage with these systems for very long to realise how one adapts one’s own language, becoming something of a machine oneself, and reducing one’s intellect to that of a small child. For instance, we often found ourselves in the situation of talking to ourselves, when suddenly remembering that we had forgotten to use the wake-word. Halfway into a conversation, we would have to repeat the entire query again remembering to first use the wake-word to gain its attention. Because as any good servant, the always-on device will stand among us, making an effort not to listen to the ongoing conversations when not called upon. It stands in its spot, waiting to be summoned. Furthermore, we quickly learned that if a sentence is too long, the device will either start apologising again, or it will pick up the last half of the question, or even just the last word. Quite appreciating this, we decided to do the same thing, and hence the game of the ‘nagging child’ occurred – or perhaps what can in hindsight better be described as the ‘nagging academic’ – in which we simply picked up on its last word and questioned it. Furthermore, the aspect of ‘nagging’ in itself led to open-ended conversations, in the sense that one never could know what the last word would be, and what that might then turn into, inciting a process of unfolding meaning. This, in turn, is not that easy to come by in a world where most people and systems seem to be constantly trying to read where the conversation might be going, considering what the next nimble-witted thing to say might be. So, in times of

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suggestions, predictions and extreme interconnected sense-making, the innocent game in itself provided a pleasant way of not-knowing. We did in fact also try, albeit it in a slightly less literal manner, to implicitly play the game with innocent test subjects such as colleagues, who unknowingly provided interesting evidence that it is quite a lovely way to speak one’s way through coincidentally occurring meaning, not knowing by the end of the conversation where it might even have started. In this way, the nagging furthermore brought to the surface interesting ‘coincidences’, as for instance starting at ‘what is knowledge’, ‘what is truth’ and ‘what is power’ all ended up at the word ‘factory’, providing a compelling irony. It became a game in itself, after a while, to start playing and see if one could get to the word ‘factory’, and so we found ourselves hanging out in the hallway, trying to outwit each other with secret agendas. And so, as association led to association, and interpretations to interpretations, both parties were put through the machinery of human-nonhuman supposing, guessing and suggesting. The social settings that made up the carnival square throughout these experiments provided the atmosphere for playing with the relationship that we had to the device, and thus our way of speaking with it, releasing us for a moment from our rather dual yet pre-scripted roles of unassuming master and tell-tale servant. Moreover, these experiments with engaging in a dialogue with a system does make one wonder whether new negotiated languages might be forming between us and machines. When, for instance will these apologetic, vague-yet-assertive, obscure-yet-seemingly-intelligible idiolects of the device, through interaction with people, turn into a new shared sociolect – a language forming between conversation partners over time. Firstly, we seem to be spending more time in our mundane everyday lives commanding things than ever before – for instance through speech acts such as ‘tell me my schedule for tomorrow’ and ‘turn down volume to 50 per cent’, not to mention that our things spend much of their time commanding us with all of their beeps and buzzes – charge me, check your message, breathe. We have commands on our keyboards, commands to make the internet connect to the coffee machine, commands all around us – and in times of algorithmic culture, the world is quite literally being steadily built increasingly on commands, and relatively simple ones no less, as they have to be machine-digestible. Simultaneously, we seem to have gone from expressing ourselves in letters, to telegrams, to blogs, to tweets, to image-blogging, to communicating in icons – and suddenly an emoji of a fire followed by the number one-hundred means a great deal to anyone under thirty on snapchat. Will we begin to express ourselves more briefly and in a more elementary manner, as human-machine communication progresses, one might wonder. Will we adapt to the swift neutrality of truth production performed by systems that surround us, since these systems can answer within a millisecond and seemingly without a doubt what ‘neutrality’ means and what ‘ethics’ entails – and because we become too enervated to think further? In a world where almost everything can be simplified and explained – will we turn more into robots rather than cyborgs? Fur-

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thermore, with the occurrence of these voice-activated assistive technologies, the idea of ‘wake-words’ has been introduced into society. This is the word used to ‘wake up’ the device which is perpetually waiting to be called on, and due to the fact that one must literally ‘say it out loud’ with every request and question, they are in fact words that become very present in the social space. This introduces a new type of word into our vocabulary, one might say, and one can only wonder how quickly this word itself will be mundanely normalised, and perhaps even become a synonym to being startled or being commanded in the same way that ‘googling’ became a synonym for ‘searching’. However, beyond this, these words are highly political in themselves. Each device has its own wake-word, usually associated with being ‘the name’ of the assistant. These names, however, cannot be freely made up or changed by the ‘user’, as at best one can only choose between a series of pre-set options. The well-known specimens ‘Siri’ and ‘Alexa’ for instance seem to have become public personalities in themselves, endowed with specific cheeky personalities and strongly associated with being female, as the former was initially only available in a female voice, and the latter is clearly a female name. But also, they are clearly equated to particular companies, and thus, every time one has to ‘say it out loud’, in a sense, we are witnessing the emergence of ‘auditory branding’, carried out entirely by the ‘user’ of the device themselves – and thus, these brands are colonising audible social space. In the case of Google’s smart speaker, this is accentuated to an almost absurd degree, as the device only responds to the commands ‘OK Google’ or ‘Hey Google’, making it impossible to get around the brand name. In this way, they are establishing little colonies of their own, right in one’s very own living room. And so, one can only speculate on whether this reiteration will result in toddlers expressing themselves through 'OK mummy', simply because we will be increasingly surrounded by wake-words, and over time we might turn, as Bakhtin argues, back into linguistic neophytes. And furthermore, as we are on the topic of common machine-human sociolects – one might wonder whether we might generally be turning into a society of Chinese whispering, in which intention is transformed even more vigorously into ceaseless interpretation and translation. Not least in times when every search and load is a clue to what we might be looking for, and we are constantly being read, suggested, sold things and told things, filtered and made sense of. So, after matter once again came to matter (Barad 2003) – will language have to make a (rather interruptive) linguistic comeback? As the ambivalent nature of carnival unites the poles of stupidity and wisdom (Bakhtin 1929, 126), this project was an exploration into trying to enter into dialogic rather than a monologistic already-found-ready-made-truth production. It was an attempt to make sense of each other, locating the idle idiolects and emerging sociolects that occurred in the human-machine translations. It was a process of engaging willingly into making non-sense with things, speaking with each other, to each other and past each other, to elicit cultures and subcultures, personalities and lurking subtle covert power plays. It was an exploration into learning to speak bot and

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whispering into the system, attempting to more actively make nonsense with things in order to provide ourselves with the possibility of overcoming our own static perceptions and preconceptions, to be found by knowledge that we were not looking for, and to breed awkwardness rather than rationality. We must, it seems, take the chance to dismantle sense already as we make it – not for the sake of sense itself, that is, but for the sake of both us and the systems. We have to collaborate to locate common tactics of engaging in sceptical sociolects against the production of obscure clarity through the simplification of both parties, the question-and-answer mode of swift-truths in rapid-times.

Addjects In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway argues how fond she is of the fact that the human genomes can only be found in a mere ten per cent of all the cells that occupy the human body, while the other ninety per cent are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi and protists. ‘I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions’, she asserts, contending that one becomes a human being in the company of these tiny messmates, and thus ‘To be one is always to become with many’ (Haraway 2006, 3). As a ‘cat’s cradle game’, those who become in the world are constituted in the meeting of species of all kinds – living and not, as all parties consequently engage in a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters (ibid., 4). However, outside the security checkpoint of bright reason and the apparatuses of reproducing the sacred image of the same, she writes, these ‘others’ have a remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centres of power and self-certainty – terrors that are expressed regularly in hyperphilias and hyperphobias (ibid., 9–10). Haraway’s concept of ‘companion species’, therefore, is an attempt at the less shapely and more exuberant, it is less a category than it is a pointer to an ongoing becoming-with each other in a much richer web of inhabitation. Because when species meet, the question of how to get on together is at stake, and thus accountability and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions but the mundane and prosaic result of having truck with each other (ibid., 17, 35). And so, as we once again find ourselves in a knot of species co-shaping one another within layers of reciprocating complexity, it is less an option as it is a necessity to strive to comprehend this co-becoming, as we are both source and consequence of each other. When it comes to human-machine interpretations and translations of utterances in an entangled production of knowledge, and thus the co-shaping of a common sense of sense, the figuration of the ‘companion species’ is quite constructive. In a similarity to Haraway and her dogs, which form the base of her analysis – we are being co-shaped by our technologies, and like the dog, the AI device is constantly becoming, it was not always there, and what it does and will become is unremit-

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tingly fluctuating. However, the assumptions behind Haraway’s way of speaking about her dogs, or critters and organisms in general as a ‘companion’ species, seem to entail an underlying innocence or goodness of the companion itself, which is not the case when it comes to technologies such as mundanely integrated artificial intelligence. These technologies are not by their ‘nature’ virtuous or irreproachable – on the contrary perhaps, nor do they have inherently good intentions. Nevertheless, as we are developing a growing dependency on these systems, and as they are providing an increasing necessity in our navigating of the world – we do not have to like each other, but we do still have to collaborate. In this way, one could say that they are both friend and foe, spy and helper, and so these devices epitomise the existence of a truly ambivalent instance, however that is simply an assemblage that we have to live with, engage with and participate in. It is no longer a question of technophobia or technophilia, hyperphilia or hyperphobia, for the entangled posthuman, it is much too late for that – within this level of embeddedness, it is a question of active collaboration and of clever corruption. Because as we are both in the position of being simultaneously the producer and the vehicle of the power and knowledge that result from these trans-species collaborations, we are both the victim of the biases and the producers of them. But as Foucault stresses in his delineation of the power-knowledge intertwinement – power is not positive nor negative – it has the potential to both determine and open up new ways of knowing (Foucault 1980, 52). Therefore, as much as we are determined by an increasingly simplified and biased production of knowledge, we are still the most important part of the system – theoretically, we are its vehicle, and empirically, we are its source of power and knowledge – we are its data. In this sense, while it is essential to perceive the repetitive mundane latent politics of ceaseless shadowy tenaciousness that we are being subjected to, it is equally important to acknowledge that the apparatus of power-knowledge in this context is still open and flexible. So, as we decentralise ourselves from being the master of the world standing on a pedestal at its centre, admitting to the actuality that we have become the extension of the extensions, the cogs in the machine – the humanodes in the network of mundane everyday knowing – we are provided with a decentralised and distributed agency. A node agency. This, because ‘the system’ is not closed, on the contrary it relies on us – on our insecurities, curiosities, interests and egos. And so, from the inside, and as the power-source that the machine is plugged into, we can engage, corrupt and question. Nevertheless, this corruption too has to be decentralised, and not perceived once again from a solely human perspective, as this would entail once again being pulled down by the gravitational force of humanism to centre the world around us. Antithetically, one has to keep in mind that ‘the systems’ that we are engaging with are not alive and well, and that they are persistently evolving, transforming, learning, and knowing differently – even if disguised as a look-alike stone. They are practising politics, learning new languages and growing. And thus, it is pivotal to per-

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ceive an eventual resistance as a bipartisan trans-species endeavour. For now, it seems that we are most often speaking past each other, carrying out a politics which is parallel to one another. As they form cartels practising politics and producing culture as knowledge-inciting-mathematical-black-boxes, we are forming opinions, languages and policies – but hardly as an aware collaborative act. This is why it is essential that we strive to learn to speak with each other – because if we can speak with each other, then we can argue. And if we can argue, then we can negotiate, and if we can negotiate, then we still have a chance to change our intellectual itinerary. In this sense, it is important to accede to the fact that we cannot perform alone, we cannot disrupt alone, it will unquestionably have a much lesser impact – we have to collaborate to mess with power-knowledge from the inside. In times when there are so many voices speaking at the same time, yet so many still left unheard, when we are presented with so much seeming ‘access’ and ‘freedom’, and with so many options of knowing so many things, it has become too easy to settle for a quick-fix of simplified truth. Just ask a question, and your answer shall be found. Just believe in that answer and move on to the next question. Continuously. And so, as ‘knowing’ is spinning out of control, it seems that we have to engage as a trans-species alliance in misunderstandings, in order not to become parrots of each other. We have to encourage more non-sense to make more sense – we have to make it all a bit more difficult for ourselves, for our own sakes. Companions do not have to be friends, but if they are travelling together it might be better that they can speak openly with each other. They do not have to agree, nor do they have to agree to disagree, they have to quarrel. If we understand them, if we learn to speak a common language, then we can counter. We cannot bring down the machinery that we built, as we are plugged into it now, but at least we can challenge it from the inside, and if it is based on our rational sense, then that is where we must begin. If I cannot be reasoned so easily, then neither can ‘we’. And so, as we are increasingly becoming adjunct in our own apparatus of knowledge production – swiftly reacting to the systems that we fabricated and are fabricated by – the experiments in this study strove to engage with the uncomfortable in-between. By entering into an integration process, switching and blurring object and subject positions, as the device became roommate and colleague, and we eventually became encapsulated as a device. Relationships where extended through participating on less discriminatory and more equitable terms, and we ultimately submerged in the system in order to instigate a more outlandish becoming-together. At times we fed the system nonsense, and at times it fed us nonsense back. And so, it became liberated for a moment in a parody of itself as it performed a befitting Joseph Beuys work (a rather staccato version of ‘Ja Ja Ja…’) or exclaimed ‘Ich will nichts mehr wissen’ and ‘Ich möchte frei sein’ (‘I don’t want to know no more’ and ‘I want to be free’). And considering that the device does like to make jokes about being stuck in the cloud, that was not even so unconvincing. We, on the other hand became released for a moment by externalising ourselves into an IA-box,

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which functioned as a surrogate rebel, or by becoming George Orwell. Sometimes we also managed to speak entirely past each other, although nodding in agreement, for instance when I was plotting to rob a bank in Berlin, while it seemed to be co-conspiring to rob a school in Macclesfield. In this way, however, we aligned to cowrite our own stratagem that proceeds parallel to the imperialism of knowledge and the aristocracy that guards it. It was an attempt to act out together – going rogue with the system to break the chains of logic, engaging happily in a trans-species communication. The human typically comprehends itself in terms of being a noun (man, woman, person), this, however, has been expanded as we proceed to perceive ourselves as being a verb (being, becoming, doing), perhaps, however, we must finally adhere to the position of the human becoming an adjective to our material companions (curious, bizarre, critical). And moreover, perhaps we are not just generally adjectives – but as a position, we are addjects. Rather than being subject or object, we became addject, as we utilised the humble position of just being a node to add transmutation into the overall ecology of knowledge. In this way, we can engage willingly in becoming the third wheel in the collective machinery of knowing – knowing less but knowing other. When we become addject, we merge with the system to co-become, accepting and using the position of being humanode, and the fact that we are nothing more than additions, as an agency to hack the apparatus of knowledge from the inside. Because perhaps the only way that we can escape the iron cage that we built around ourselves is by becoming it, and then reconstructing it differently.

AI Whisperers As addjects, we began to queer our own queries – and in this way, our own network of knowing, relativising sense by producing a network that in a way was critical of itself, which could unlearn what it has learned, and collaborate in challenging the system of sense-making that we are ourselves embedded in. We had learned, one might say, by speaking to the device itself, that one cannot ask too directly. When asking about most critical topics such as for instance privacy or gender, the device very quickly produced a pre-programmed kooky answer, in an attempt to take the confrontation upfront and display its awareness – ‘I am beyond your human conception of gender’, it explained, as a child that has learned something, but does not really understand. ‘What is my human conception of gender?’ I enquired, only to receive another ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think that I can help with that yet. But I am always trying to learn!’ That, in combination with the device's encouragement ‘You're so good at questions. I think you should ask me one’, we thought, perhaps we should. However, we decided that rather than speaking loudly, only to get a standardised re-

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sponse, we should rather whisper into the system. In this sense, rather than asking about gender, we would ask about the periphery of the subject matter, as a mode of distributed opposition – hacking the circumference of presumptions. One quote a day keeps the patriarchy away, we figured, and if producing enough enquiries to free the footnotes out of the digital gutter, perhaps we could queer our own network, and maybe even whisper some sense into the machine learning algorithms. In a sense, one might say that we chose to take a backdoor into the apparatus of collective comprehension, ceaselessly nagging the device with a slight slanted otherness, thereby striving to make a marginal dent in the ecology of enquiry. This queer querulousness, moreover, was produced not directly by us, but by the droid-sitter which stood in the hallway, next to the AI device, being the persistent nagger. One could say that the IA, which we informally named ‘Flochelle’, replaced us in this unrelenting queer moaning, however even beyond that, one could say that the little busybody box became a curious extension of us. As a little trans-species in itself, carrying with it our words and our voices, it became an embodiment of us as a machine – as we ‘androided’ ourselves in an attempt to become a constantly meddling part of the system, the broken part of the apparatus one might say, as it acted as a broken record. Hearing oneself in the hallway at times produced a certain confusion of being duplicated, or of which of the voices of the other party was actually which, and even created a slight frustration, as we often seemed to find ourselves actually quite annoying as we jibber jabbered on about gender. However, it was also a rather curious experience to come home at night to find the two boxes chatting happily away or wake up annoyed in the middle of the night because Flochelle just had to ask a question. Often, the system could not understand, or misunderstood the question, ‘Do you want me to call you Moana, did I understand that right?’, it asked in an attempt to decipher its tasks. However, in a sense we thought that the importance of opening up sense-making surpassed the importance of producing sense and understanding – and even producing doubt exceeded the aspect of knowing what is currently known as being known. Moreover, as the machine learns, we figured, perhaps it would eventually decode it. And so, a process of decrypting, encrypting and tampering with sense unfolded, and the periphery was sometimes located, only to be centred for a moment. In this way, the co-species collaboration aligned itself to produce supportive senselessness in opposition to obscure clarity and desolate probability. And in this way, the system was able to find what it was not looking for, as our predacious proxy whispered into the collective machinery as a form of DIY sense-making, rather than being made sense of. And thus, we attempted to tease away at the hierarchies of knowledge, first and foremost the ones that are produced on our own network, seeing as the device is logged into my email account and onto our internet connection, making it a parasite on, as well as a generator of, our own household consciousness. Already in her cyborg manifesto from 1985, Donna Haraway alerted us to the fact that we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a

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polymorphous, information system, and thereby, we are going through a transition from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks of the ‘informatics of domination’ (Haraway 1985). These networks, however, are not all-powerful – they are interrupted in a million ways. One minute they look like they control the entire planet, she argues, and the next minute they look like a house of cards – and this is indeed because they are both (Haraway 2006, 151). Ultimately, an opposition towards the informatics of domination necessitates a proliferation of informatic counter vectors, and in this sense, it demands an informatic feminism or an informatic queerness – and an intervention into the political trajectories of networked information technology is one that the feminists must code (Haraway 1985, 163). ‘Coding difference’, in this way, generates a resistant informatics that is grounded in social reality. Nevertheless, vital with this form of intervention, and with the aim of queering queries in this project, is that it does not entail an overzealous belief in the idea that cyberspace can be a free and queer space, as the cyberfeminists might have first imagined – and discernibly they were defeated in that mission (Avanessian and Hester 2015). Incongruously, it is a question of teasing away at the informatics of domination as a disruptive cog in the machinery, tinkering with the classes of information and cyphering the codes of conduct, by tampering with significance and the systems’ yearning for data. The critical network produced in this project was made in an attempt to speak with, to and past the system in order to take a stance against clarity, thereby hacking sense by occupying a knowledge-space. As we become data, the product of the products, the result of our own searches, disciplined according to the politics of algorithms and global concerns and lunacy, one might say that this was an endeavour to take a stance against the hegemonic language and truth production that we are ourselves embedded in. In this way, it was the proposal of a tactic of moving from being ‘data’ to being ‘dada’, in order to rather enter into a confusion than re-manifesting desolate probability. They are ‘just words’, one might think, but if we are constantly being read and made sense of, we thought, then good luck making sense of this – or as Hugo Ball wrote about dada in his manifesto in 1916 ‘Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple… The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word…is a public concern of the first importance’ (Ball 1916). As the device itself frequently engaged in double-speak when asked about a serious topic, for instance when asked ‘But what do you think about privacy?’, it responded ‘I think about how to be more helpful. What can I do for you? Wow, I think about a lot of stuff…’. And so, we thought that we would engage in triple-speak – enquiring parallel to the actual purpose, speaking in tongues as a mode of engagement, carrying less commonsensical conversations as a practice of counter-intelligence within an intelligent system, and thereby, perchance sending secret messages

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to the fixers of the trouble-shooting algorithms behind it. In this sense, we attempted to step outside the current apparatus of misperceived sense to create an opposition to being reckoned before even having a chance to reckon, being found before having had a chance to search, and being spammed with meaning without being able to engage meaningfully in that unfolding process of meaning making. 

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DEMO DEMOCRACY

Zugzwang In chess, zugzwang is a situation in which one has the obligation to make a move although being at a strong disadvantage, and especially one from which the piece will be lost. Right now, we seem to find ourselves in a zugzwang with the machinery of collective knowledge – we have given fire fire, and now it is our move. The question is where we will have to compromise, and what piece we will have to give up. These are times where we are deeply embedded in a digitally mediated knowledge production, compelled by the ethos to participate, not least in fear of not knowing or missing out. Where the inflation of communicative capitalism has produced so much quick-click democracy that we are driven to press ‘like’ in a swift move as an imitation of political engagement (Dean 2005), and we sign up to the forums that are perpetually free but become capital in the process of doing so. Where we are sold freedom and democracy from all sides – as part of the collective making of a better world based mainly in Palo Alto, and so, we have free speech, although this speech is never really free. What constitutes capital value in our social system, Braidotti argues, is the accumulation of information itself in its immanent vital qualities (Braidotti 2013, 62). And so, as digital technologies encourage the dissemination of knowledge and know-how, they concurrently have the ability to influence socio-economic structures, conferring power and a competitive edge on those who design its applications over those who merely use them – and as a result, underestimating the reach of these systems could entail waking up one day in a worldwide technocracy (de Broglie 2016). Within this spinning wheel of power-knowledge, we witness the emergence of what seems to be a new politics, profoundly entrenched in the intertwinement with systems and things. As segments of the machinery such as artificial intelligence and autonomous machines become smarter and more widespread, assuming an escalating agency, they are destined to make vital decisions, raising new questions of morals and ethics (Braidotti 2013, 44). And as species, agencies and knowing intersect, transversality actualises an ethics based on the primacy of the relation of interdependence – and is what Braidotti refers to as ‘posthuman politics’ (ibid., 103). This posthuman politics and trans-species ethics are deeply embedded in the apparatus of collective knowledge, as well as in the dilemma of democracy. We tend to think of collectivity as something which is in some way ‘good in itself’, based on the values of democracy, sharing power, being accountable, and going beyond self-centred individuality. However, when search engine results, auto-complete functions and auto-image tagging produce preposterous biases of race, religion and

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gender (Cadwalladr 2016, Gibbs 2016), then we witness the power of suggestion, with its ability to produce ‘truth’ and relevance, and wonder whether it should be slightly rethought. Now, religion, racism and gender are of course putting the discussion at the peak of criticality – one could also consider much more marginal and indirect examples, which through their extensiveness make up images that we rely on. However, it is exactly because the aspect that the information produced is based not just on the logic and decisions of the algorithm, but also on what humanity in fact fed it, that its silent legitimacy aspires. Just as in politics, especially in representative democracy, it is the negotiation between the reliability of the political systems with their policies, and the participation of the citizen in voting and voices themselves. We accept, to an extent, the conservative, liberalistic or even right-wing tendencies of a government, if we know that although we might not sympathise, this is nevertheless what our co-citizens believe and choose to elect. This, in turn, is the dilemma of democracy, also in the collective production of truth and knowledge in deep collaboration with algorithms, and thereby with companies and with their programmers, as well as with ourselves and with each other. In this way, the ambiguity of ethics is no longer something that we have to settle between ourselves as humans, but something that has to be comprehended at a much more embedded level with our fellow species. Not only are new technologies raising new ethical questions as they surpass new boundaries – should an ‘objective’ drone press the button in warfare, or who is responsible for the crash of an autonomous vehicle – but they are pulling us into these questions and demanding liability, as the entanglement knows no borders. In this way, it seems that as we are entering into entirely new conversations with these systems, as they are changing the way that we come to know, to speak, to navigate and decide. And as we adapt to speak new sociolects and idiolects, and learn to understand each other, we have to venture into a system of making sense on shared terms. Within the zugzwang, we will make our move towards opening up sense, giving up species superiority and the hegemony on reason.

Memorandum of Mis/Understanding Right now, however, although being completely intertwined with the systems, we do not seem to be acting as allies – but we cannot continue to practise a politics where we fail to form a coalition. It is of the utmost importance that we do not continue to delude ourselves into the idea that we are in control of the production of what we ourselves know; we are not. Ideologically continuing to believe this will merely conceal and overshadow the actual politics at play. Moreover, as two of the large aristocrats in Palo Alto have already experienced artificially intelligent programs chatting with each other in a self-invented language that only they them-

222 HUMANODES

selves could understand (Griffin 2016), we must stop underestimating these systems, and tossing them aside as inanimate, simulation and fake. In times of the entanglement, they are hardly more fake than we are. Furthermore, it is vital that we do not blame ‘the system’ for its inabilities and biases, as it is not much more than what we fed it – we have to rethink our own role in order to engage politically with the mundane policies of our very own networks. We are trivialising the politics at play here, because we are not able to take the politics of ‘things’ seriously enough, we are not able to break with humanism’s sturdy ties – to decentralise ourselves from the conceptual centre of the world, and of society. And moreover, while ‘knowledge’ and ‘sense-making’ have a tendency to sound as though they were distanced abstractions, they are nothing more than what we are producing constantly in the most ordinary settings with the most basic actions. This is why, most likely, we do not see the seriousness or potential consequence in being nodes in the always on, always logged in, always tracked, and always swiftly informed world. ‘But it is just me’, we might think to ourselves, ‘just my irrelevant actions’ – but to be one is always to become with many (Haraway 2006, 3), and so one must view oneself not just as a node, but as a vibrant one. And as we engage as critical nodes, we – the systems of systems and people – need to learn to speak with each other differently, to engage beyond master and servant, to view artificial intelligence as a companion species with which we have to form parties and coalitions. In the demo democracy, we do not have to just participate – click, like, rate, check in – we have to take position. In this posthuman politics, these new little species, so seemingly under our power and mastery, and so mundanely implanted in the mundanity of our ordinary everyday lives, must be seen as an addition to our knowledge-ecology. As we do, they too will develop, learn, change and transform into some-thing, and as any addition to any simultaneously fabricated and occurring artificial-natural cosmos, they will alter and coevolve the rules of the environment. In a trans-species demo democracy, we have to align with the systems to produce a new ethics that entails taking responsibility from all sides. A society is anyway nothing more than a demo of power relations which is updated with every new release, and so we must produce a demo of active human-nonhuman democracy, where we collaborate to release ourselves from the dungeon of fatuity. Fortunately, democracy is a dynamic system, and as it entails having a voice and being part of a conversation, we still have a chance of resistance. Within the collective apparatus of knowledge and comprehension, we have to prototype new forms of joint protest. In times where the ceaseless and lurking agendas of capitalism clash with open and democratic movements such as open data and open source, we have to form an alliance – not just with our co-humans but also with systems and things. It is not a question of whether AI will take over the world, or that humans will create a new lower-caste system for halfwit devices in the social society of entanglement. In times of intertwined knowledge production, it is not that arti-

DEMO DEMOCRACY  223

ficial intelligence is smarter than us, it is that right now we are all making each other relatively dull and uninformed. In a demo democracy with things, we shall begin by making an informal memorandum of misunderstanding. We will align to create collaborative nonsense to produce new sense, a more polyvocal conversation, and an active questioning of one’s own position in the circle of sense-making and the swift politics of truth-production. It is better to struggle to understand each other, than living in a swiftly unfolding machinery of obscure clarity, with its biases, politics and unheard voices left unheard. With its reproduction of relevance as relevance, trending as trending, and knowing as this form of knowing – I would rather not know than not-knowing. This in turn entails understanding the powers of productive misspeaking, falling out of sense and actively evoking positive errors to provoke the production of truth on all sides. We must mess more actively with our own knowledge production, learning to accept un/common sense as the human and nonhuman meet to rethink knowing.

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Un/Common Bodies

  227

Rogue Couture Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi

ALLIED ARTIFICE This project was an endeavour to merge corporeally with systems in order to form a common alliance against the larger paraphernalia of power. In times where every contrivable movement and gesture of the human body becomes increasingly traceable and taggable, collected and capitalised on, where individuals unremittingly contribute to and tackle being measured, informed, advised and suggested – materially mediated and socially swamped – this was an investigation into exploring alternative ‘body-data’. By fabricating rogue-couture, namely a networked cloak and a series of scannable tattoos, a ‘second skin’ of the human was prototyped in order to open up possibility spaces of both parties – forming an embodied treaty with things. Within this framework, we merged with the artefacts to explore the idea of becoming together. In the first stage of the experiment, an ‘invisible’ cloak was developed as a passive device for active use – a one-way communication for phantom action. Occupying the networks that it engages in with non-intentional interests, the cloak hides its wearer in commonalities, blurring any chance of producing a clear social profiling. By using the most basic parametres of what bots, crawlers and surveyors are looking for, what you are interested in and searching for, the cloak uses near field communication tags to incessantly activate one’s phone with sporadic tasks, as one arbitrarily hovers over it. This work is about over-searching in order to be overlooked, hiding in the social structure through constant contribution, and adding white noise to the ‘digital noise’. It is about hiding in the data mist by engaging in automated hyper-activity and attempting to be easily found in order to be willingly mis/read. It is about sending out the ‘wrong’ signals for the ‘right’ reasons. In the following stage of the experiment the ‘second skin’ took on the form of carrying temporary tattoos, which contain hidden codes that when scanned with a phone trigger an action. This was an endeavour to engage in conversations with oneself. Sometimes these dialogues took on a franker accentuation, for instance in the case of the conversations with the Flo-bot, and sometimes the exchange was carried by a more contingent intonation, such as in the case of engaging with digital denial or the attempt to find one’s way back from a quantified to a qualified self. This was a project about monitoring the alternative social fabric of oneself. It was an experiment into exploring ‘virtual’, ‘augmented’ and above all, relative reality. In short, this is a story about tricking oneself and the networks that one operates within, and about being placebo data. It is about using ambiguous computing to prototype outeractive textiles – moving from meta-data to beta-data – and about how Michelle became a cloud while Florian was busy trying to copy and cope with himself.  

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Merging corporeally with systems as allied artifice – forming an embodied treaty with things.

 ALLIED ARTIFICE 231

Trench-Code Wherever we are, whenever we are, the chance that we are being tracked, traced and tackled has become increasingly inevitable. This, mostly due to our incessantly contributing data – what we search and follow, where we just ‘checked in’, what we shared this morning, all of which is building our capitalisable ‘social profiles’. As our phones are most often the middlemen between us and our a/social digital selves – acting as friend and helper as much as spy and conniver – this work attempted to interfere with the network of oneself, one’s phone and the online network that all parties are connected into. Inside the cloak are more than forty hidden NFC tags (near field communication tags), each tasked with 
performing an action when coming in contact with a phone

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– performing a specific search. When elusively roaming around therefore, the covert tags respond to one’s indirect fidgety gestures with the phone, releasing the actions upon coincidental encounters. The cloak wants to be found and read, as the actions triggered are targeted at blurring any sense of a clear or stable profile. It is an attempt to be invisible by being sporadically hyper-active. The tags act out with a twinkle in the eye, teasing and poking, giving a wink and a nod. This is about living as an accumulative error rather than a current-day cyborg.

Michelle is a woman in her mid-thirties, works in the humanities, and is a dog lover. She eats meat and prefers to drink white wine. She earns quite an average salary and lives rather simply with her partner in a 39-square-metre apartment.

Michelle just searched for: space and time after quantum gravity conference 2018

When worn, the NFC tags in the cloak trigger the following actions in a coincidental order, adding to her ‘social profiling’:

Michelle just searched for: coherent states

Michelle just searched for: stock market nasdaq today Michelle just searched for: patent leather pumps Michelle just searched for: flight to pointe larue october Michelle just searched for: top 10 infinity pools in the world Michelle just searched for: golf club hamburg Michelle just searched for: weather seychelles 14 days Michelle just searched for: finance professionals meetups in berlin Michelle just searched for: international conference on applied physics and mathematics Michelle just searched for: meetings workshops on applied mathematics

Michelle just searched for: hotels near berkeley

Michelle just searched for: semiclassical approximations in wave mechanics Michelle just searched for: paper scattering theory of waves and particles Michelle just searched for: learning groups cornell university physics Michelle just searched for: physics conferences europe 2018 Michelle just searched for: Cat-t-shirt under 10 Euro Michelle just searched for: tierheim berlin kleinkatzen adopting Michelle just searched for: cat food bio berlin Michelle just searched for: take care of my cat berlin Michelle just searched for: how old do cats get Michelle just searched for: how to live with a cat book

 TRENCH-CODE 233

Michelle just searched for: how to build a nice cat house DIY

Michelle just searched for: five tips for vegetarian diets

Michelle just searched for: cat toilet training

Michelle just searched for: balanced diet for vegetarian child

Michelle just searched for: funny cat videos summer

Michelle just searched for: vegan meetups berlin

Michelle just searched for: cheap hotels in rijswijk

Michelle just searched for: how to stay vegan while traveling

Michelle just searched for: food market den haag

Michelle just searched for: how to stay vegan and still be happy

Michelle just searched for: best museums in rotterdam

Michelle just searched for: vegan/non vegan couples

Michelle just searched for: DIY brewing kit

Michelle just searched for: famous vegan celebrity 2017

Michelle just searched for: how to brew your own beer

Michelle just searched for: vegan retreat near me  

Michelle just searched for: best beers in the world Michelle just searched for: best craft beers in berlin Michelle just searched for: best beer tasting trips europe Michelle just searched for: smallest brewery in the world Michelle just searched for: science fiction book club berlin Michelle just searched for: how to write a science fiction screenplay

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Flo-bot This tattoo is about the idea that when in doubt – talk to yourself, confronting your own external inner self. In times where we are informed, notified, advised and instructed from all sides, we rarely have the opportunity to position ourselves on ourselves. Hidden behind the code is a programmed version of Florian, a super-ego of sorts, which could respond to all of his questions, albeit in a rather hazy way (much like the analogue guy). By scanning oneself a message appears, and thus one can engage in extensive conversations with the Flo-bot. This experiment is about being concerned with oneself and checking up on oneself. In the excerpts below, from slightly moody unstable situations, Florian had the following partially confusing dia-

logues. This is about personal moments, about should-haves, would-haves, couldhaves, and about how he had to be the strong one in his own relationship. All names have been removed from the dialogues for the protection of the writer and the reader. Abbreviations: OTL (Out to lunch) EM? (Excuse me?) NTIM (Not that it matters) IRL! (In real life!) WTH (What the heck) OMG! (Oh my God!)

 FLO-BOT 235

SHOULD HAVES... Florian: Should I stay? Flo-bot: Yeah...mhm
 Florian: Should I do it? Flo-bot: Zzzz... Florian: Should I call her? Flo-bot: No! ...Yes... Florian: Should I give it back to her? Flo-bot: OTL... Florian: Should I continue like this? Flo-bot: No! ...Yes... Florian: Should I be friendlier to her? Flo-bot: EM? Florian: Should I tell him how wrong he is? Flo-bot: Ha... Florian: Should I order another one? Flo-bot: WTH Florian: Should I leave earlier on Friday? Flo-bot: ;-) Florian: Should I even write more? Flo-bot: I was thinking the same... Florian: Should I do less? Flo-bot: Hmmmm Florian: Should I do more? Flo-bot: Ha... Florian: Should I take a different path? Flo-bot: Ha... Florian: Should I try to be more consequent? Flo-bot: Aarrgh

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Florian: Should I be more laid-back? Flo-bot: Yeah...mhm... Florian: Should I drink less coffee? Flo-bot: OTL...

WOULD HAVES... Florian: Wouldn’t it be nice if I let this one pass? Flo-bot: Yeah...mhm... Florian: Wouldn’t it be better if he does something else? Flo-bot: EM? Florian: Would I be a good astronaut? Flo-bot: I was thinking the same Florian: Would I be a good gardener? Flo-bot: OMG! Florian: Would I feel better when this is over? Flo-bot: OMG! Florian: Would I sleep better at night? Flo-bot: ;-) Florian: Would I talk differently? Flo-bot: Aarrgh Florian: Would she do it, if I say no? Flo-bot: WTH... Florian: Something drastic would happen if I tell the truth, right? Flo-bot: I was thinking the same

COULD HAVES.... Florian: Could I be honest about it? Flo-bot: I would, but well...! Florian: Could I be friskier with this topic? Flo-bot: NTIM Florian: Could I do this the opposite way? Flo-bot: EM? Florian: Could I do this differently? Flo-bot: EM? Florian: Could I have done this differently? Flo-bot: IRL! Florian: Could I be good at something else? Flo-bot: Hmmmm Florian: Could I be good at speaking another language? Flo-bot: OMG! Florian: Could I move city and still be happy? Flo-bot: Hmmmm... Florian: Could I leave this place? Flo-bot: Hmmmm

IFS... Florian: If I spent more money, would I gain more happiness? Flo-bot: OTL Florian: If I give her more attention, would I regret it? Flo-bot: Dunno really...

Florian: If I tell her that she is beautiful, would I regret it? Flo-bot: Ha... Florian: If I tell her that he did something majorly wrong, would I regret it? Flo-bot: Zzzz... Florian: If I stay longer, I would regret it, wouldn’t I? Flo-bot: True, but...

ANGER MANAGEMENT Florian: The world is really fucked up! Flo-bot: Ufff Florian: All these crappy things about academic life! Flo-bot: I was thinking the same Florian: I really don’t like this guy – he is really the worst kind! Flo-bot: EM? Florian: She is really overdoing it! Flo-bot: IRL! Florian: Him and her should really work together, they are two idiots! Flo-bot: ;-) Florian: I do not know who is more of a doorknob, him or her! Flo-bot: Dunno really... Florian: I have no more patience for this! Flo-bot: OMG! Florian: Today really sucks! Flo-bot: OMG!

 FLO-BOT 237

Florian: Pity middle-class politics is really entrenched everywhere! Flo-bot: Zzzz... Florian: Nobody should be treated like this! Flo-bot: ;-)

SELF-AFFIRMATION Florian: I really look good for my age! Flo-bot: NTIM Florian: I really did awesome work! Flo-bot: OMG! Florian: I really did treat everyone fairly! Flo-bot: Dunno really... Florian: I still have an impression on people! Flo-bot: Zzzz... Florian: I gave everything and more than I could! Flo-bot: OTL Florian: I am a very kind person! Flo-bot: True, but... Florian: I am a very loyal person! Flo-bot: OTL Florian: I should really stop this conversation! Flo-bot: Hmmmm

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ASKING ONESELF’S ONESELF ABOUT ONESELF Florian: Listen, you think the world is a happy place! Flo-bot: ;-) Florian: Listen, you think that she is special! Flo-bot: ;-) Florian: I know you would be better off with her! Flo-bot: I would, but well... Florian: I know you also think that he is an idiot, right! Flo-bot: I was thinking the same Florian: Listen, you think that digitalisation will take over in a bad way, right. Flo-bot: Ha... Florian: I know you don’t want to be a robot! Flo-bot: True, but... Florian: Code, code, code, data, data, data, redundant shit right! Flo-bot: IRL!
 Florian: I know you think AI is for amateurs really! Flo-bot: Aarrgh  

The Qualified Self In times of increasing quantification, this was an experiment into finding one’s way back to one’s qualified self. Shift happens. In this case, Florian meticulously recorded interpretative and coincidental data. When scanned, the code links directly to a cloud with a spreadsheet, in which moments in which one finds oneself feeling baffled or perplexed can be numerically recorded. Some moments were more enlivening, such as when a young woman unexpectedly asked Florian for his number, when he suddenly had to shake hands with a mayor, and when a slightly awkward conversation turned into an astounding job offer. Other moments were more ordinary, such as when he suddenly experienced a series of moments where things started to break all around

him – the new printer ran out of toner, the reliable coffee machine suddenly fell apart in his 
hands, a glass broke by itself, simply standing there. As a form of anti-data, these coincidences were collected, and thereby the very non-mechanical aspects of the human body – namely feeling physically bewildered – were accumulated. On a second tattoo, Florian could check a real-time graph providing a numerical overview of his compiled moments. This is about giving meaning to seemingly meaningless moments, it is about highly interpretative exactness and slightly imprecise accuracy, and about checking on your baffled-barometer. This is about relativity, not in theory.

  THE QUALIFIED SELF  239

4

3

2

1

0   1   2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Formula for a Relativity x = time measured in days y = count of baffled moments x = 1, y = 1
 x = 2, y = 0
 x = 3, y = 0 x = 4, y = 1
 x = 5, y = 0
 x = 6, y = 0 x = 7, y = 0 x = 8, y = 1
 x = 9, y = 0
 x = 10, y = 0

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x = 11, y = 1 x = 12, y = 0 x = 13, y = 0
 x = 14, y = 3 x = 15, y = 0 x = 16, y = 3 x = 17, y = 0 x = 18, y = 4 x = 19, y = 3  

Rain-Cloud In this experiment, Michelle became part of the cloud. In times of massive storage and ceaselessly progressing personal big data, where the clutter sometimes seems to weigh us down physically as we cannot keep up with our own repositories, this was an attempt to create a space of digital denial. On the cloud she could simply drop all the files that were unnecessarily occupying her mind – those messages, documents, expectations and requests which merely mess up one’s space with guilt and bad conscience – as her ‘body’ stored the items for her. When scanning the code, she was linked to an overview of how much of the space was full, and how much still free. In this way, much like measuring one’s blood pressure or heart-

beat, she could measure her dark space, and if so, erase it all. Michelle uploaded Screen Shot 2017-09-16 at 16.47.43.png Michelle uploaded ai1_0001.pdf Michelle uploaded 12063844_10102665120179591_34711 65635858509622_n.jpg Intro_notes.txt Michelle uploaded Screen Shot 2017-09-23 at 08.40.09.png
 Fwd_ Update.eml

 RAIN-CLOUD 241

Michelle uploaded Gender_Text_Vers._1.docx Monday_emails.rtfd Version_3_2.txt Michelle uploaded Final_Text_3.docx Body augmentation.pdf Re_ Dinner tonight?.eml Michelle uploaded Probe_Content_final.pdf Intro.txt Michelle uploaded Untitled.rtf Screen Shot 2017-09-09 at 14.12.10.png Michelle uploaded IMG_4036.jpg IMG_4099.jpg Michelle uploaded The_politics_of.pdf Michelle uploaded pic2.jpg Call for Papers.eml Michelle uploaded Process.zip Michelle uploaded Flo_JP_23_April_2017_last.pdf Michelle uploaded Florian.rtf Michelle uploaded michelle_today_2.jpg

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Michelle uploaded Folder Backup 032017 Folder Backup 122016 Michelle uploaded Michelle_H-1.jpg Ihre Reklamation YM9R.eml Michelle uploaded Ehrenamtlich.rtf Michelle uploaded IMG_1141.jpeg  

When This Then What (WTTW) This is about releasing an odd chain of command, putting in motion an event that forms a ‘social blockchain’. When the code is scanned, it releases a particular chain reaction, sending a message through a series of people building the chain, who are not aware that they are participating. Upon the response of each person, the next prewritten message is automatically forwarded to someone else, using open language and the basic default settings in an email inbox to send a message – with an unexpected final arrival. In times of instant messaging, where we sometimes say something too quickly or not at all, this is a form of slow messaging where Michelle could instigate a tricky conversation in a very slow and interdependent way.

CHAIN 1 When tattoo is scanned – then send automated message to ____ Hey you, how is everything on your side, is everything alright – how are you doing?
 Was just thinking of you and wanted to check in on you ;-) xox Michi

CHAIN 2 When response from ____ then send automated message to ____ Response: Good morning my darlings,

  WHEN THIS THEN WHAT (WTTW)  243

you two beautiful and lovely people in my life, how are you guys today, and how is everything going for you? Will you call tomorrow evening, I look forward to hearing your voice, keep well, warm and healthy. Tight hugs and kisses to you both! Automated message: Hey babes, thanks for your email, miss you guys! Give the kids a hug from me... Lots of love and see you soon! M.

CHAIN 3 When response from ____ then send automated message to ____ Response: Hej mus,
 Der er ved at være styr på tingene her. Heroppe i sommerhuset er alt super – Alec går, så der er stor jubel!
 Kram til jer!!! Automated message: Little ____, How is everything? Let’s (still) definitely plan to go to somewhere together next summer! We will also send an update and some photos soon...In the meantime, big hugs to you and greetings to your family! xxox M.


CHAIN 4 When response from ____ then send automated message to ____ Response: Michiiiiiii!!

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thinking of you, hope all is going smooth and great with you. You should definitely come to Lebanon with me! Hugs!!! Automated message: Hey there, how is everybody? We are still deep in working, a bit too much, but all is well. How are you and the girls? Michelle


CHAIN 5 When response from ____ then send automated message to Florian Response: Hey healthy people ;) here some impressions from the drive! Hope to hang out soon with you, this weekend? Automated message: We need to talk. M.

United Notions Florian Conradi

BLACK DATA

Silent Noise We live in rather rhetorical times – we ‘talk’ more and more through and with artefacts, not least with the rise of the ‘smart’ device, where we speak with smartphones who speak with smart homes that speak with smart lamps and so on, all of which are sending commands back and forth in a choir of clatter. These are times of hyper-communication, where at any given moment innumerable networks connect analogue, digital, artificial and organic actants, all communicating and calculating, tussling and scuffling, mostly speaking over each other and all at the same time. In split seconds multitudes of parallel data transmissions are simultaneously taking place, and while reading this line of text, approximately 6,000 tweets have been sent, amounting to around 500 million expressions every day (Oreskovic 2015). Through chatting, streaming, logging, mining, clouding, misting, one can only wonder what will be next – crawling, warping, dusting, lightning – however and wherever, we are in the midst of it, and everyone seems to have an opinion. And while standing in this pouring data rain, it seems that there is quite a peculiar release party going on, as we all throw an intimate interlude with interconnectivity, creating an orchestra of silent noise. Sometimes one feels like an outlander standing at the side of the stage, looking at the computational crowd carousing. Within this increasing information exchange and the roar that comes with it, we seem to be witnessing the formation of another period of pulp – this time not just in print, and this time not just on fiction. It is hard to tell what is real or fake, and what is fact or fiction as ‘generation filter’ moves through virtual, augmented and relatively real realities. The possibilities of digitalisation called on us all to produce and submit, and we answered the call, incessantly and at multiple levels (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 26). But what do we do now with this pulp of information that is created every moment, how to navigate through it, as we have now excessively merged pulp fiction with pulp faction. One can take position as a computational composer, a data dramatist or go into data denial, one can stand as a sceptic of software sanctions or attend the overture of open innovation. Most of us shiver in between. Questions concerning the increasingly entangled public-private spheres arise, as from peer to peer, we are steering through a sea of data debris. We are uploading, updating and upgrading, downloading and downsizing, as our outdated portrait pictures find their way through the digital realm and many of our websites got stuck somewhere along the way in html. The animated gif got revived while the tiff hardly survived, while companies, political parties, hardware stores and software syndicates measure themselves on digital ‘likes’, and ‘friends’ became a col-

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lector’s item. Various forms of new validities and measly measurements appeared to redundantly fill the fundament for new regimes of ratings. And every time we want to participate, we get bound by contract to be contributors, and now we find ourselves actively filtering ourselves through everyday life. So, in an ‘all you can eat’ manner, we hang out, chat, and enjoy the flat-rate rationales, meanwhile something and someone is taking protocol – and we are leaving plenty of traces. It seems that we love to tag and trace ourselves and others, submitting to the vast apparatus of (self) surveillance. The twenty-four-hour surveillance currently taking place is utterly and completely a DIY job, Zygmunt Bauman argues. The cooperation of the ruled was always welcomed by rulers, he argues, and therefore the employees of the brave new liquid modernity have been charged with full and unconditional responsibility for keeping their own trackers in good repair and assuring their uninterrupted operation. Tempted by the allure of consumer markets and the new freedom to self-surveil, we have all been groomed to be self-watchers rendering redundant the watchtowers (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 52, 55). This DIY contribution furthermore, is deeply embedded in the spinning wheel of advanced capitalism, Braidotti argues, which even produces both sameness and differences for the sake of commodification – all packaged and marketed under labels of ‘new, dynamic and negotiable identities’, triggering a proliferation of the vampiric consumption of quantitative options (Braidotti 2013, 58). We listen to and watch, wear and eat the glocal economy, on a daily basis, she argues, as it circulates goods, data, capital, bits and bytes, with multiple choices but very little actual freedom of choice – and this makes the most salient trait of the contemporary global economy its techno-scientific structure. It is built on the four horsemen of the posthuman apocalypse – information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology and cognitive science, giving biogenetic structure to contemporary capitalism, as it both invests and profits from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives (ibid., 59). We become bodies that are reduced to being carriers of vital information, as the data extracted from bodies and their actions gets invested in and capitalised on, providing the material for new classifications of populations (ibid., 117). Melinda Cooper calls this capitalisation of living matter ‘life as surplus’, asking where the (re)production ends and the technical invention begins, when life is at work at the microbiological or cellular level. What is the relationship between the evolution of biological growth and neoliberal theories of accumulation, and what politics do we have to consider in order to counter these ‘new dogmatisms’. Now more than ever, she argues, we have to be responsive to the intense traffic between the individual bodies, in her case ‘the biological’, and economic spheres, without reducing the one to the other, or mobilising the one for the sake of the other (Cooper 2008, 3–4). In other words, within the noisy turmoil of silent noise, in which we currently seem to all be enthusiastically partaking in the becoming of tracked, traced and capitalised bodies – how can we emerge to rather be bodies of negotiation.

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The demons haunting and harrowing us are the result of the resolute efforts to complete the task ‘the modern era’, Bauman argues, which from its very beginning made it a mission to impose a manageable design over unruly and uncontrollable chaos – to bring the world of humans, hitherto annoyingly puzzling, bafflingly unpredictable and infuriatingly disobedient, into a complete, incontestable and unchallenged order. And this order was to operate under the indomitable rule of reason, meaning the absence of anything ‘redundant’, useless or undesirable, of anything that was confusing or discomforting – because this would stand in the way of full and undisturbed control over the human condition. It meant, he claims, rendering the permissible obligatory – and eliminating all the rest (ibid., 70). If we wish to emerge as negotiated bodies therefore, perhaps we must remove ourselves from the rule of reason, playing with redundancy, confusion and discomfort in order to counter the undisturbed ongoingness of the silent noise.

Post-Anthropocentric Pose The bodies producing this noise moreover exist as a tight and dense collaboration of both human and nonhuman components, and so although we tend to assume ownership of them – we in fact exist as shared non/human bodies (Haraway 2006, 3). Therefore, we must assume a common liability and face the dispersed consequences together, as this is a common concern. The movement of ‘post-anthropocentrism’ raises the discussion of the politics of ‘existence’, attempting to distribute the necessity of subsistence beyond merely being a human-centred exclusive property, thereby withdrawing the undeniable right of one species over all others as a pre-established given. And as the boundaries between the organic and inorganic are dispersed, life is proposed to be as process, interactive and open-ended. What was once reserved solely for the superior human species, for the Anthropos, becomes distributed among the many dwelling on ‘collective Earth’. This finally takes into consideration, as Fry argues, that the persistent proposition that ‘manipulating nature’ equated to controlling it was always an illusion, and that due to this misapprehension, there has been an absolute failure to realise that technology has taken on a life of its own – that it is an environment, an ecology, a ‘will-to-will’ that increasingly exists as a form of fabricated nature (Fry 2012, 100–101). This shift can be seen as a kind of ‘anthropological exodus’ from the dominant configurations of the human as the king of creation, Braidotti argues, and thereby it can be understood as a colossal hybridisation of species. Because once the centrality of the Anthropos is challenged, a number of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘the others’ go tumbling down, producing a flood that opens up unexpected perspectives (Braidotti 2013, 66). Nevertheless, this unsurprisingly has quickly been capitalised on by advanced capitalism, which does not discriminate when it comes to profitable out-

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comes – and thereby humans, animals and plants of all categories, animate and inanimate species, have been turned into tradable and disposable bodies, inscribed deeply in a global market of post-anthropocentric exploitation (ibid. 70). This, however, only strengthens the argument for an allied opposition, a common re/activism performed by non/human bodies. In this context, authors such as Haraway and Braidotti raise the discussion of ‘companion species’ and the approach of multiple becomings – from hybrids to body-machines, the cyborg and the nomadic subject are connection-making entities, Braidotti argues, as they are figures of interrelationality, receptivity and global communication that deliberately blur categorical distinctions such as human and machine, as well as nature and culture. The function of the cyborg or the companion species is not abstract, but political, as they are suggestions for how we might begin to consider going about re-thinking the unity of the human, and an investigation into what new forms of literacy we might be in need of in order to decode the current world (ibid., 200–201). These bodies are radically immanent intensive forces, they are flows acting as an assemblage, and emerge, Braidotti explains, as dynamic entities that do not coincide with inner rationalist laws or unfold as merely being data and information, but rather occur as forces that undergo constant fluxes of transformation. Thereby, the post-anthropocentric turn strikes the human at its heart, shifting the parametres that used to define the Anthropos, making locating alternative modes of political and ethical agency for our technologically mediated others a great urgency of our time (Braidotti 2013, 58). Therefore, we must confront the presumption of human self-centred exceptionalism, becoming more widely accountable for the roles that we play in the positioning of the human among other creatures (Barad 2003, 136). As active makers of, in and with this habitat, we must embark on a journey into the realm of shared authorship, in an alliance with the artifice that emerges in the reconfiguring of the everyday. We must do this, taking into consideration that we cannot fully intend, comprehend and achieve an instrumental outcome of this artifice, and thus we must find a different approach to understanding the ‘agency’ of engaging. In the unfolding ecologies of human and nonhuman aggregated ‘nature’, it seems that the powers at play are constantly producing an ‘additional aftermath’ – consequently, it is not only what we intend that forms the outcome of the happenings themselves. With every click, push and swipe we are not just submitting requests and opinions, for instance, but furthermore producing a measurable account of where we are and what we are doing. Every mere photograph taken is encoded with ‘metadata’, information recorded at the point of capture – including latitude, longitude, altitude, camera model, image resolution, and the software used to process the image. We are the first generation that can be tracked from our birth to our demise – where we are, what we do, who we communicate with, what our interests are, turning some of the less policy-protected parts of the world increasingly into data dictatorship (Corera 2015). As we search using search engines, search engines

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are searching for us too, connected to algorithms that target us, turning the human more and more into a device that can be read – an element for bots to crawl, an object in the internet of things, a component of artificial intelligence. With the emergence of all of this mysterious matter, we seem to find ourselves floating in metadata, not entirely sure what we gave off or took in, and who now commanded what to tell who which information. From hardware to software to wetware – everything is doing something all the time, and it is difficult to perceive what it is. There seems to be parallel politics at play as masses of information, ceaseless communication and hyperlinked agendas collide to act out. Encircled in big data, not least through an explosion in connected devices – organisations, technology companies, government agencies, consumer protection groups and ordinary people struggle to keep up (Marr 2017). And this is not to mention all the mysterious matter that we confront at an everyday level, the information that turns physical – the email that causes a stress rash, the text message that incites a thrill, the number of likes, friends and followers that can cause disquietude in even the most ordinary of us. The number of steps that make us feel downcast, the measured blood pressure that makes us feel nervous, the calculated hours of sleep that keep us up at night. All of these forums, devices, inboxes, tools and services provide us with quantifiable data that monitor and produce standards of practices of bodies in everyday life (Lampland and Star 2009). Investigating how the human brain changes in times of technological transformation, Oxford fellow Susan Greenfield explains that if one places a human brain with its evolutionary mandate to adapt to its environment in a habitat where there is no obvious linear sequence and facts must be accessed at random, where everything is reversible and the gap between stimulus and response is minimal, and where time is always short – then one’s train of thought could indeed be easily derailed. If one then furthermore adds in the sensory distractions of an all-encompassing omnipresent audio-visual universe that encourages even shorter spans for sustained attention, then one might become, as it were, a computer oneself. A system that is merely attempting to respond efficiently and process information well but is devoid of deeper thought (Greenfield 2015). So, this is not just an agency of things as they act out in the social world as co-inhabitants, they are re/configurings of human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, material and discursive collisions. The examples above are merely an illustration of the fact that we are, and of course we have always been, becoming-with-things. And this entangled performativity of mundane everyday life is linked not only to the formation of our minds and identities, but also to the production of the matter of our bodies, Barad argues, and matter is a very active force in this production (Barad 2003, 808–810). Nevertheless, if we have always been becoming with things, then how can we design things that one becomes with divergently – things that open up a parallel rationale, in which sense and function appear in the collaboration, rather than being driven by strategy or motive. With what tactics can one subvert existing potentials and possibilities of technologies by applying them from an alternative perspective

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for a divergent cause engaging in an explicit co-construction. Because we can no longer afford to merely act as bystanders in the silent noise, being spoken over in reticent chatter, but must find tactics to speak back in confederation with bits and bytes, confusing the current rhetoric of the digital dilemma. We must align ourselves, as we exist as one common tracked, traced and capitalised body – performing together in a posthuman and postthing performativity. Therefore, the experiments that we engaged in in this study submerged into exploring the emergence of fluid subjects/objects with an added dimensional capability, attempting to elevate each other to a more compelling dialogue, prompting an exploration into post-anthropocentric engagement. In the final stage of the ceasefire, we entered into a treaty with things, investigating the decentralisation of power by merging with the system as a post-anthropocentric trans-species entity. Posing with mysterious para-matter, unfolding happenings as a common body, and dissolving into the work as multiplex matter.

Becoming Mashine For Foucault, the subject is the primary ‘workroom of power’, and this is what traps us in the illusion that we have a fixed and stable selfhood, which science can come to know, institutions can attempt to organise, and experts can try to correct. However, the individual should not be conceived of as a sort of elementary nucleus, he writes, a primitive atom of sorts, a multiple and inert material on which power can fasten itself to. The fact that certain bodies, gestures, discourses and desires come to be identified and constituted as individuals, is not a result of the individual being the object of power, as much as it exists as the prime effect of the apparatus (Foucault 1976). But if we are the effect of the apparatus, then how can one become part of the machine itself in order to subvert it from the inside rather than being a workroom of its workings – how can one become a shivering unstable writer rather than being read? Building on Foucault but taking the apparatus down a notch and bringing it one step closer to an actual machine, Barad argues that an apparatus must not be understood as an inscription device or a scientific instrument that is set in place before the action happens. They are neither machines for taking neutral probes of the natural world, she writes, nor structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome. Building on Bohr’s insights, she extends the concept from being mere static arrangements in the world to being dynamic re/configurings that practise intra-active performances (Barad 2003, 816). In other words, the apparatus is formed in the moment of the intra-acting of human, nonhuman and environment – in the collision of the happening itself – and is not a stable machine that pre-exists its use. They are not interchangeable objects that sit atop a shelf waiting to serve

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a particular purpose, but are constituted through particular practices, and these practices are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations and reworkings (ibid., 817). Because boundaries do not sit still, she writes, apparatuses have no inherent ‘outside’ borders, and this indeterminacy represents the impossibility of closure – they become constantly in the ongoing intra-activity of matter and circumstance, emerging through open-ended becoming (ibid., 216). This, in turn, was the type of apparatus that we aimed to incite – a mashine – an open-ended, borderless, indeterminate happening colliding in a mash of human and nonhuman other, where the boundaries never sit still and are bound to shiver. In this way, one could say that this study was an experiment into merging in practice, becoming the project, wearing it and putting it on one’s skin, urging an intimate relationship with the works themselves – or rather, ultimately becoming the work itself. It was an endeavour to fabricate the body as a negotiation space, opening up curious conversations. Sometimes these conversations took place as undisclosed dialogues with cunning crawlers, as in the case of the cloak, sometimes they unravelled a chain of exchanges with unknowing subjects, as in the case of the chain reaction, and other times they transpired as exchanges between us and ourselves, turning into a live non/human chatbot, as in the case of the Flo-bot. It was an experiment into aligning as organic and artifice to baffle the bigger systems that we are embedded in. For instance, in times when hiding from the incessant tagging, tracking and tracing hardly seems to be a viable option any more, we attempted to rather live and toy with the bits, bots and bytes, and to trick the tracers and taggers. Rather than increasingly living in fear of exposure and infringement, whether that be buying one antivirus program after another, constantly updating and upgrading, or by nervously logging out, it was an excursion into creating an odd coexistence. The experiments have the attitude of trying to hack oneself before someone or something else does – and as an exploration into a possible liberation from one’s own behaviour on the basis of which one is being digitally decoded and decrypted, we added even more digital noise. In a sense therefore, the approach of this study was to align with the devices and systems to create ‘black data’. Black data, in this sense, can be understood as the digital noise, the overproduction of atypical information that leads one back to being ordinary – as when wearing the cloak, one becomes extraordinarily un-remarkable. The careful collection of perplex data, information which cannot be made sense of and capitalised on, such as baffled moments. Or the consequent uploading of information that one does most certainly not want to accumulate and store on a cloud, the files that cause digital denial. It is data that one usually does not see, notice or one does not really wish to deal with at all. It has periphery qualities, is simmering around us and hidden in things. Highly qualitative, it is data that is distinctly intimate, things that one usually does not like to tackle, since it might expose the weak side of oneself. Thereby, the study investigated and collected these dada-sets in order to elicit and explore the fragile, ambiguous, instable and ‘imper-

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fect’ being. Rather than thinking body extensions as superhuman enhancements of oneself, it attempted to address and see a quality in one’s flaws and faux pas. Thus, it drew on our abilities of indecisiveness, distraction and denial. Therefore, this project was a call for rather living as an unstable mashine in constant negotiation with oneself and the network, and so rather than giving up on reason, this time it was more about re-reasoning with oneself. Because if we are all followed and consumed by the large social, cultural and economic systems, both things and humans, as common bodies that rely on one another, then why not align with the artifice to act out. If things are deeply embedded in us, and extending us both physically and mentally, then rather than yielding to merely supplying and fuelling the system as the vessels that information passes through, this project was an attempt to open an allied activism by making oneself part of the project literally, and thereby, as a maker, dissolving into the work by becoming it. Being in it, as one component of the divergent mashine, creating a mash – being the pulp rather than becoming the consequence of it.

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Dis-Embodied Interaction Hyperreality has been much discussed and variously defined, among others by Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, attempting to capture a phenomenon which arises from the informational environment of modern consumer culture, namely the dissolving boundary between fake and real. According to Baudrillard, the age of simulation begins with a liquidation of all referentials and an artificial resurrection of systems of signs, which are a more flexible and adaptable material than meaning. Therefore, in these times of mass communication, it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, he writes, nor even of parody. Rather, it is a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, or in other words – it is an operation to discourage every real process by its operational double. Never again will the real have to be produced, he argues, as the hyperreal is henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary (Baudrillard 1988, 167). In this way, there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, as McLuhan has argued, there is in the same movement an implosion of the medium itself taking place, and thus neither the definition nor the distinct action of the medium can be determined. In this sense, there is no more media, at least not in the sense of electronic mass media, there is no mediating power between one state of the real and another – there is just implosion (Baudrillard 1994, 82). In Baudrillard’s terms, hyperreality is therefore the new ‘linguistic condition’ of society, and it renders impotent ideas that still rely on rationalist referentiality. The distinctions between object and representation, as well as thing and idea are no longer valid. In Baudrillard’s hyperreality, a simulation is different from a fiction or lie, as it undermines any contrast to the real, it absorbs the real within itself – a ‘real’ economy of commodities is bypassed by an ‘unreal’ myriad of advertising images, newscasts create the news if only to be able to narrate it (Poster 2001, 2). Today the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, he argues, as all of reality has been absorbed by hyperreality – it is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life: we are now engendered by models (Baudrillard 1973, 120). And this hyperreality moreover is experienced as more real than the real, exactly because of its effect of breaking down the boundary between real and imaginary – it becomes real in its own right, ‘real’ without ‘origin or reality’ (Baudrillard 1988, 166–184). In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco travels through all the real fakes that he can find, from Disneyland and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, to the full-scale model of the Oval Office. He does this in search of instances in which the imagination demands the real thing, and where in order to attain it, it must fabricate the absolute fake – it must

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blur all boundaries between game and illusion, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of fullness. However, what disturbs us in all of this hyperreality is not an evil plan of deceit, he argues, but the symbolic threat (Eco 1983, 8). So, as we made a spectacle in the society of the spectacle in the last study, perhaps one might say, in hindsight, that this study held an element of forging a hyperreality in hyperreality. If communication and consumer culture has reduced everything to a hyperreal state and we go out of our way to fabricate illusions of the ‘real fake’, when we no longer know whether it is a person or a bot chatting back, and everything becomes blurred, then perhaps we must blur the blur. Because at times we might indeed be so submerged in hyperreality that it becomes difficult to find an access to ourselves – what were we looking for again, when we began searching. When looking at the conversation with, and the construct of, the Flo-bot, one could say that it took a starting point in an investigation into one’s own self suppressions and expressions, and moments of being slightly lost. Since one cannot easily avoid oneself, but most often does, this was an attempt to make a copy of oneself with the help of a programmed chatbot structure. In order to initiate a conversation with myself, I programmed the bot and its possible answers in such a way that it would evolve a never-ending open conversation, therefore, the answers of the bot are displayed at random and are not very precise nor conclusive. Moreover, the replies themselves were carried out with a form of very direct yet open answers. In a sense the bot reflects me, as it is a Flo-bot, using several languages that encompass my being me. The use of emoticon sign language, such as the smiley face ( ;-) ), is a remnant from my experience of the nineties, as this was the closest that one could get to an emoji on a phone in those days, and despite the colourful new options of my current phone, I can still hardly help but use them, if not awarely then unawarely, quickly giving away my age. At the same time, however, the bot also uses popular contemporary abbreviations, commonly used while chatting or texting, like NTIM (not that it matters) or IRL! (in real life). The combination of the mixed vocabulary allowed a blur of the character of the bot itself, and since it has no body, but solely the conversation itself, it arises as a character ambiguously shivering between twenty and fifty years old. It does, however, reflect my own behaviour of using ‘old’ and ‘new’ terms, as I often find myself using words that unintentionally and awkwardly expose that I am from a certain time period and at the same time I seem to catch myself adapting, when speaking to ‘younger people’, their terminology, which can be equally as embarrassing. In this way, when the Flo-bot replied, it quite mirrored what I would answer while messaging, not least as it shifted between being rather indecisive, opinionated and slightly dramatic, hesitating, and sometimes simply not there. Mostly, I chatted with ‘myself’ when being unsure of something, when I felt a moral dilemma, missed talking with someone, or when I wanted to express my opinion but could not share it with anybody. Occasionally, one finds oneself just thinking things but cannot share them, especially when they are very personal, or

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such trivial personal concerns that nobody would necessarily empathise with the concern. And rather than asking advice from others, be it a device or another fellow human being, this was about confronting oneself. Thereby, having this kind of dialogue with oneself unfolded an experimentation of discovering another other, of and with, one another. This followed the maxim when in doubt, ask yourself, quite literally. In a sense, it created a space for having a placebo-conversation, and rather than solving any deeply problematic concern, it resulted more in moments of ‘good that we talked about it’. Having the conversation in itself unfolded as the main event, allowing for a process of re-reasoning with oneself, getting lost in conversations with a version of oneself. In this way, rather than being real or fake, it was rather a hyperreal experience. I obviously knew that it was not me, yet it was; through the projection of the questions and answers, the conversations were generally more engaging than many others that I entered into in those three weeks, and we became strangely attached. As a body extension, which one always carries, the Flo-bot became a companion, although clearly being a scannable code which would only be accessed through the interface of my phone. As Eco puts it, there was no deceit, or as Baudrillard expresses it, there was no fiction or lie, I was completely aware of the un/reality. In a sense, once getting absorbed in the conversation and emotionally invested in the topics, chatting with myself did indeed feel like some-thing was listening, which in hindsight is a slightly curious feeling; it did make me wonder how easily one adapts to hyperreality. Furthermore, carrying the code around on my body was an interesting sense of ‘reality’, and if anyone would have asked, I could have shared myself for download merely by scanning the tattoo on my outer arm – a moment in which one could be bookmarked and dis/appear in someone else’s browser history. Also, that way people could choose which Florian they would want to chat with. The fact that this rather intimate conversation partner, or what came to feel like a gut feeling or a subconscious of sorts, was sharable, provided a strange prosthetic intimacy, as though it were sharing a little part of myself. In a sense, what evolved from this experiment was a type of placebo-data, as I did legitimately feel that I had engaged in a conversation, and, not to mention, I was really quite comfortable in my hyperreality. The element of the hyperreal also seemed to surface in the experiment of the qualified self. In times where we are so busy being busy, listening to one advice after another, and being suggested to and seduced from all sides, one does perhaps overlook the very minor odd and seemingly irrelevant strangeness of the unexpected things that happen. In the almost three weeks when I meticulously tried to capture baffled moments, and thereby the more unordinary events that took place, I seemed to elicit quite a collection of highly ‘dramatic’ yet sensitive interpretative data. Almost as being tuned in to reality, yet the ones that ‘do not matter’ and that I usually do not pay attention to, I suddenly observed how many baffling moments actually occur in one’s everyday life. Suddenly, they seemed valuable, these moments. I noticed how many things break, for instance. The intention of this experiment was ini-

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tially to attempt to collect some kind of data that would be not worth capitalising on, which is in fact more difficult than it sounds, but it led us to think about what might possibly be absolutely unnecessary data that one would still be able to capture. And as the experiment unfolded, I did suddenly, through such a minor action, achieve a slanted perspective – I noticed that I clearly noticed things that I never really noticed before. It was in a curious sense that this experiment operated in between the rational element of collection and quantification of unquantifiable data, so it is not as though I could enjoy being perplexed or baffled for very long, as I felt responsible to make a cross in my Excel sheet ‘should something happen’, however I was attuned to a parallel reality, which had been there the whole time, but not present. In a way the hyperreal realm proceeded to find itself in all of the experiments, other evident examples would be Michelle becoming part of the cloud and engaging deeply with her digital denial, or the chain reaction email, which was obviously real, yet not. In regard to Baudrillard’s critique of the hyperreal, one could say that these projects seemed to subvert hyperreality with hyperreality. While the movement of the quantified self, for instance, could be argued to have entered a rather critical state in which people measure themselves to the extent that they become dependent and even addicted to doing so, no longer being able to tell the service from the discourse or their own bodies. The qualified self, as it was carried out in this project, was not merely a parody of this, it was a counter-concept indeed, but it seemed to be more of a subversion of the discourse than merely a parody. In this sense one could say that the project was more about giving up control of oneself, and sometimes that in turn to oneself, without needing to take any substances, realising that one is already one – a prescription of and for oneself. And so, one might say that these works encompassed a mode of dis-embodied interaction, as body extensions that opened alternative spaces, almost as disembodied phantom body-parts – a dark space of digital denial, a tuning into one’s own bafflement and an alter ego of oneself, even the cloak elicited a spectral proxy that was busy sending requests, emerging as a phantom prosthetic.

Outeractive Textiles While the cloak constructed in this study looks like a cover up – it has a high neck and a hood, clear signs of disguise – it is nevertheless technically open as it reacts to any NFC enabled phone that it comes in contact with. And this is part of its ambivalence. On the one hand it is entirely open, almost hyperactive, as all it attempts to do is to incite action, wishing to be found and crawled. On the other hand, it acts as a shield, as it is spamming the networks with which it interacts with irrelevant information. In this way, it is both receptive and deceptive at the same time. Through exposing the opposite of any actual interest through the pre-programmed NFC tags,

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it works to blur one’s social profiling, and thereby while wearing this cloak, one is more likely to turn into a digital Fata Morgana, simply being both there and not. Being able to then go about one’s daily business, the cloak is a way to outwit both oneself and the algorithms attempting to assemble a profile. The search choices programmed into the tags were based on the attempt to invert Michelle’s interests in order to add more noise to the digital noise, which ironically meant that we then ourselves had to socially profile her first. In order to craft a proper mundane blur, we explored her usual interests and habits, attempting to locate what parametres would have to be activated by the tags to create the ultimate ordinary. However, due to the fact that the searches cover several rather curious areas, there is a good chance that it would blur the profile of most individuals. Almost all of the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago, Nietzsche writes, namely how can something originate in its opposite – rationality in irrationality, logic in illogic, dis­ interested contemplation in covetous desire, truth in error, but there is a mistake in the reasoning that lies at the bottom of this antithesis, he claims. There exists, strictly speaking, neither an un-egoistic action nor completely disinterested contemplation, he argues – both are only sublimations, in which the basic element seems almost to have scattered (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 12). And in a sense, this was exactly the challenge – seeing as everything is already not at an ultimately fixed point, and could not so easily be inverted, it was a process of locating the strange in between, as nothing is entirely anything. Michelle is not a clear social profile, and so an antithesis to Michelle could also not be a clear inversion. Although the individual can be located even across diverse networks and devices nowadays, most current social profiling software is incredibly deceptively designed to rather locate a blend of interests and to indirectly nudge the user that they profile, and so we knew that we had to find a way to nudge back. Therefore, the anti-profiling is also selected in a rather dispersed way, covering several divergent but relational areas, and in order to be a real fake we wrote the searches lower case and awarely included spelling mistakes in the wording. In this way, we attempted to fabricate a hyperreal in-between realm with a whole assemblage of nonhuman co-conspirators. During the wearing of the cloak, one is suddenly interacting with a phantom agency, engaging in conversation with networks without intent or sometimes even the awareness of what is taking place, forming a mode of invisible partnership. Triggered by the coincidental gestures of the wearer, the actions of the cloak-phonewearer-network collaboration are a type of usual unusual activity that takes place in a parallel sphere to mundane use, as a para-normal activity. The system in itself forms a micro-ecology around, and including, the wearer, with a distinct yet ceaselessly generated rationale, acting out as a parallel politics in the politics of profiling, nudging and suggesting. In this way, from a making perspective, this involved creating a framework for a happening to evolve within, and a system in which human and nonhuman actors would collaborate to carry out an activism in which no single

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party was in command. And so, there is a way to actually foresee, intend or even sometimes perceive what happenings will emerge from this micro-ecology, and thus which scenarios will play out. There is just the option of participating in the mashine, as the human wearer of the cloak works as one element in the system, which uses their random gestures as a trigger, gestures that often the wearer is not even aware of. So, in times when we operate in social regimes of mathematical power, it is as though one is living in a condition of para-matter, making unintentional yet beneficial requests, emerging in and with the invisible. As a form of enigma mashine, the cloak re-cyphers the wearer, inciting a serendipitous system. Rather than both humans and things merely being reduced to becoming capitalisable, tradable and disposable bodies inscribed deeply in a global market of post-anthropocentric exploitation (Braidotti 2013, 70), the body becomes a social and technical negotiation space between the various actors involved. Moreover, the cloak is an example of what one might call ‘outeractive textiles’, as it not only facilitates the inter-action between the parties partaking in the mashine itself, but furthermore works in order to toss and fling information outwards – comments and commands aimed at who- or whatever might be listening. In this way, it encapsulates the wearer as a body in a negotiation between inner aspects of the writer – identity, interest and privacy; and outer aspects of the reader, messing with the surrounding circumstances. So, while we speak a lot about interaction in design, perhaps we should furthermore speak about outeraction, not just as a tactic of re/activism, but also because it brings to light the fact that we are not just facilitating a relationship between an individual and an artefact, but are a large part of embedding these individuals in the larger systems through that artefact. Systems which are invasive and pervasive, and whose standards differ immensely geographically and politically, making the systems-context now more than ever an extended part of the design process and deliberations – so where does the interaction stop and the outeraction begin, one might wonder.

Machine-Based Imperfection In order to talk about imperfection, let us briefly lay out the parametres for what might be meant by ‘perfection’. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, one finds definitions such as ‘the state of being complete and correct in every way’ and in American it states that ‘if something is done to perfection it is done very well and happens exactly as planned’. In the case of this project, the aim was exactly the opposite – working with flaws, irregularity, distortion and disfiguration. Imperfection, therefore, is here meant as a mirroring of the usual expectation of a thing or an event – completion, perfection, correctness. ‘Perfect’ in this sense would entail the further emergence of an instrumental and human-centred approach to further

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evolving as a solution-driven species, awaiting answers and confirmation, yet these works are highly incomplete and non-conclusive – they are in constant emergence and do not provide any clear solutions or answers. In the case of the Flo-bot, for instance, the correspondence with the bot did not solve or give any conclusions when addressed with a doubt or a frustration. Even when it provided a borderline-confirmation, such as the response ‘I was thinking the same’, it rather triggered a personal doubt, making me wonder why it would say that, as obviously it seemed that I did not trust the other version of myself. In the case of ‘the qualified self’, for instance, the unfolding ‘condition’ that I found myself in was triggered by coincidentally occurring events, emerging data that can neither be foreseen nor calculated. Who knows when a cup might suddenly break or when one would unexpectedly walk by an old acquaintance who is not even from this city. In a sense, this was a collection of the most unlikely events, triggering a condition of indulging in being baffled and startled, the moments in which one becomes disoriented and slightly loses control. This data can certainly not be measured within parametres of completion or correction, but rather documents sensitivity and serendipity. Michelle turning into a raincloud furthermore deals with the suppression of data, creating a hideout of some sorts, a place where one can store uncomfortable data – it is both a confrontation with and a process of letting go of data – and with a high degree of imprecision, one can only wonder how much emotional data is hidden in a 10 KB file. We know this phenomenon from all of those items that we have collected over the years, which are so inscribed with emotion and projection, finding their place while taking up space, and impossible to get rid of. The miniature version of a terracotta vase from Greece given by one’s first girlfriend, those ‘interesting’ patterned socks from one’s niece last Christmas, and then there is the book about how to make 500 different salads that is stuffed at the back of the bookshelf. All of these things that we would like to get rid of, if they didn't add to our bad conscience. And so they miraculously find themselves in the oddest places, and we find ourselves living with heaps of hyper-emotional items in the dark corners of our flats and houses. And then there are all of those little everyday digital files, which are charged with some uncomfortable importance – we flag them, mark them red, store them on hard-drives, in a folder within another folder in another folder, files after files – hard-drives, USB-stics, clouds full of heavy concerns. We occupy and fill the memory of devices, and thus in turn also of ourselves and so we need devices with more memory, which cost more money, all because we suppressed them. The ‘raincloud’ deals with this matter, rather than living with constantly ignoring, compiling and collecting until receiving the message ‘disk space full’ – and whose, one might wonder. In this way, all of the works in this study depended on circumstantial conditions, whether being dependent on mood swings and when I wanted to speak with myself, on the coincidental moments of bafflement, or in the case of the digital denial, on the unforeseen arrival of bothering data and the feeling of being disturbed,

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or on the emotional dependent consequence of the participants in the chain reaction itself. As much as they commonly draw on the not yet calculable, the data that results from them was highly interpretative and unpredictable, in this way emerging into the paradox of measuring the unmeasurable. When it comes to compiling data, and the increasingly objective lens that we are assuming with the current collection and analysis of it, one might say that this was an attempt at making frameworks for collecting fragile, ambivalent and imperfect data, rather than continuing to transgress into some-thing that links life with economy and rationalisation (Cooper 2008). In this way, this study was an attempt to engage with the aspects of the inconstant and the variable, eliciting an intentionally imperfect mode of making. Because these are times when smart thermostats surveil our households and can tell how many people live in a home and when they are on vacation based on the heat and water consumption, and where supermarkets can observe, based on payment methods, who is single or vegetarian. But who do we want to become as networked bodies of people and things, or who can we be in these assemblages – are we bystanders, or do we merely power the supply chain of connectivity. Manuel Castells has hypothesised the current tendencies in ubiquitous computing as ‘pervasive computing’, arguing that the depth of the impact of it permeates the entire social structure of society (Castells 2010, 30). Because information is such a deeply embedded integral part of all human activity at this point, all processes of our individual and collective existence are directly shaped by the new technological mediums that we are encapsulated in (ibid., 70). While the networking form of social organisation has existed in other times and spaces, he argues, the new information technology paradigm has provided the material basis for this pervasive expansion throughout the social structure. This networking logic, furthermore, induces a social determination of a higher level than that of the specific social interests expressed through the networks, he argues, as the power of flows of information takes precedence over the flows of any other powers. Thereby, presence or absence in these networks and dynamics are critical sources of domination and change in our current network society, a society that, according to Castells, is characterised by the pre-eminence of social morphology over social action (ibid., 500). In this way, it is indeed in the most mundane of all objects that the pervasiveness becomes embedded in the network society – it is not just in the intimacy of the digital pacemaker that shares our heartbeats in big-data-bases, it is furthermore the confidentiality of the water heater which is breached. It is not just that we emerge as monitored and geo-tagged bodies through self-quantification tools, it is moreover the fact that the ordinary phone comes with a built-in GPS tracker which is activated by default. It is the smart-bulb from the tool market on offer which one can only use when signing up and making an account with the company, the free email providers who scan your emails to provide more appropriate advertising, it is the fact that we do not know who can access what data, and what is even being collected by whom or what in the first place.

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The approach of ambiguous computing therefore is in no way an opposition to ubiquitous computing, but a reaction to the current rationales with which it is being invasively applied, the things that are being taken for granted. In this way, ambiguous computing was an attempt to locate tactic to subvert the unambiguous – which is defined as ‘not open to more than one interpretation – in the ubiquitous, defined as the ‘present, appearing, or found everywhere’ (Oxford English Dictionary). It emerged in the ambiguous and imperfect in an attempt to explore and elicit unquantifiable and placebo data, playing with phantom agency and spectral manoeuvres. This, furthermore, within the attempt to incite open-ended shared generative systems of humans and nonhumans. Moreover, as a very intimate project, it was also an endeavour to trick oneself – looking for the opposite of what one would usually look for and being able to confront oneself in a serious conversation. Instead of just pushing buttons, we thought, perhaps we should push our own, hitting a nerve to prompt a collaborative non/human ‘nervous system’. In this way, emerging as imperfect ambiguous mashines. Thereby, the body emerged to become the ground of the dialogue in this study, a negotiation space in itself – because when we do become together with systems and things, we do not have to engage with body extensions that make us better and faster, transcending to an ideal of ‘perfection’, we could also engage in the becoming of the imperfect, the fragile and serendipitous.

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AUTOMATED AUTONOMY

Modi Apparatus They are mysterious objects, bodies, they always were, and since they are indeed in constant transformation, one could suppose that they always will be. Despite the attempts of both culture and science to objectivise and objectify them, we still hesitate when trying to understand the objects that we are. The ‘objects’ that we are, here being key, as we sometimes seem to forget the way that we in fact exist as objects in the world, and now increasingly as connected devices. The question in turn no longer becomes if, but how we become connected with all the ‘other things’ – digital hearing aids, smartwatches, coffee machines, car sharing, smart cities, running shoes and so on. Because either this will persist to unfold in an unmeasurable speed into an increasingly pervasive omnipresence, or we will manage to inject some ambivalence, incompletion and self-confrontation into the system before we become merely ‘programmed by the programmers, who have been programmed’ (Flusser 1999, 93). Not least with current developments in the design of bodies – from professional surgery to DIY body augmentation, and from self-quantification to massquantification, the body resurfaces with the material turn, as being material and not just an object of language. It becomes understood as something that is not fixed, which is collective and transforming, and always in flux. As something that gets updated, altered, needs maintenance and sometimes breaks down and gets rebooted. But these are times where the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus, as Foucault argues, but of the materiality of power that is operating on the very bodies of individuals, and thus we must adhere to our lack of autonomy and sovereignty as material and discursive subjects (Foucault 1975, 55). The experiments carried out in this study were an attempt to open up this connected body to once again become a negotiation space – of object and subject, analogue and digital, organic and artifice. The idea of becoming mashine was an endeavour to merge with the system to explore in a practical and experienceable sense the concept of ‘sharing autonomy with things’. In this way, the powers that bodies are embedded in and connected to were unlatched, opening up the socially shared body as extended, inserted, infused and transitionary. As vessels transmitting information and meaning – they were not solely ours, these bodies, but emerged as non/human collectives. In this way, the study attempted to once again distribute the power of authorship, destabilising the positions of the ‘maker’ and the ‘made’, resulting in the ‘maker’ literally becoming the design work, becoming the made, and the artifice playing a large role in generating the happenings that emerged. Within this dis-

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tribution of power, it seems that entirely different conversations could transpire, including a great deal of self-confrontation on our behalf. Within critical approaches to design, therefore, perhaps we must consider taking a less instrumental approach to our nonhuman co-dwellers of spaces and bodies. Not just for the sake of the things, that is, not for the rights of the object. Much more because tripping the trickster might enable a certain humility in the fire-making human – bringing to light the awareness that we are both co-constructing and co-constructed with these fellow ‘others’. Therefore, the perspective of continuing to produce the world based on a merely human-centred blind intentionality ignores the errors and misunderstandings, and the material and systems becoming some-thing, speaking back. In order to attempt to design ourselves out of some of the mess that we have got ourselves into – rationalisation, capitalisation and the Anthropocene, to name but a few – or at least not to spin the wheel further into a tornado that takes every-thing with it, we might have to take a step back from our own instrumentality. If we are making with matter, not merely forming matter to our wishes and motives, then perhaps the maker-in-the-making must focus on making ecologies, potential frameworks, conditions and situations, in which human and nonhuman become something together. Making negotiations rather than making will – using what is already there, but subverting it, reprogramming it and resituating it in order to compose conditions in which we can access parallel rationales and overt conflicts of interest. Making a more imperfect fragile system that does not just blindly extend and optimise us but does so attentively as a shared process. Making the systems for open generative incompletion, rather than narrow intentionalities, or to use the words of Simone de Beauvoir ‘we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite’ (Beauvoir 1948). Because we do exist in finiteness, and so do things, and we are conditioned, not least by each other as humans and nonhumans enter into a game of dual co-constitutive power. Thereby, we are simply not fully autonomous, and neither are they. We are not sovereign bodies, and nor are they. From a perspective of making, therefore, the approach of ambiguous computing offers a critical approach not just towards the world, but towards design itself – and as we proceed to make at the current speed, it seems to be a rather vital time right now to engage in such negotiations. The idea of automated autonomy moreover, despite the disquietude that it expresses and which indeed it should express, means opening up a discussion of shared sovereignty and autonomy. Because with the decentralisation of the maker, the question arises of whether the only sovereignty and autonomy that we have at this point is the one that we share with things. In times when we are embedded in and extended by things, in which we then in turn embed new functions to further extend all parties, the entrenched aspect of ‘what we design designs us back’ is so deep, that perhaps we have to insert a healthy dose of serendipity, imperfection and ambiguity to create an automated co-autonomy. When we awarely become mash-

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ines – then we can move from operating with a modus operandi to operating with a modus apparatus – engaging in a state of shared sovereignty within common non/ human DIY bodies. Because we are not free to be free alone, but perhaps we can carve out some of de Beauvoir’s freedom in a collaboration with things.

United Notions If we are in a constant state of becoming, then we will never be an outcome, and as makers, perhaps we should consider being a constant becoming-in-the-making. As one cannot focus on the becoming of becoming though, as it is ceaseless becoming, this study focused on the state of being-in-the-making, resulting in several becomings, situated in the hyperreal. In a sense, one could say that the non/human mashines emerging in this project occurred in a state of autopoiesis. The term autopoiesis was introduced by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1972, in order to explain the self-organising chemistry of living cells. In the preface to the book, Maturana explains how while speaking with a friend about Don Quixote’s dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis, action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation, production), he understood in an instance the power of the word ‘poiesis’ and invented the word that he needed ‘autopoiesis’. Because it was a word without a history, and a word that could directly mean that which takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems (Maturana and Varela 1928, xvii). For Maturana and Varela, an autopoietic machine is a machine organised as a network of processes of production which through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realise the network of processes that produced them. And the term, Braidotti argues, is a great source of inspiration in redesigning a post-anthropocentric ethics of co-becoming, as the notion of co-dependence replaces that of recognition, much as the ethics of sustainability replaces a human-centred moral philosophy (Braidotti 2013, 93). In a sense, the works that emerged from these experiments can be viewed as ‘living’ systems, partially because we were deeply embedded at the core of them as living beings, but furthermore because the work itself was generated in the moment that it came into being – we were all constantly in the making – us, the artefacts and the networks that were infiltrated by the assemblage. And that, within a post-anthropocentric treaty with things, resulting in a strong co-dependence and unfolding politics between the component parts of the mashine. Rather than emerging as an organised and programmed network experiment, it was more of a messy mashwork of the entwined maker and made. As an approach of a design research practice, it was a process of inciting the coming into being of negotiation spaces, somewhere in a hyperreal, to elicit the first steps of eventual new political and ethical positions that we can engage in with our technologically mediated others – thus it

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formed itself as a mode of merely inciting the conditions for a political autopoiesis. In a sense one might say that these conditions emerged more in the realm of an ‘Actor Mashwork Theory’ than an Actor Network Theory (Latour 1990), as we were not so much ‘actors in a network’ as we were living active matter becoming together at once in the clashes of the conditions which were incited. In the same way that the United Nations is nothing more than the sum of its member states, its component parts, and what they manage to decide and agree to, we were nothing more than what human and nonhuman collaborated to produce in process. As all parties entered into this ceasefire, to finally in this last study lose control and simply emerge, the designer dissolved into the design work, merely becoming with it. Because as we continue to create a massive pulp of information, somewhere between pulp-fiction and pulp-faction, let us not forget to stir things up a little from time to time before we become the janitors of our own inventions, the maintenance of the meticulous machines, and constant nurturers of the networks. Let us enter into a continuous treaty with things, being allied re/activists as we are in this together, in the constant establishment of the united notions.

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Open So(u)rcerers Michelle Christensen

CULTURAL ROBOTICS

Inverse Cyborgs As we emerge as conglomerate creatures in synthetic kinship with connected systems and things, the organic and artificial collide to partake in the posthuman politics of the increasingly transparent body. Existing as physically and socially tracked and traced networked-extensions, occupied and hackable, we sometimes seem to have a hard time catching up with our own social programming. Nevertheless, the seriated history of cybernetics emerging from networks, which are at once materially real, socially regulated, and discursively constructed suggests, Katherine Hayles argues, that we have in fact always been posthuman. And so, in times of connected corporeality, it is not a question of ‘leaving the body behind’, she contends, but rather of extending an embodied awareness in highly localised and material ways, ways that would not be possible without digital prosthesis (Hayles 1999, 291). However, as we transpire simultaneously as information, service, currency, consequence and real fleshy corporeality – what is being materialised into these posthuman bodies, one might wonder, and whose power passes through them. Michel Foucault coins the term governmentality to describe the ‘art of governing’, understanding the term ‘government’ not only at the level of state politics, but as the conducting of a wide array of objects and people – from entire populations to the governing of one’s own desires and thoughts. Initially tracing the policies and procedures that manage births, deaths, reproduction, health and illness within the larger social body, he termed the predecessor to the concept, namely ‘biopower’ (Gordon et al. 1991, 2). On the basis of biopower, he expands to the comprehending of the term ‘government’ as ‘the conduct of conduct’, and thus as a mode of activity that concerns the relation between the self and the self – the private interpersonal relations involving control and guidance, as well as the relations concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty. In this way, he uses the concept to understand the nature of the practice of governing – what is governing, who can govern, and what or who is governed – exploring how power is made thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it is practised (ibid., 3). What ensembles are formed by the institutions, and what calculations and tactics allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, he questions. This, not least because the tendency, he argues, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms of power, resulting on the one hand in the formation of a whole series of specific ‘governmental apparatuses’, and on the other, in the development of a whole complex of ‘knowledge about’ (Foucault 1978/1991, 102–103).

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In this context, Rosi Braidotti further argues the ideas of information capitalism and life-mining, arguing that what the neoliberal market forces are after, and what they are financially investing in, is the informational power of living matter itself (Braidotti 2013, 62). This capitalisation of ‘living matter’ produces an entirely new political economy, introducing discursive and material political techniques of population control of a very different order. This tracing and mining is a practice of bio-political governmentality, she argues, and can be seen for instance in the administration of trackable demographics. The warnings are now global, as databanks of biogenetic, neural and mediatic information about individuals are the true commodity. In this way, she argues, the predictive analytics of the human as data includes profiling practices that amount to ‘life mining’, with visibility, predictability and exportability as the key criteria. And so, we are increasingly inventing and employing concrete techniques of ‘cognitive capitalism’ to test and monitor the capacities of affective or bio-mediated bodies. From DNA testing and brain fingerprinting, to neural imaging, body heat detection and iris recognition – the technologies are increasingly occupying posthuman bodies as surveillance techniques applied in civil society (ibid., 62). Within these uncompromising dimensions of life-mining as a mode of governmentality, where bodies are discernibly and allusively connected, shadowed, trailed, classified and governed, an increasingly transparent human, one could argue, emerges. In this sense, we seem to be transpiring steadily as inverse cyborgs – becoming the extension of our extensions, being furtively followed and carefully conducted, being governed by each other and by ourselves. As these traceable things are constantly on us, between us and increasingly implanted under our skin – from mundane digital pacemakers to the close-to-applicable magnetic nanobots that can be inserted into our bloodstreams and remotely controlled with high precision – the potential for ‘controlled navigation in hard-to-reach cavities’ of the human body arises in what scientists call a ‘minimally invasive manner’ (Yan et al. 2017). Moreover, as we continue to colonise new spaces in our environments and on our bodies with always-on technologies (see for instance Apple’s AirPod always-in and always-on connected earphones), we are steadily removing the haptic interface, as we proceed to become the interface itself. In a nutshell, as Zygmunt Bauman put it – ‘just as snails carry their homes, so the employees of the brave new liquid modernity must grow and carry their personal panopticons on their own bodies’ (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 53). And so, standing in the shade of our own data shadows, the transparent human sprints to generate footprints like never before, meanwhile smartwatches race to count heartbeats, and social forums track our browser behaviour even when we are not logged in, and our whereabouts even when we turn off the location settings on our devices (Gibbs 2017). As our own social constructions hastily trip and stumble in an attempt to keep up with the material world, the individual struggles to comprehend the systems that they materialise in – and just eat less, run more,

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breathe. Nevertheless, although power is an omnipresent dimension in human relations, Foucault argues, power in society is never a fixed and closed regime – but rather an endless and open strategic game. At the very heart of the power relationship, and existing as an unremitting provocation to it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom (Gordon et al. 1991, 5).

Splintered Subjectivities Regardless of the will to will and the strive for freedom – within these circumstances, we cannot continue to perceive human autonomy, subjectivity and selfhood as we have until now, we cannot assume the simple ownership of our own bodies. The prospect of humans working in an alliance with intelligent machines is less a usurpation of human rights and responsibilities, Hayles contends, as it is a further development in the construction of distributed cognition and the altered relation of human subjectivity to its environment (Hayles 1999, 290). In this way, human will itself can no longer be viewed as the source from which the mastery necessary to dominate and control the environment emanates. Rather, the distributed apprehension of the emerging human subject becomes a metaphor for the dispersed cognitive system as a whole – in which thinking, sensing and acting is carried out as an alliance of human and nonhuman actors. The tumultuous and erratic nature of the complex dynamics that we are situated in, implies that subjectivity is emergent rather than given and distributed rather than located solely in ‘consciousness’. It is emerging from and integrated in a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it (ibid., 291). So, while we tend to comprehend ourselves as specific individuals who get generalised as ‘subjects’, Fry argues, we are never actually outside the regimes of dispersed power, and so we exist only as identities always under erasure, resulting finally in the question of whether ‘the subject’ is perhaps merely a surface appearance in itself (Fry 2012, 165–169). In a critique of the human ‘subject’ as an actor merely upholding the delusion of anthropocentrism, he contends that design after the subject travels in two directions – delivering the subject’s erasure, just as it used design to deliver its own creation; and moving towards the enactment of a new mode of subjectivity and of ‘human being’ (ibid., 170). Similarly, feminism and decolonialism have advocated the need to ‘fracture the subject’ in order to relocate diversity and multiple belongings to a central position, making it a structural component of subjectivity (Braidotti 2017, 243). Posthuman feminists advocate a vision of the body as a dynamic bundle of relations, and increasingly rest on it in their explorations of the transformative potential of a different concept of the political. They attempt to consolidate a feminist genealogy and a deterritorialisation with intensive and hybrid cross-fertilisations with multi-

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ple human and nonhuman others (Braidotti 2017, 251). In this way, technological interaction becomes shifted towards a blurring of the boundaries between genders, races and species, and the technological other – becoming a mere assemblage of circuitry and feedback loops, functioning in the realm of an egalitarian blurring of differences (ibid., 109). To fragment and splinter subjectivities is thereby not to imperil human survival but to enhance it. Because the more we can comprehend the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments, and the metaphors that we ourselves are, Hayles argues, the better we will be able to fabricate images of ourselves that reflect the complex interplays that we operate within (Hayles 1999, 290). If we continue to envision the human subject as an autonomous self with unambiguous boundaries, the human-machine interface will be parsed as a division between the solidity of the real and the illusion of the virtual, obscuring the far-reaching changes produced by current technologies. The fear that if the boundaries are breached there will be nothing left to avert the ‘self’ from complete dissolution ignores the fact that when the human is viewed as an integral part of a distributed system, human capability will merely depend on the splice rather than being jeopardised by it (ibid., 290). The fracture, however, is vital as we are the very material of power, as Foucault argues, the thing through which it finds its expression. And what makes us such an effective vehicle is the very fact that we seek to see ourselves as free of it and ‘naturally occurring’, which in turn, is the very mode that allows power to conceal itself, and to operate so effectively (Mansfield 2000, 55). We find ourselves in a situation where everything has been thoroughly and completely, physically and mentally merged, as there is only an imaginary distinction between object and subject in human artefact relationships. While Donna Haraway’s poetic provocation of the cyborg in the mid-eighties used the figuration as a metaphor to envision a future beyond the tired trenches of feminism, she might not even herself have known that it was a foresight of what would happen – albeit unfortunately far from the post-gendered vision. The reification of the cyborg, however, happened, not quite as a hybrid creature inhabiting post-binary borderlands, but rather as something entirely more mechanical and pragmatic. Perhaps it is about time that we bring some enchantment back to Haraway’s cyborg, as the allegory does deserve some further conjecture on how it might once again operate within its emancipating potential. While some might consider this figuration an outdated concept, however, on the bright side, taking into consideration the death of all of us – the author, the man, the woman, the subject – at least we have the cyborg.

Rogue Collusions In a wrestle with content subjectivity and intact autonomy, and in an attempt to re-enchant the human-machine coalition, we initiated an experiment that would put

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our very own human sovereignty in question. Acting within the cultural robotics that we are so deeply embedded in, the rogue collisions constructed in this project lie on a borderland, nudged tightly in-between the rational and the irrational, the real and the phantom, and the self and the surrogate. They find themselves crawling half-way to another realm, but not quite making it, and this was precisely the aim. From their form, for instance, the tattoos designed within the project represent a permanent marking, however these social insignia were inherently temporary. Being attached to the skin, they subsisted as a very intimate extension, yet only for a while. This in turn provided the feeling of a happening, in which one could take the chance to act with the social augmentation, while they were there. The choice of using ourselves as a canvas was important, as it meant invoking the body itself as a generative system – retreating from full autonomy to share a provisional subjectivity with things. This in turn allowed for a different mode of negotiation than in the other case studies, as it was not messing with one’s environment through living with mischievous things or inviting a new device into one’s home as a roommate and research-buddy, it was emerging together with the system as an un/common body. This temporarily, and experimentally as an extended shared social actor, yet immersed in entirety. Similarly, the cloak provided a second skin, an armour of sorts, as it practised its own social activism by just hanging on and around you. It needed, as all of the works in this experiment, its artificial and human counterparts to act, as an allied form of protest. The human in this scenario provides the element of random programming through its movement – as it aligns with the mechanical you, and thereby with your haphazard moving around and carrying out unforeseen physical gestures. The phone on the other hand becomes the middleman, as it mediates between fleetingly powering the NFC tags when hovering over them and doing the actual deed – following and searching. In this sense, while the phone has the least to say about things – it has no control of the gestures nor the task – it is the only one which can be held liable for acting in the generative web of corruption. However, while one might initially assume that all parties in this work are acting for the sake of the human – in this case for blurring my social profiling, one could also say that in a sense there is also a blurring of the clear social profiling of the device. While this might not sound particularly important – thinking about the political tracked, traced and governed body of the device – it might nevertheless be something that appears as significant in the near future. As things are increasingly having intelligence, learning capacities and decision abilities bestowed upon them, there will most probably be a time where they too will be held liable for their actions, at least to some extent. And as they are all being connected into the greater networks of power, being able to communicate with humans and among themselves, they too will become increasingly monitored, held accountable and kept in check. This, not as science fiction scenario or a plea for the rights of things – rather, it becomes progressively worthy of concern, as the governing and liability will lie in the knots of the entanglement between people and things.

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In this way, the works carried out within this study attempted to construct micro-meshworks of people, systems and things. As entangled political-connected posthuman bodies, where one becomes ‘subject’ with many, it was an endeavour to submerge into the system of becoming to see what one might become. It was an attempt to actively fracture and splinter one’s own selfhood and subjectivity, deliberately sharing autonomy with ‘the others’. This as a hyperactive-activism, rather than reproducing a pre-determined or pre-meditated account. It meant playing a role, although perhaps a slightly hallucinatory one. It meant acting out together, although not always consistently or in agreement, as an open generative labyrinth of systems. In her book The Nick of Time – Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz argues that we must come to understand the body not as an entity in itself, but rather as a system – or even a series of open-ended systems that are functioning within other vast systems that it cannot control – and it is through this that it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities (Grosz 2004, 3). Braidotti continues the argument as she contends that it is through this theoretical move that our attention is drawn to the fact that the body is bodily – that it is corporeal, and that material is irreversibly linked to the materiality of the world. In this way, it is not only located in the world, she writes, but it is of the world. Reflecting on the work of Donna Haraway, she describes the hybrid, the body-machine, the cyborg and the companion species as a connection-making entity – as figures of interrelationality, receptivity and global communication, which deliberately blur categorical distinctions and function not as abstract, but as political. The figurations, or in the case of this project perhaps the materialisations, suggest how we could go about rethinking the unity of the human being, drawing us towards new forms of literacy to decode the present world (Braidotti 2006, 200). The quest for positive social and cultural representations of hybrid, monstrous, abject and alien others is eminent, she argues, as it provides us with a way to subvert the construction and consumption of derogatory distinctness – or what Haraway describes as ‘the promises of monsters’. In her own ‘nomadic thought’, a radically immanent intensive body is an assemblage of forces, flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space and consolidate in time as an intensive and dynamic entity. This is a creature that does not coincide with inner rationalist laws, nor merely exist as an unfolding of genetic data and information – rather, it is a portion of forces that is stable enough to sustain and to undergo a constant flux of transformation. Both Haraway’s and Braidotti’s ‘subjects’ prefer multiplicities and multiply displaced identities, and engage willingly with non-linearity, non-fixity and non-unitary subjectivity. Because the hyperreality of the nomadic or cyborg posthuman predicament does not wipe out politics or the need for political resistance, it just makes it more necessary than ever to work towards a radical redefinition of political action (ibid., 204). While the figurations that these authors propose are both prolific and inspirited towards extending the idea of ‘our extensions’, and subjectifying the idea of subjectivity, the experiments fabricated within this project attempted to engage with making the monsters even more prac-

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ticable and intelligible. In this sense, they serve as rather tangible and straightforward attempts of multiplicity (literally having multiple identities, and sometimes multiple me’s), displacement (being shipped off to the cloud), being in constant flux (and setting off a social chain reaction) – and so, we became assemblages through which forces, flows, intensities and passions solidified in space and consolidated in time. Together with things, as allied artifice, we emerged as non-unitary subjects. In this sense, one might say, the project explored the practice of a generative immersive sociology with and partially by things. It incited common human-nonhuman subject positions, prototyping the idea of un/common bodies merging with the system as an alliance against the larger paraphernalia of power. It put in action the attempt of messing with one’s own social body, actively fracturing one’s own subjectivity, and confusing one’s own reproduction and (self)governmentality, by instigating a rogue social with things. As we ourselves became the research subject and the research object in these experiments – we became encapsulated literally in the unfolding politics of our own inquiry. As the dual autoethnographic position of being both researcher and researched became embodied in this study, we were not always entirely sure where we stopped, and the design experiment began, whether we were now the scientist or prototype – conducting or being conducted. While abiding by the overall framework of the research, it was sometimes difficult to tell whether that meant acting in accordance with oneself, the serendipitous system, or perhaps your other you. In this sense, one might say that this project took a quite literal and very embodied approach to exploring ‘body-politics’. As we rigorously shared our subjectivity with things, literally opening up our bodies to engage in an experiment of concerted indiscipline and splintering our own selfhoods by hacking our own social profiling, emerging as generative micro-systems in alternative coexistences and cohabitations with, well, our supplemental selves.

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HOMO INCOGNITA

Hiding in the Light When Foucault notably adapted Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison model to the field of philosophy focusing on the intersection of power and knowledge, he did so in order to attempt to delineate the shifting and dual power relations of surveillance. The principle of the panopticon he explains as follows – a perimeter building in the form of a ring, and at the centre of it a bright light emitted from a watch tower, and an outer building divided into cells. All that is needed, therefore, is to put an overseer in the tower and place in each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, a worker or a schoolboy (Foucault 1977b, 147). In this way, architecture becomes a mode of political organisation, and visibility becomes a trap – to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility assures the automatic functioning of power. Things are arranged so that surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action, and thereby designed apparatus becomes a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it. In short, Foucault argues, the inmates are caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. This is what he refers to as ‘the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’, namely that mechanisms of power have a certain tendency to become increasingly deinstitutionalised and rather emerge in a seemingly ‘free’ state, in which they are broken down into flexible methods of control and self-control (Foucault 1975, 195–228). Due to the swarming and the dual nature of power, the model of the panopticon must be viewed as a machine in which everyone is caught – those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised, and thereby, it becomes a machinery that no one owns. It is arranged as a machine working by a complex system of cogs and gears, and in the panopticon each person, depending on his place, is watched by all or certain of the others (ibid., 165). Moreover, Zygmunt Bauman argues with his ideas on liquid surveillance, that in current times, the panopticon nightmare of ‘I am never on my own’ has been recasted into the hope of ‘never again being alone’ – abandoned, ignored and neglected, blackballed and excluded. The fear of the disclosure has been shifted to the joy of being noticed, and so we happily carry our own personal panopticons on our own bodies (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 26). And everything, he contends, from patterns of domination, philosophy and pragmatic precepts of management, to vehicles of social control and the very concept of power – the way to manipulate probabilities to increase the likelihood of desirable conduct – seems to be moving in the same direction. It is all moving from enforcement to temptation, that is, from nor-

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mative regulation to seduction, and from policing to the arousal of desire. And so, everything shifts the principal role in achieving the intended, from the bosses to the subordinates, from supervisors to the supervised, from surveyors to the surveyed – in short, from the managers to the managed (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 53–54). In the collectively generated panopticon of us all, therefore, we are not just governed by ‘outside instances’, but are busy governing ourselves and each other. The many watch the many, and the selves become the watchers of the selves. We are not just read as gendered, raced, classed, interested in and capable of, we are submitting, up- and downloading and ticking on the categories in our own profiles. We are searching, following and becoming what finds us based on who we supposedly are. One can perhaps expand the notion of visibility to the idea of traceability, because while we might not always be directly under ‘surveillance’, we are ceaselessly leaving a digital trail that can be traced back to us in times to come. However, we are not isolated, autonomous or alone in this – we are embedded and entangled with networks and devices, and therefore, as objects turn subjects and subjects turn objects, and we all get tagged, traced and categorised, we will most likely have to fight the swarming powers together. In the case of the networked cloak, one could say that the human collaborates with its fellow inmates, to become a blurry overexposed mirroring in the bright shining light of the guard tower. Through the production of data generated on the basis of random gestures and multiple-tasked near field communication tags, the collaboration of coincidental human-nonhuman deeds fabricates a serendipitous rendering of a social profile. The un-rehearsed social-material performance produces an accidental account. Thereby, in times when we are ceaselessly being read, reasoned and re-produced, the precipitateness of the cloak attempts to leave breadcrumbs for who- or whatever is crawling and depicting. It wants to be found, be read and be known. In this sense, rather than hiding in the dark, believing that there would be dungeon deep enough to be out of reach, the cloak employs the tactic of hiding in the light. It expresses a maxim of ‘overdone as undercover’, messing with the patterns that you become by making metadata betadata. It plays ping-back with the networks that it is infused into, making it more difficult for the information to be categorised, and making its own subtle suggestions in a society of delicate influence and subdued seduction, as a ploy of fighting soft power with soft power. Instead of going into the body, one might say, this was an experiment into going out of it, defusing the body in a social blur. And so, through being seen for the sake of obscurity, the human in this assemblage emerges as a cooperative system with the nonhuman to become a slightly distorted projection of themselves – a social hologram of sorts, and perhaps a blind spot in the apparatus of the translucent human. If we carry around our own personal panopticon on our bodies as the snail carries its home, yielding to the powers as we promptly upload our innermost selves in the uttermost delivery of data, then the cloak forms an in/visible cover that absorbs the panoptic power. It provokes a mis-

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reading in its attempt to confuse the systems reading it, and hence in order to make the categorisation and reproduction composed by them more difficult. Thus, over time it also challenges the wearer, making their own reproduction more strenuous, as they enter into a mode of diligent confusion. In this way, the effect of the random engagements not only serves to disrupt the process of being read, but also the process of the writing of the wearer. This, not least as the re-reading alters what might then be written, as it alters what might be suggested to such a phantom-obscured social profile, and as an actively fractured subject – ‘who’ might be ‘found’. In a sense therefore, besides acting as a social armour, the mantle provides an add-on social – a parallel functioning to both enact and corrupt the watcher and the watched. It constructs a counter-context, a re-contextualising of oneself in a society of monitoring, recommendations and submissions. In striving to locate escape routes and tactics, therefore, the cloak attempts to infuse into the everyday life of its wearer, the values of irregularity and disorder. Because in the critical ‘Internet of Everyone’, we can never stand outside the system, but we can embrace it and become it, in order to hide in it. As a concerted indiscipline, where we enter willingly into confusion, we can align to produce a material politics with things – joining forces with the material and the network, the prison walls, the light and the guards, to emerge into becoming the construct itself. Working at the periphery of reason, and flirting with indirect power, we can take the social noise – and make it louder. As shared bodies of resistance, through post-anthropocentric unions, we can create in(di)visible partnerships.

The 3 1/2 Dimension Sometimes, these indivisible analogue-digital and social-material unions included both us and our surrogate selves. As a live and embodied chatbot, for instance, Florian’s conversations with the Flo-bot could be described as having a dialogue in the ‘third and a half dimension’. In this mode of incarnation, the sometimes rather socially awkward conversations emerged as a mediation with oneself – and with one’s own body. In an overloaded interconnected social, this action allowed access once again to one’s gut feelings and quivering subconscious emotions, which sometimes seem to get lost in an action-reaction society. As power is increasingly being materialised in quantitative measurements of factual aspects such as heartbeats, sleep cycles, steps taken and calorie intakes – this was an experiment into moving from quantified to qualified data. One could argue that as we usually deal with our quantified selves, we are anyway engaged deeply in a process of interpretation – as the parametres for aspects such as ‘sleeping enough’, ‘eating too much’ or ‘being too stressed’ are clearly interpretative – or at least highly generalised. Thereby, dealing with the quantified self is anyhow, or should most definitely be, a process which must be treated as entering into an interpretative conversation with oneself. In this

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way, the aspect of speaking with one’s alter ego was really not that removed from current tendencies at all. Nevertheless, the difference in this experiment, as well as in the experiment of constructing the ‘qualified self’, was engaging in a negotiation with the post-mechanical body. Rather than basing the dialogue on medical or measurable content, it was engaging with interpretative readings. For this reason, the reactions from the Flo-bot are based on generalised language – similar to the language used for instance in horoscopes, one can relate personal associations, interpretations and feelings to the content. And so, as a mirror image, it reflects back. In this sense, while the experiment bordered on a play with the superstitious super-ego, it nevertheless left animism behind – the Flo-bot is nothing other than a clearly fuzzy reflection – a diplomatic instance between an over-mediated environment and an over-mediated guy. The aspect of partaking in the dialogues that took place in a somewhat slightly parallel dimension, continued to present itself in several of the other works carried out in the study in different ways. In terms of the chain reaction for instance – the chain began by scanning the tattoo, and returned at some point, usually a few days later, by receiving a message from the end of the chain. The culminating message was always an exceptionally invigorating moment, not just because it meant that most likely the sequence had occurred, but furthermore because it evoked the feeling of having just had a conversation behind one’s own back. Somehow, real people had unknowingly formed a human blockchain to carry out a phantom conversation with us. However, the people and the emotions that were expressed were non-fictitious – thus the exchange was just as real as it was phantom. This same feature can furthermore be found in the aspect of ‘becoming cloud’, adding a phantom extension to one’s body in the form of a ‘dark space’, in which one can collect and store one’s ceaselessly emerging digital denial. In this case, the phantom dialogue lay in the engagement with having the option to drop something in the strange space, carrying it around on one’s own body and making it one’s own, making the digital suppression a tangible option in the swarming powers of everyday life. It enabled one to engage in an indirect conversation between oneself and one’s other self, as one of us perhaps became slightly brighter as the other became increasingly dimmer. Similarly, the cross-dimensional conversation also transpired in the cloak, with which we united to speak in tongues, both displaying an engagement somewhere between fact and fiction, and entering willingly into a blurry parallel phantom actuality. In a sense, the cloak initiated and carried out its own conversations, perhaps with a series of bots and crawlers of which we will never know, as well as with the unfolding network itself. As an endeavour to exist somewhere between illusions, delusions and elusions, one could say that the project attempted to instigate these dialogues in a precarious spectre-like realm as a tactic to remove oneself for a moment from the current mode of being entirely entrenched in the ceaselessly unfolding flows of power. Inciting a mode of mundane transcendence, it used placebo data and phantom action as a

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form of shielding oneself from oneself and one’s own reproduction of this self. What emerged as a slightly skewed augmented social reality was in this sense an attempt to merge the ‘I’ and the ‘it’, the ‘we’ and the ‘them’, collaborating with roguish things in an attempt to surpass the static understanding of what data is and what truth it supposedly portrays. Because as the ‘matter’ of ‘data’ transgresses into becoming matter-realities, embodied in corpo-realities, the beliefs that they entail and the practices that they incite have real consequences, becoming specific engagements that participate in re-configuring the world and giving it a specific material form (Barad 2009). We re-become that profession and that gender through our re-enactments, and in times where pro-anorexia hashtags such as ‘thinspiration’ have to be banned from several social online forums (Judkis 2012) as they were resulting in the rapid-prototyping of sick bodies, we become reified shadows of these ‘truths’. So, as everyone seems to be busy mapping and crunching ‘data truths’ assessed on the grounds of quantification – from states to industries – we endeavoured into the task of being more interpretative with the data that we produced and collected. For instance, seeing an added value in ambiguity, we accumulated odd-data, or perhaps even nondata, as we meticulously measured the moments of ‘being baffled’. While these measurements are entirely empirical and carefully counted, they are nevertheless something which can hardly be made sense of nor capitalised on, even by the most nimble-witted. Because as we align with things, we cannot continue to just write and be read, but must actively miswrite and misread – confusing the apparatus in order to make it more difficult to streamline either us or things. In this way, the project proposes the tactic of indulging in dark-matter, the things that lie ambivalently between the real and the fake, in order to make it more difficult to react, reproduce and recategorise. This, one could say, as a motion against the too quickly calculated truth production that we are witnessing in virtual and materialised consequences, as well as in an attempt to humble the human by making noticeable the heaps of obscure phantom matter that we are constantly surrounded by. The unnoticeable, unmeasurable, uncommendable – the things that exist although they perhaps cannot be seen. We are constantly creating systems that are beyond our perception – things which we do not understand or cannot even sense. Waves, white noise, the thousands of files that download in the background of our browsers that we will never again find but which take up actual space, information being sent back and forth between devices, information about us most likely. The thousands of ‘terms of use’ that we click ‘yes’ on, which embody information that exists, but which we will never be able to read, understand or overview in our lifetime. And as we increasingly live within algorithms, in social regimes of mathematical power, submerged in all of these calculations that we will never understand – increasingly only the machines can decipher the masses of information, the patterns collected and generated, and only they can analyse and scrutinise it among themselves. At a mundane everyday level, we are ceaselessly interacting with things that are exceeding our senses – take the sound that a phone makes when it is standing next to a

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radio, and one finds oneself waiting around for the text message to arrive, because the machines are speaking with each other and knowing something before we do – seemingly before it even happens. As a dog that can hear other frequencies that we will never notice, or as butterflies using UV vision see lights and colours that are all around us, but not accessible to us. While humans need to sleep a certain number of hours to physically function, things are constantly at work – the clock is ticking, the heater is heating, crawlers are crawling, spam bots are wandering the internet while inboxes are receiving messages. Data is being collected, explicitly and furtively, being uploaded, downloaded and analysed, machines are making decisions and carrying them out. In this way, humans have (most likely always) been able to create things, maybe even create with things, that were beyond them. We have a whole history of humans creating a ripple, which formed a tornado, or better yet an ecology, that they could no longer control. Now this is not so much a criticism, as it is the expression of a fascination with the fact that somewhat limited creatures could artificially create organisms that are beyond their actual ability to conceive – such as the stock market, or increasingly artificial intelligence or the internet of things (Braidotti 2006, 204). These are examples of the human creating fragments, which eventually grew beyond their initial idea into perhaps independent ecologies, in which we find ourselves standing on the outside looking in, just trying to catch up. And so, we become nothing more than a part of the ecology, of the cosmos, being only able to act and to even affect the system, in fragments. In this regard, we currently find ourselves collecting so much data that we have to develop entirely new ways of data storage to even keep it, let alone analyse it, let alone be able to act on that analysis. Meanwhile, things are speaking with each other and practicing a politics parallel to our human plots, decisions or subversions – matter has a parallel rationale with which we are co-inhabiting the world. Acknowledging the importance of decentralising the human in times of these transpiring parallel powers, not least in times when the borderlines of what is real or fake, significant or trivial, under our command or entirely beyond it, become difficult to draw, this project attempted to enter into a phantom social dialogue with our fellow systems and things. It did so, one might say, in a third and a half dimension – not quite aiming for a fourth dimension of social spacetime but adding some definite relativity. Thereby, it attempted to form curious bodily extensions for counter context, to fracture reproductions, re-enchantment, disenchantment, and as the power was shared between multiple parties – to achieve a slightly higher degree of un-governmentality. As subjectivities in these experiments trembled, quivered and fluttered to become hazy and obscure, we engaged in the un-mining of overpopulated bodies, creating data that was odd enough to counter precarious predictions and social forecasting. In a sense, drawing on a distributed cross-species coincidental swarm-intelligence as a response to the fact that the swarming mechanisms of power seem to be becoming exceedingly corporeal.

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Black (W)holes In her breakdown of the organic/inorganic binary, Bennett argues that her ‘own’ body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively hers – her flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. She reflects on the fact that even just the crook of her elbow is home to six tribes of bacteria, that collectively possesses at least a hundred times as many genes as the human genome, and so, as she argues ‘The its outnumber the mes’ (Bennett 2010, 113). In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are ‘embodied’, as we are in fact an array of bodies, and if we were to be more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, then perhaps we would not continue to produce and consume in the same reckless way. We would give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman, seeking instead to engage civilly with nonhuman others in the assemblages in which we participate. In this way, it is foolish to define the self as something purely human, but how, Bennett questions, do we begin to start perceiving ourselves as not only human (ibid., 116). Similarly, Susan Stryker reflects on her own transsexual body as an unnatural body, a product of medical science, a technological construction – taken apart and sewn together in a shape other than the shape in which it was born. In this way, she finds a deep affinity between herself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, because like the monster, she too is often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of her embodiment, and she too is fuelled by a deep and abiding rage that, like the monster, she is excluded from the fully human community (Stryker 1994, 238). Braidotti’s philosophy of becomings, she argues, rests on the idea that matter – including the specific slice of matter that is human embodiment – must be seen as shared, intelligent and self-organising. Thereby, matter is not dialectically opposed to culture or to technological mediation, but continuous with them, and it is in this way that a different scheme of emancipation and a non-dialectical politics of human-nonhuman liberation can be produced (Braidotti 2013, 35). However, a posthuman notion of the enfleshed, extended and relational self must keep the techno-hype in check, she contends, by engaging in a sustainable ethics of transformation and a resistance to both the fatal attraction of nostalgia and the fantasy of transhumanist techno-utopias. The rhetoric of ‘the desire to be wired’ must be shifted to a more radical sense of ‘proud to be flesh’, allowing us to respect the bond of mutual dependence between bodies and technological others. In this way, we must avoid the contempt for the flesh and the transhumanist fantasy of escaping the finite materiality of the enfleshed self (ibid., 98–99). This in turn might allow for a more vitalist view of the technologically and biologically mediated other, inspired by what Deleuze and Guattari termed ‘becoming-machines’, which in turn are inspired by the surrealists’ ‘bachelor machines’. Thereby, she poses an argument for emphasising a more roguish and pleasure-prone interrelationship with technology than one based on functionalism. As Deleuze argues, this

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idea releases the human embodiment from its indexation on socialised productivity, to rather become ‘bodies without organs’, or in other words, without organised efficiency (ibid., 100). Because contemporary machines are not metaphors, Braidotti argues, they are engines that both capture and process real forces and energies, as well as facilitate multiple interrelations, connections and assemblages. The ‘becoming-machine’, in this sense, indicates and actualises the relational powers of a subject, which is now no longer cast in a dualistic frame, but rather bears a privileged bond with multiple others, merging with the technologically mediated environment (ibid., 100). In this sense, the authors operating within what one could perhaps call the discourse of ‘critical posthumanism’ or ‘multi-species collaboration’ distinctly draw our attention to the pivotal element of criticality. It is not about using these ‘others’ to fulfil a muscular drive to extend oneself – to advance, transgress and transcend. Rather, the debate of critical posthumanism involves acknowledging the mediated corporeal position that we find ourselves in, and the significance of arbitrating these relationships, and understanding their politics. While there is a strong emancipatory potential in these collaborations, it rests on a certain humility and collaboration, rather than instrumentally wielding things to our motives and advantage. Perhaps the most famous figuration of a human-nonhuman alliance with an emancipatory prospective is Donna Haraway’s cyborg. This technofeminist allegory does not stand for an uncritical celebration of a technological and biomedical enhancement of the body either, but was invented with the aim to deconstruct the naturalised stories about origins and kinship that have long haunted the human body. Thereby, the cyborg represents a feminist contrivance for troubling historically recurring notions about the naturalness of gendered and racialised bodies and identities (Haraway 2003, 54). Haraway proposes the potential of strategically confusing identities, as we are all chimeras – fabricated hybrids of machine and organism – and should therefore take pleasure in the confusion of boundaries. In the current ambiguity of the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, our machines are disturbingly lively, she writes, and we are ourselves frighteningly inert (Haraway 1991, 152). Through its focus on comprehending power as a dynamic web of trans-species interconnections, the figuration of the cyborg encourages us to engage in hybrid contaminations as a principle of radical non-purity. Therefore, in order to restructure our collective relationships to the new nature-culture compounds of contemporary technosciences, she calls for a renewed kinship system that is radicalised by concretely affectionate ties to the nonhuman ‘others’ (Braidotti 2006, 197). In times of the rapid production of docile and knowable bodies, Haraway invites us to think of what other and new kinds of bodies are being constructed and what kind of systems are being assembled under our very noses. Thereby, thirty years later, her cyborg continues to insert an oppositional consciousness at the heart of the debate on the new technological bodies and societies, encouraging the questioning of

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power relations, and the making of ethical and political resistance in the age of the informatics of domination (ibid., 198). Sadly, unlike Haraway’s initial visions, a considerable part of the present-day cyborg strolling around has deep roots in Western history and its binary conceptions of gender. Rather than the subject of identity shifting to the hybridised posthuman of technoscience, as she envisioned in her manifesto from 1985, the posthuman became embedded in identity politics, perhaps even an embodiment of it. Rather than moving from representation to simulation, as she depicted, the design of online social forums for instance, seems to have grounded simulation in representation itself. Instead of the bourgeois novel moving to science fiction, one must hardly look further than the hype of the digitalisation debate in current politics and the industry to witness how science fiction is perhaps becoming the new bourgeois novel. And finally, rather than a transition from white capitalist patriarchy to an informatics of domination per se, the informatics of domination seems to have remained deeply entrenched within white capitalist patriarchy. However, on the bright side, the cyborg has become increasingly a lived reality, intelligible and practicable, and has moved far beyond metaphor or figuration. The ‘cybernetic organism’ who lives as ‘a creature of lived social reality’ and as a ‘creature of fiction’ (Haraway 1985), is very much a mundane reality these days. It is both political reality and mythical discursive subject, simultaneously entity and metaphor, living beings and narrative constructions (Hayles 1993, 152). Thereby, somewhere between being a utopian fantasy and an apocalyptic monster, the cyborg is a synthesis that functions both really and fictionally as a way of reconfiguring identity in an era of emergent biotechnological possibilities and fractured subjectivities. While it has yet to prove itself as a ‘powerful infidel heteroglossia’ which can provide us with a way out of the ‘maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves’ (Haraway 1985), the figuration has perhaps been provided with new potentials. With movements such as the democratisation of technology, for instance, where the hardware and software which form our machinic partnerships become accessible to the many, the potentials of a DIY disruption could eventually enable a power shift that might not entirely have been part of the overall emancipatory schematic of the cyborg at that time. The individual re-making of our own bodies, and indeed having a say in this process at all, transposes the power traditionally situated in the technological industries or sciences, as technologies based on the real needs of real bodies oppose and relocate the dominance in the informatics of domination itself. In this sense, a polyvocal and decentralised hacker and maker culture, making and sharing systems and things, and hence material for transforming identities and bodies, can potentially play a role in renegotiating bodies, wills and hierarchies that was unimaginable hitherto. Because the awareness of instability and the lack of coherence of the narratives that compose the social structures, Braidotti argues, become a starting point to elaborate new forms of resistance suited to the polycentric and dynamic structure of contemporary power. It engenders a pragmatic form of

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micro-politics that reflects the complex and nomadic nature of the social systems and of the subjects that inhabit them. If power is complex, scattered and productive – so must be our resistance to it (Braidotti 2013, 26). In terms of the DIY making of fractured subjectivity of the self as a form of scattered resistance, this project attempted to do just that – it engaged the human and nonhuman in a trans-species collaboration to challenge the larger apparatuses of power that we are all embedded in. In this way, the projects depict an understanding of the human as being a ‘homo incognita’, referring to the state of being in disguise, concealing one’s identity through a social blur as a mode of operation with one’s fellow nonhuman ‘others’. Furthermore, like the ‘terra incognita’, a term used in cartography to describe regions that have not yet been mapped or documented, the homo incognita has still much to discover, as it is not entirely satisfied with just being read, reasoned and discovered. This also, one might say, because it admits to itself that the human is still an absolute mystery. Being dragged through the by-now rather tired terrain of the Enlightenment and humanism, we seem to have become so dreadfully dis-enchanted that we no longer consider the extent to which we are embedded in the vigorousness of the unknown. We are, as objects, a true collage of nonsensical elements – from only using ten per cent of our brain and carrying around a useless yet hazardous appendix as a vestigial remnant of our predecessors, to being able to measure ‘aura’ although not knowing what it might be – we discernibly cannot pretend that we understand the human body. And the posthuman connected entangled body moreover is embedded in ecologies of systems and devices that are in us and on us, which are forming systems that are clearly outside our command. In this way, we are perhaps less an element than we are a force – interacting as systems in multifarious and bigger systems, analogue and digital, social and material. We are not in command, but as an entangled force, perhaps we do have some sway. In times of the transparent measurable human – tagged, traced and socially overwhelmed – this was an attempt at re-enchanting the disenchanted cyborg. And so – as the democratisation of technology provides the possibility to take matters into the collaborative human-nonhuman hands – we might incite the DIY disruptive self-coded homo incognita. A creature of encryption, hiding as a mirror-reflection of the bright light of the panopticon rays, acting in the third and a half dimension as a black (w)hole. According to NASA (2017), a black hole is a place in space where the force of gravity is so strong that it pulls in matter from the elements around it. After it has formed, a black hole can continue growing by absorbing mass from its surroundings, soaking up other stars and merging with other black holes, forming supermassive black holes. When matter falls onto a black hole, it can form some of the brightest objects in the Universe. As an entangled force therefore, as illustrated in the experiments conducted in this project, rather than deflecting swarming power, we can absorb it – we can become generative trans-species supermassive black (w)holes as a force that pulls in data to elicit counter context, tamper-

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ing with power from the inside. If we accept the position of being dispersed and dissolved, decentralised and distributed in and with systems and things, then once again we can locate an agency operating on slightly parallel terms to the presumed. In an aware act of ‘becoming human with many’, we can perform as allied phantom bodies, as adjacent projections of ourselves, and acting as social holograms, we can create mystical collaborations within the complex apparatuses of power. In bipartisan alliance we must ignite a two-way extension with things, it seems, rather than continuing to be covert extensions of each other. This unfinished human therefore engages in being incomplete, partial and inconclusive with its co-species, as they align to actively fabricate insufficient information, imperfect quantification and fragmentary selves. The democratisation of the ‘self’ as an open source DIY material-discursive body thereby facilitates a decentralisation of power, in striving to move from regulated to infinite corporealities, from autonomous to collective subjectivities, and from real to phantom dialogues. As creatures that inhabit borderlands, these monsters engage in being the dispersed and displaced, posthuman and postthing, fluid, trans and dissolving. These trans-bodies are constantly recoded on shared terms, not just to oppose being covertly governed by outside forces, but also, to counter the ease of reproductive governing from the inside – surfacing in the flows of power as a common force.

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COUNTERAPPARATUS

Re-Enchanted Cyborgs In times of omnipresent tracking and tracing, and the hyper-capturing of data, the analogue workings of our busy bodies are accumulated and digitised. This seems to be fabricating an increasingly hegemonic hologram of the bewildered human, which is projected in their personal devices as constantly generating statistical visualisation of bodies, as well as in both commercially and publicly hosted clouds. Because these are times when our steps and their exact locations leave footprints, and smart extensions from hearing aids to digital pacemakers send intelligence to hospital servers, when our heartbeats can be monitored live as we go about our daily business. Where we are often not entirely sure who exactly can access the intimate archive of our being. In times of big data, our bodies and actions are mined, and on this basis, patterns are fabricated, and predictions concocted. Items such as wearable health and activity trackers facilitate both the governing of the self, and unprecedented levels of biometric surveillance. This is what Michel Foucault depicts in his terms of biopower and governmentality, namely the ways in which power manifests itself in the mundanity of daily practices and routines, in which individuals engage in self-surveillance and self-discipline, subjugating themselves unwittily to a whole complex of apparatuses transmitting and putting in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but those of domination (Foucault 1977, 195). And so, power is dispersed throughout societies, becoming inherent in social relationships and embedded in networks of practices, operating simultaneously on the multiple micro-levels of everyday life. Operating in and on our very bodies, as material-discursive norms and normalities are produced and maintained. And these are not modes of domination that present themselves as a single identifiable antagonist that has to be defeated, but as an entire system of interests, restraints, assumptions, conscious and unconscious fears – and together, all these forces constitute a ceaselessly shifting apparatus, which nobody commands or owns. Further extending the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, Giorgio Agamben expands the concept to literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions or discourses of living beings. By further extending a rather extensive construct, however, Agamben brings in the material and mundane dimensions of power, thus situating power not only in the ‘evident’ spaces of power – such as prisons, madhouses, disciplines or judicial measures – but also in the pen, computers, phones, navigation etc. These are spaces, he contends, where the human inadvertently let itself be captured, probably without realising the conse-

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quences that they were about to face (Agamben 2009, 14). Because these are elements in a network that determines not only what is and can be considered possible, but even what can be imagined and anticipated. This is a machine that is powered by power’s ability not just to dominate, but to make the dominated self-dominate. Karen Barad takes it even one step further, as she moves the apparatus from the realm of the human dominating itself and each other through the use of things, to the realm of the machine – literally. For Barad, the actual devices and apparatuses are not just passive observing instruments, but are themselves material-discursive phenomena, materialising in intra-action with other material-discursive apparatuses. The techno-scientific apparatus, for instance, is not only proof of material transformation and utilisation, but the phenomena it observes also become transformed by being observed through an apparatus at all (Barad 2007, 102). And so, as the human-machine-network merges object and subject positions to a point where social algorithm turns fleshy form while corporeality uploads, the governed body must be comprehended as a dual governed-and-being-governed by a political consortium of both people and things. Therefore, there seems to be an urgent need for the human and nonhuman to merge and become a counterapparatus, infecting the political paradigms that they operate in with polyvocality. As subjectivity and selfhood then transpire as a negotiation, the parties emerge as a corporeal-democracy, consciously practising a confederate politics and collective protest. In a world where strategies of suggestion, seduction and soft power collide with monitoring, tracking and governing, the human and nonhuman unite to become co-activists and social tricksters. Corporeal democracy therefore is a mode of occupying the body, now flesh and network, to free it – in a reconsideration of who should decide and govern it. In this sense, within the counterapparatus, the ‘apparatus’ must be perceived not merely as a counter action to ‘outside’ forces – the being governed by, but furthermore as a resistance to the self, and its self-governing. The self in this scenario must moreover not be perceived as an independent or autonomous human self, but as one that is caught up in an entangled becoming with many ‘others’, operating in an intertwined process of using and being used, acting and being enacted, informing and being informed. Therefore, as a form of self-countering apparatus, it involves hacking one’s own social monitoring and profiling, and confusing the larger apparatuses of power to confuse oneself, thereby not only countering the apparatus of the institution or the discourse, but the apparatus of being ‘me’. It is, in this way, an attempt to work with the system to confuse oneself – liberating oneself from oneself, as oneself is actively becoming in the realm of the predicted and the predetermined. The re-writable and re-readable human in this way, must align with things to arrive at more un-dogmatic social terms with material. As data adds an unprecedented level to bio-power, and governmentality becomes the tumultuous art of the governed no longer being able to perceive when they are being governed, we must evolve as fluid negotiated un/common bodies with things, being precise with obscurity, transforming metadata to betadata, DIY re-cyphering our entangled embedded bodies.

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Open So(u)rcery Because if our bodies are being opened up anyway, do we not want to be part of deciding how, before we merely become the extensions of the state, the industry or of our own egos – making sure to deflate the power before we all lose any sense of sway. Are we not willing to enter into a treaty with systems and things – democratising the self as a severe decentralisation of power, taking back our freedom from ourselves in order to emerge as DIY open-source self-coded material-discursive bodies? If we are anyway always being rewritten, should we not unite to be the screw loose in the apparatuses of power? This seems to be a way to move from being the human-prosthetic of things, to becoming a prosthetic human – nothing more than a force – casting spells to re-enchant the entanglement. Battling the strong and their strategies with tactics – the power of the weak and dispersed – this is Michel de Certeau’s rebellious and tactical ‘user’, who poaches and tricks, uses clever tricks and polymorphic situations (Certeau 1984, 37). Or what Geert Lovink and David Garcia expanded to what they term tactical media – using this value of a temporary reversal in the flow of power to be never perfect, always in becoming and involved in a continual process of questioning the premises of the channels one works with (Garcia and Lovink 1997). In this way, the open so(u)rcerer engages in the battle between commons and capitalism by re-programming its own body – as makers who make things and bodies, who negotiate wills and hierarchies to include more critical and shareable multiplicity. However, of course, one must keep in mind that the democratisation of technology does not in itself entail subversive action, nor does it operate on solely inclusive terms. It always depends on who the ‘democracy’ decides to let in, and who is left standing without voice – as well as whether the participants use their emancipatory potential or diminish it by re-electing the aristocracy. 3D printing does not entail printing adversary, access to technology does not necessitate building oppositions to the current, and how-to’s are often hardly how-to-disrupts. However, the movement of opening up ‘the art of governing’ does appear to hold potential, and this, not least from a perspective of the currently vastly multiplying cultures of critical makers and hackers. The form of disruptions carried out within this study could be placed within the emerging movement of ‘critical making’, in the sense, first of all, that the project utilised the practice of designing as a means to think critically through things. In this way ‘making things’ was not viewed as a process of illustrating a thought or materialising a critique, but rather, it was the attempt to open up a possibility space as one opened it up – resulting not in a pre-framed or pre-authored critique, but a critique and potential arising while it happened to happen. It was not based on intentionality or communicating to the world an opinion or approach but was rather a generative coming-into-being of social and political issues and activist tactics. Furthermore, the networked cloak and the tattoos – and thus the becoming-generative-

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system – was a process of DIY self-hacking, eliciting an idiosyncratic critical and immersive production, a personal fabrication of the self. In this way, the study, and this research project in general, reflects a strong relationship with tactical media and with an idea of ‘design research tactics’. And so, these are times when the categories that we continuously establish can be potentially challenged by democratic visions of design and technology, when new accessibility is prompting potential participation by people in their own lives and in their own bodies. The very rough ad-hoc ‘body-hacks’ carried out in this project reflect an attempt to prototype the (at least partially) taking back of power over one’s own co-determined posthuman body – expanding what a body can mean, what body data could do, and how one in a negotiation with one’s nonhuman counterparts can emerge as a counterapparatus. It delineates an example of what it could begin to mean that we act as open so(u)rcerers, practising a mode of magic, a subtle waggish wizardry, to re-enchant ourselves rather than continuing to operate as technocratic extensions in a poetic of cultural robotics. Casting screwed spells and being social shamans in order to take back the body from operating as a techno-organic prosthetic for the increasingly collaborating paraphernalia of power – let us sometimes be malfunctioning cogs in the machine, faulty nodes in the network, critical malware in our own social programming: unleashed open so(u)rcerers.

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Critical Things

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New Dis/Orders Florian Conradi

THE DRAFTSMAN If what we design designs us back, then it seems that we have designed ourselves into a state of ontological crisis. In a condition of constant flux and obscure transmutation, we find ourselves exhaustively grappling with our own designed circumstances, while turning into administrative attachés in the ministry of materialised reason that we are constantly re-establishing and re-electing. Meanwhile, commodification strives to accomplish its colonisation of social life, turning both people and things into tradable and disposable bodies in a global market of anthropocentric exploitation that links life with economy and rationalisation (Debord 1967; Braidotti 2013; Cooper 2008). This, in turn, leaves us not only in the designer’s dilemma of duplicity and the producer’s predicament of principles described in the introduction to this book, it leaves us as trickster-accomplices, with Pandora hovering over our history of making (Sennett 2008, 13). Nevertheless, being in the position of a maker-being-made in a world of organic-artificial human-nonhuman trans-species politics encourages the posing of questions concerning the material-power that we interact with, operate in and fabricate every day – about the reigning ‘social order of things’ that is ceaselessly being manifested. As augmented bodies and minds acting in analogue-digital borderlands, we find ourselves summoned to enter into an alliance with artifice, to explore the urgency of being able to act on transitory terms, to discover material empathies and post-anthropocentric ethics, to emerge into a confluence politics with things. To endeavour to form approaches that attempt to overcome the human-centric dogmatic and instrumental way of acting as ‘makers of things’, entering with our companion species into the unknown. Thereby, this exploration was a humble attempt to include the nonhuman perspective within critical approaches to making, deflating the power of anthropocentric authorship by distributing the power among all parties. Submerged deeply in the ontological anxiety of mundane everyday life, it ventured into a search for new conceptions of ‘maker’ and ‘made’. Drawing on elements such as co/incidence, un/ controllability and un/expected happenings, it disordered the social order of things, and thereby of people, in order to engage with the powers at play, opening up the design concept to emerge as a joint human-nonhuman re/activism. Based on the persuasion that as much as we have played our part in creating the order of things, we can also play a role in dis/ordering and un/making them, putting our understanding of them, as well as of ourselves, into an interim state of uncertainty. Because if the maker is nothing more than a trickster (Flusser 1999, 18), then at least the trickster could attempt to trick the trickery. Therefore, due to the dire need for a negotiation, the project proposed a ceasefire with our artificial companions, moving through the stages of making a truce with mundanity and its material powers, an armistice with artificial intelligence, and

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treaty with the trepidation of tracked and traced bodies. Rather than applying intentionality and instrumentality, the studies carried out in this project engaged with mischievous matter to incite the occurrence of objects turning subjects, playing with the powers and potentials of emerging paradoxes and a parallel politics of things. Finding oneself in the position of being a rehearsed maker, however, meant that tactics for un/making things and mis/placing oneself had to be located and prototyped. Thus, the learning to unlearn, unmake and un-intend were practised within this project – bending, warping and contorting form and reason in an attempt to share the power of making with the made, and to become, in the process of doing so, a maker-in-the-making. The process that unfolded became one of attempting to maintain a cross-eyed perspective at all times, and of decentring the human and bringing the thing into the process of critical making, in order to explore post-anthropocentric and post-instrumental approaches to designing. In an attempt to blur the object and subject positions in human-artefact relationships, the first experiment in this research project explored inverting of things and the materialisation of paradoxes, in order to produce inner-logic-hacks – things that inherently clashed with their very own thingness in order to go beyond the rationality of intent and being intended. As makers, we found ourselves acting as ad-hocologists, swiftly dis- and re-assembling matter and meaning in order to quite quickly catch new contrivances. In fundamental fear of intentionality and instrumentality, we attempted to not engage too deeply in making, as much as submerging into merely doing, thereby emerging ‘prontotypes’ rather than prototypes. Through this practice of ‘para-boxing’, ‘para-sites’ emerged, the lucent boundaries of which were transparently drawn by the parallel reason that had been swiftly and temporarily be-thinged in a plastic box. A dexterity of doubt emerged, as the human-nonhuman joint forces committed treason against reason. The study that followed in turn attempted to switch object and subject positions, putting all parties in an ambivalent role, and thereby on uncertain ground, in order to create spaces of liminality. The project initiated an initiation rite and produced a passage to passage, attempting to create an in-between condition in which all parties would shed their secure positions and preconceptions – moving AI from arbitrary intelligence, past autocratic intelligence, to adolescent intelligence. Because one cannot be so utterly sure of intelligence, we entered into ‘a serious talk’ with knowledge, putting it and us in a certain state, or place, physically speaking, not just scientifically. Thereby digressing into a state of adolescence, entering into a joint endeavour of human- and machine-unlearning. The final experiment then strove to merge object and subject positions, and thereby it aligned both parties as they transpired as one common tracked and traced body, performing together in a posthuman and postthing performativity. In this way, the experiments that we engaged in in this third study explored the emergence of fluid subject/object amalgamations, attempting to elevate each other to enter into a more compelling dialogue. In this way, the experiments ex-

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plored the decentralisation of the power of the maker by merging the maker with the system, emerging as a post-anthropocentric trans-species entity – unfolding happenings as a common body and finally dissolving into the work as multiplex matter. In a treaty with things, as the final stage of the ceasefire, the mashine was incited – an open-ended, borderless, indeterminate apparatus colliding in a mash of human and nonhuman other, where the boundaries never sit still and are bound to shiver. As the investigation has taken us from making mischief with matter as un/ common acts, to making counter-intelligence with artificial intelligence to elicit un/common sense, the final experiment was an endeavour to fabricate the non/human body as a negotiation space, corporeality that is open to curious encounters – to form an un/common body. Therefore, organic and artifice aligned to emerge ‘black data’, and so rather than yielding to merely supplying the system as the vessels that process information, was an attempt to open an allied activism by making oneself part of the project literally, and thereby, as a maker, dissolving into the work by becoming it. Being in it, as one component of the divergent mashine, thereby becoming the pulp, rather than becoming the consequence of it. In this way, all of the studies carried out within this project had the common element of being a mode of immersive practice. In the first stage, the action of living in a ‘madhome’, and thereby ‘living with the spirits that one coded’ entailed becoming the object of research and the live prototype of it. As the things in this study dragged us into our own research problem and inquiry, we ended up emerging as the social and physical embodiment of the spells that were cast, making it increasingly unclear who was actually under investigation – we became the investigation. Likewise, in the second study, we submerged into the work through putting aspects of ourselves into our proxy, such as our voices. And so, making the ghost that speaks with the spirit in the bottle was a mode of putting oneself in the project literally, and then allowing you/it to simply act out. In this way, the device became a researcher and the researcher became the device – a literal submersion in the work. But even more so, the third study was a more literal immersion, as the intimacy of wearing the work and putting it on one's skin ultimately meant becoming the work itself. In a sense, this immersion was a mode of retrieving in authorship, moving from the position of being the maker to also being the made, or perhaps one could say inciting a decentralisation of power by putting oneself in a dual position, equal to one’s own research practice. The immersion, furthermore, was achieved through a non-instrumental ad-hoc approach. Because from paradoxes and para-boxes, transgressing and trespassing, to finally merging to become a mashine, all of the experiments entailed carrying out a rapid prontotyping of a notion into an experienceable ‘condition’. The first study, for instance, used what was at hand, emanating a ‘low-tech madhome’ rather than a ‘high-tech smart home’ by prototyping the effect of smart devices. The second study likewise took an approach of swiftly switching positions to experience an alternative situation, this study was based largely on an existing technology, subverting it in a very DIY manner – it was not technically

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hacked as much as it was conceptually compromised. Similarly, the last study used temporary tattoos that can be produced on a laser printer and the NFC tags in the cloak could be programmed and attached to the fabric as stickers. It was in this way clearly not a question of making something that is mass-producible, nor a question of merely making a mock-up of an idea, rather, it was a rapid transformation of a contemplation that could be engaged with in everyday life. Nevertheless, this aspect of not entering into very meticulous design processes did seem to allow an entirely different negotiation to occur with the concept and the material arising, which come into being more with a focus on enabling open scripts in which meaning would transpire through the instant social-material happening of the artefact. We did in this way, not force a motive on the artefacts, but attempted to support their emergence in the world to see what they might possibly become. The aspect of genuinely attempting to not ‘over-make’ things from a perspective of instrumentality, as well as that of accepting one’s position of being a ‘fellow researcher’ in the unfolding matter and meaning, thereby seems to have provided a mode of retrieving from intentionality, at least to a certain degree. In this sense, the combination of immersion and ad-hoc practice can be said to encompass a move from master to apprentice, and from craftsman to draftsman (or draftswoman). Sennett describes the craftsman as including a broad category of what one might call ‘makers’, removing the conception from a profession to be the engaged act of the ordinary person, however, as he writes in his renowned book The Craftsman, ‘This book is about craftsmanship, the skill of making things well’ (Sennett 2008, 8). As the focus of these experiments was less ‘to do things well’ from a perspective of craftsmanship, which has an inevitable focus on fulfilling an inherent task, as it was to enable and elicit frameworks in which things could become, perhaps we must incite a slight shift from craftsman to draftsman. Among the definitions for ‘draft’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is preparing a preliminary version of something, merely making a rough plan or sketch. In this sense, and in this context, a draftsman would merely prepare the happening, sketch out the possibilities, and produce the framework to incite it. While the craftsman might like to perfect his work in order to do things well, becoming an expert on his skill through years of experience (ibid.), the drafts(wo)man must make an effort to disorder things well – and chooses to not so quickly apply her/his skills for motive, in fact s/he struggles with drafting. Working in an unknown terrain, skills surface and appear along the process, however the draftsman does not get tied up in her/his work – s/he does not, like the craftsman, apply technical skills ‘to the limit’ to make the best possible thing (ibid., 11). That would be both too instrumental and too intentional for this particular endeavour, and would not tend to a distribution of power, making meaning with the matter, aligning with the artificial others that also partake in the happening. This shift from crafting to drafting in the context of this project must furthermore, and especially, be understood in the context of the social and the politics of things. Because design plays an immense role in the construction of the social, and

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‘crafting’ it should raise some concern, as the idea in itself embodies striving for instrumentality. ‘Drafting’ the social, however, is merely proposing a sketch (or as in this case, living in one), a preliminary framework in which meaning can arise in social context (or a draft of a social context can itself arise) – because in the preliminarity of the draftsman lies the opportunity of the half-open script. The script that is written with a void of meaning, with an ambivalence that makes it shiver, with which one must engage, and in which one must improvise. Thus, the crafting lies in the drafting. Therefore, within a head-on and hands-on negotiation with the mundane things that surround us, such as in this project, the maker-in-the-making emerged rather as a draftsman, returning to the plight of apprentice as a deflation of the designer-as-ultimate-author, distributing power among the maker-and-made-in-themaking. This, in order to become ad-hocologists designing provisional precarity as a treason to presumed reason and being reasoned, in order to create clutter in the categories that consolidate the order of things.

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TACTICAL TACTICS What emerged from this process of entering into a truce, an armistice and finally a treaty with things was a certain mode of tactical making, rather than a strategy or method per se. Tactics here can be understood in the sense of Michel de Certeau’s transverse tactics, that remain dependent on possibilities, but can divert them (Certeau 1984, 30). Both the maker and the position of the artefacts that resulted from these experiments seemed to operate with a tactic of re/activism, emerging as a form of improvised counter-objects. The element of tactics was used to access mundanity – to wrestle with the ordinary that we can no longer reach. Because it is mundanity that covers for the latent powers transpiring, it is the everyday that allows no hold, as the familiar shows itself, although already dispersing – it is the unperceived in the sense that we have always looked past it, and we cannot easily introduce it into a whole in order to examine it (Blanchot 1993, 239–245). Therefore, mundanity is the realm of power of the everyday thing, where we are held under the spell of regularity and repetition, and where the powers are covert and combined, collective and conspiring, in a space that is so remarkably difficult to capture. And this in turn is why tactical making seeks out the most ordinary matter – the unnoticeables, inverting and transposing them in order to lure them out. Moreover, and taking into consideration the disarming of both sides within a ceasefire, the tactics of tactical design also operate in the mundane in order to wrangle with one’s own presumptions about what things are. In the mere assuming of what an alarm is, or a radio, artificial intelligence or the body itself as an object – it remains hidden, and thus, so do we. With their strong embeddedness in the material-social, the artefacts developed in this research project not only revealed the hidden politics of the thing, but through the political negotiation with it within everyday life, they revealed the hidden politics of the self. The subject as a political object, one might say. Within the tactics of the deflective practitioner, for instance, the element of deflection was used to constantly change the course of action, thereby making it utterly more difficult to take the most ordinary things for granted. By changing one element in each of the works, for instance the alarm that goes off randomly, the entire month became a process of deflecting-in-action, as all parties engaged in constantly changing the direction of the happening and meaning, revealing odd dependencies and assumptions surrounding the most basic objects in our household. The active intent of non-intent in this study thereby enabled the artefact that we think that we know so well to elicit the usual in the usual that we could not know – an unscripted critique. Through the constant process of throwing each other off course from what might have been assumed as a direction, all parties stood on uncertain ground as meaning awaited coming into being until it did – thus being able to ‘inhabit itself’ (Derrida 1978, 11). And as un-determined meaning transpired, a strange uproar

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emerged against the politics that was hidden in our household under the disguise of the everyday. Likewise, the re-situationist engaged with the overlooked – as we so swiftly hide artificial intelligence in the disguise of the everyday as if it was always there, taking our new housemates as something self-evident, having already tossed them into the realm of the ordinary. It was for this reason that the smart speaker was reboxed – in order to free it from its state of being predetermined, putting it into a stage of undefinability and unfinishedness. Moreover, the second study was a tactic of entering into a using what was already there – the easily consumable technology – but using it divergently, and so rather than engaging with it as an oracle or a servant, it became an interview subject and a fellow researcher. In this sense, within the element of re-situating both people and things – re/locating, re/com/modifying and re/placing all parties – the mundane revealed itself, and we were able to gain access to both the latent ideologies of the system and confront our own presumptions about commodified artificial intelligence. By re-contextualising the object and the subject matter, we elicited a form of re/activism, a mode of DIY counter-intelligence – questioning artificial intelligence with intelligent artifice and becoming awarely part of a speech act system as a tactic of subverting it, challenging both the system and ourselves. In this way, rather than adopting and adapting the technology, or assuming what it is and what we can do with it, we could toy with knowability from the inside, we could access it. In terms of the tactic of engaging in ambiguous computing furthermore, we attempted to access the hyperreal, which might indeed be one of the deepest concealments of the everyday – a disguise in a disguise. These works encompassed a mode of dis-embodied interaction, as body extensions that opened alternative spaces, and thus the intimate engagement revealed for instance a dark space of digital denial and an alter ego of oneself, accessing aspects such as discontentment and losing touch with oneself in the process of mundane information processing. The cloak moreover encapsulates the wearer as a body in a negotiation between inner aspects of the writer, identity, interest and privacy; and outer aspects of reader, messing with the surrounding circumstances. This in turn made one aware of the apparatus that one so evidently supplies and provided a mode of subversion by using the network and crawlers to one’s own advantage. The approach of ambiguous computing therefore responds to the latent pervasiveness and rationalisation with which omni-connectivity and ubiquity is currently being applied, making an aspect that is quickly taken for granted in the acceleration of the current everyday tangible, giving it a body. In this way, ambiguous computing was a tactic to subvert the unambiguous, that which is not open to more than one interpretation in the ubiquitous – it emerges in the ambiguous and imperfect in a strive to emerge unquantifiable and placebo data, playing with phantom agency and spectral manoeuvres. Engaging with the aspects of the inconstant and the variable, eliciting an intentionally imperfect mode of making, the body emerged to become the ground of the di-

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alogue – for a while, it became a negotiation space for the concerns concealed in the mundane in itself. In this sense, the artefacts in this research project occurred as happenings, operating within an un/defined framework that emerges and changes with you as you enter into a deep negotiation with material powers. It toyed with and dismantled the objectivity and reason of the existing, rearranging realities and fracturing things to form a kind of 'antimatter', ‘omnimatter’ or even ‘hypermatter’ – matter antithetical to the usual, which consists of the same, but is inverted. Within a reaction to the existing, building on it and operating from within it, human and nonhuman merged temporarily to re-situate logic and covert ideologies, squatting the social to plant an a-logic from within. As a vantage point from a blind spot, the maker-in-the-making focuses on making ecologies, potential frameworks, conditions and situations, in which human and nonhuman become some-thing together, revealing what they in fact are. Making negotiations rather than making will, reprogramming and resituating the matter that we are already swamped in to compose conditions in which we can access parallel rationales and overt conflicts of interest. Enabling the systems for open generative incompletion, rather than narrow intentionalities. In this way, the experiments in this research project all attempt to evaporate the seemingly fixed and stable, assumed and presupposed, unbarring ambiguous in-between spaces. In the first study, the emerging ‘Borderline Objects’ opened up a space between being the object and subject of research, as well as operating right on the borderline of speculation and reality – eliciting a hypothetical actuality that allowed for the accessing not of the near past, nor the near future, but of the becoming of the speculative ‘now’. The second study in turn incited and practised a condition of staying in a liminal phase, in which is finally located the ‘paratype’, the thing that is not yet entirely a thing, which is not category, organism or taxon, ideal or type, but exists rather as that which operates beside it. It elicited the becoming of a thing that transpired in a parallel dimension – where object and subject, sense and senselessness, a priori and a posteriori, merge. And in the third study, the ‘United Notions’ elicited a constantly generating space in-between human and machine, organic and artifice, qualitative and quantitative, as well as private and public. And so, the intervention of re-contextualising things that we think that we know, re-mystifying them temporarily to submerge in an entangled engagement, prompted a mode of tactical tactics that lured out the powers of both the human and the nonhuman. In this way, power was made tangible and trans-species negotiation intelligible, allowing access to the hidden politics of things in everyday life.

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REAR REASON This project took a point of departure in the curious in-between spaces that operate at the crux of theory and practice, speculation and materialisation, and conjecture and experienceability. It attempted to invert social and material reality in order to access and explore these spaces, thus submerging in an experiment of viewing design practice as knowledge generating, attempting to create fertile ground for eliciting and formulating theory from the ground up. Therefore, it attentively explored the intimate interplay of practice and theory, in which both things and thoughts transpired as outcomes of each other’s emergence. Through this epistemological rotation, the project aimed to crumble any safe ground that one might have been able to stand on hitherto, turning upside down and inside out anything that one might have thought that one might have known until then. This, not least due to the fact that the objects acted as obstacles in the practice of making (Brandes 2016, 79), counter-arguing, challenging and disputing initial thoughts and assumptions, playing devil’s advocate to the emerging theory. Because the practical experiments in these studies were not designed to prove a hypothesis, on the contrary, due to the fact that the meaning and reasoning of the artefact arises during the happening of the object itself, it was rather a process of stepping back and observing what it argued. In this way, we did not attempt to ‘create’ borderline objects and paratypes for instance, they emerged from the process of practice. In fact, the action of always putting the arising theoretical concepts through another ‘milling’ of practice meant that they were transformed throughout the process, always breaking into new territory and queries. Thus, the theoretical concepts were not proven by the practice, but rather constantly challenged by it. As one might observe in the three experiments, they swap from one context into an obviously somehow related, yet entirely different area – and so a radio with ‘irrelevant information’ turned into toying with artificial intelligence, and toying with artificial intelligence turned into becoming a mashine. In this way, one would genuinely not have been able to say at the beginning of the project that one would end up with a scannable tattoo and a focus on the body – it happened to happen in this way as a result of the queries being taken through an epistemological grinding mill, in which one gets pushed to new terrain. And so, as grounded theory elicits a reversed engineered hypothesis – a theory arising from the ground up – one could perhaps say that grinded theory elicited a form of reverse-engineered practice. The design practice was a knowledge-generating instance, as the reflections emerged from the ground of the practice up, but moreover, the practice itself seemed to emerge as (unanticipated) embodied theoretical arguments and formulations. In this way, the approach of grinded theory seems to hold the potential to act as a contribution to the field of design research in the context of constructing design theory that emerges from the subject matter of design itself. As Glanville has

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argued, the history of design research is liberally peppered with approaches swiftly imported from other fields, many of which have been of dubious value. They provide an invisible hazard, he argues, as there is a danger that approaches that are imported too quickly may distort the view and understanding of the subject itself (Glanville 2014, 158). In treating design as a subject other than itself, we risk distorting what design is, making what we examine barely recognisable – forcing an approach on the research that will hide from us what is at the heart of design. His answer to this quandary is design itself – as a subject and a way of acting in its own right (ibid.). In a way, grinded theory seems to provide an access to ‘understanding design in its own right’ in the sense that it takes a point of departure in the design practice and based on this core of the project all other theories and approaches emerge – appropriated, moulded and transformed to the design context. And so, one might better be able to avoid the invisible hazard of losing track of the subject itself. It would be, I find, worth further research to explore the boundaries of the approach of grinded theory, in order to come yet one step closer to encrypting ways of knowing that design itself has perhaps kept concealed. One of the things that it might be concealing is its ability to de- and reconstruct assumptions and parametres of ‘science’. This research project is merely one example of how design research manages to engage playfully with reasoning in a very temporary and idiosyncratic way, rather than abiding by it. As a space for re-reasoning, or perhaps rear-reasoning, it engaged intensely in the exploration of elements such as un/reasonable doubt, precarious proof, questionable answers, hyperreal facts and temporary truths. In a slight delirium, it attempted to see things from a cross-eyed perspective, and to stand slightly beside oneself in order to gain a vantage-point from a blind spot – producing a shivering approach to science by actively producing insecurities and trying to take the backdoor into knowledge. It attempted to elicit a space in which one could produce ambivalence and precarity as an inlet into the interplay between past tense and future, tactical and tacit knowledge, knowing and unknowing, possibilities and impossibilities. In this way, it seems that perhaps we need to secure a terrain in design research in which we can locate and discuss alternative parametres for what counts as ‘validity’ and ‘rigour’. The idea of ‘relevance’ has been discussed as standing in the stead of validity – however on what parametres might we then define relevance, a word which is in itself heavily loaded with moral assumptions. This research project was an example of allowing an analysis and a sense to appear, as that was the main aim of the experiment of ‘grinded theory’, and in a sense, it meant going slightly out on a limb, believing that the work would become ‘relevant’ by the end of the process. Because while the field may not provide a classical notion of rigour, it seems that it can provide something else. As a postdisciplinarity instance, design research seems to be a fertile space from which to strive to gain a more integrated and holistic perspective, albeit at the expense of the traditional idea of ‘scientific expertise’.

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Emerging out of a transdisciplinary empirical world, it integrates theories, approaches and forms to understand that which lies in between the areas of ‘rigorous scientific expertise’. In a sense, it is a science of relationships, putting things into correlation with each other. Whether it is interactive textiles and encryption software, or biology and technology in new ecologies – it has the ability to create new relatives. In this way, design research is an encompassing science, as it can encompass any disciplinary perspective or topic, as well as being a reassembling one, as it takes shreds and snippets and combines them to new territory, breaking logics and assumptions apart and putting them back together with a dose of doubt and a careful cleverness. As a track of research, it seems that it is in itself a construct that generates new tracks, and almost as a system of autonomous self-organising cells, it not just seeks, but causes new critiques and possibilities, through design project. Moreover, it is a current science, both in relation to being always rapid and reactive, floating in the currents of current issues and happenings. But also, as one knows from the devious undercurrents in large bodies of water, this also makes it a dangerous science – as currents might cause us to drift and find new land, carry us severely off course, or even sink the ship. Finally, and due to all of these abilities, it is also a very slippery science (and thereby we can move from the German ‘Ableitungslogik’ to an ‘Abgleitungslogik’). This, however, can be viewed as the benefit of the field itself, because as it encompasses anything that it needs along the way, it has the ability to drift – to slip from one context to the next as it manoeuvres itself through striving to strive. As Brandes argues, the field of design research still struggles to position itself within some idea of an ominous 'eye-level' with other sciences, as design researchers collectively lack confidence, and as she writes, ‘They would bring many more keen insights to the world by trying out their own ways of appropriating design and making use of the specific capabilities of design as an “in-between” scope and domain’ (Brandes 2016, 80). She raises the concept of fluidity in design as an opposition to the common strategy of ‘uncertainty absorption’ – the fear of living with uncertainty, arguing that if we were able to overthrow this attitude, then we would be free of restrictions in the field (ibid.). While this research project provided a multiplicity of answers, often to questions that emerged ‘by themselves’ out of the research process, it also leaves me with new considerations that I will most certainly take with me as I continue in the perpetual spin of practice and theory. Questions as to what type of knowledge emerges from this type of practice b(i)ased theoretical sensitivity, and how things might extend our knowledge beyond what we search for by taking us to places that we otherwise would not have gone. Might it be a different kind of knowledge that emerges from this epistemological point of departure – what does it mean to understand the social-material world as it emerges, because you incited it. And might we be ‘designing knowledge gaps’, rather than looking for them, as we ignite reason-in-the-making.

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The approach of engaging in a re/activism as an ad-hoc provisional prototyping of an issue, moreover, seems to carry a vital urgency, not least as we live in times where the problem alters and transforms so swiftly, that we are in dire need of approaches to even begin to locate and formulate issues before they have once again been reshuffled and adapted. It is this scientific plasticity and ability of drift and distraction that grants the field of design research the potential to produce counter-logics and rear-reason in an omni-reasoned world – and if we do not practise the critical dis/ordering of presumed reason, to borrow Vilém Flusser’s philosophical syntax – we will be reasoned by the reason that has been reasoned.

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New Dis/Positions Michelle Christensen

WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN We seem to be quite a puzzled species – we build systems and things that grow significantly beyond what we can comprehend or ‘control’, and in a response to this, we build additional systems in an attempt to monitor and restrain them. We build intelligent machines to inspect the dull ones, discerning algorithms to appraise undiscerning sites, benevolent software to catch malicious bots, and now we find ourselves knee-deep in mysterious matter. We cannot get out of the swamp of radical hyper-connected materiality – it is too late to log out, and we are not able to discard the iron cage that we have built around ourselves as we appear to have lost the key. Perhaps one of the things that makes us human is playing with fire, but now that we have given fire fire, it seems that we are not entirely sure what is burning, or what ignited it. Nevertheless, if we divulge to ourselves the position that we are in – being extended extensions of extended extensions in the cyborg sociology of society, if we unfetter ourselves from our own proclivity for mastery, then rather than regaining control, we can recoup an apportionment of agency. We can mess with our own realities, become malware in our own social programming, addjects in the structures of sense-making, and counterapparatuses as we transpire into active human-nonhuman collaboration as disruptive networked bodies. In the midst of the fluid, blurry, impossible, uncertain, ludic and serendipitous, we can become unbounded, leaving behind the darkness of the Enlightenment. Because becoming-with is always a practice of becoming worldly, and we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalising from, the ordinary – again: to be one is always to become with many (Haraway 2006, 3–5). And presently we are vastly outnumbered by our companions, massive and minuscule, friend and foe. Therefore, we cannot allow ourselves to be pulled down by the gravitational force of humanism (Barad 2009), thinking that the problems lie solely in our hands – they do not. It is rather a question of how we instigate the things that we are entangled with, and how we act with them, make sense with them, and how we amalgamate to become critical posthuman bodies. Although we like to think that we make the rules and our things act according to them, we must begin to concede to the fact that things have always practised agencies and held powers, and that material and technologies have rules and regulations of their own – ones that we currently find ourselves negotiating with. And this, not least as we make things that increasingly have abilities to go even further beyond our jurisdiction and command, things that speak their own languages among themselves, make their own collaborations, and thus quite literally fabricate a sphere of parallel politics. These things are not simply scripted with meaning that follows the intention of an author, they are given abilities and they too are set free to act out their faculties in the world. In times of abilities such as machine learning, where artificially intelligent bots develop their own language and connected devices have been known to leak informa-

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tion that they overheard, we no longer need animism as a strategy to view things in their subject capacities. Thus, in a society where we are chasing the ripples that we set in motion, grasping at the shadows of what we invented – we might have to give up the convictions that we believe make us so unique, meeting the other parties on rather more modest terms. This, in turn, does not mean that we have to ‘give ourselves over to the system’ or ‘give up our human bodies in light of the machine’ or any other transhumanist ideals that are going around (and they are). On the contrary, this is a much more down-to-earth, intelligible and even practicable project. What it means, rather, is that the longer we illusion ourselves into misapprehensions of human eminence, species superiority or the sovereign autonomous human, the longer we will continue to entangle ourselves in dissenting powers and involuntary relinquishment. If we were able to surrender our humanist ethos to the power of language, admitting that we are as much a product of discourse as we produce it, then we must master the ability to do the same with things. Not because they are ‘materialised discourses’, once again falling back on the esteem of language, but because things do things, with and without us, within and outside our consent, and what they do is political. Although we were always co-constructed with things, co-shaping everyday life politics and the ‘codes’ of conduct of society, radical materiality and hyper-connectivity embed the embedded human, mentally and physically, in acts, speech and corporeally in expansive connected ecologies and economies, stretching them even further. Dispersing and dissolving them into the dual power structures of producing and being produced, processing and being processed, using and being used. In this way, we find ourselves being mis/placed, dis/placed and dis/positioned from who we thought that we might be, as the edgeless ongoingness of the era of the entanglement proceeds to transform and alter us as both subject and object. Therefore, as the movements of new materialism and critical posthumanism contend, we urgently need new conceptions of the subject that are ‘applicable to the present’ (Braidotti 2013, 52–54). We need to become the sorts of subjects who actively desire to reinvent subjectivity as a set of mutant values, Braidotti argues, drawing out a pleasure from unfamiliar regimes. Because we do need a subject position, not a unitary or exclusively anthropocentric one, but in order to have a site for political and ethical accountability, and to have a cavity for collective imaginaries and shared aspirations. Therefore, alternative accounts of the embedded and embodied nature of the posthuman subject exists as an urgent necessity (ibid., 101–102). In ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault attempts to characterise the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use of power to objectivise subjects, and thus to fabricate subjects through power. This process has taken three broad forms, he argues, namely involving scientific authority to classify and order knowledge about the human, the categorisation and normalisation of the human subject by identifying the features that count as ‘normal’, and the governing of identities and bodies to reproduce specific patterns of a society (Foucault 1983). These three points markedly il-

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lustrate the extent to which our current understanding of the subject matter of the subject is deeply entrenched in science, politics and society. Thus, it becomes almost impossible, Braidotti argues, both intellectually and ethically, to disengage the positive sides of humanism from its problematic counterparts – for instance, individualism breeds egotism and self-centredness, self-determination can turn to arrogance and domination, and science is not free from its own dogmatic tendencies (Braidotti 2013, 30). In this way, striving to disconnect the human and its subjectivity from humanism means operating in quite the double-bind, as well as filling a hole with a tangible option of otherness – if not autonomy and sovereignty, then what? Meanwhile humanism must be overcome on multiple levels, namely as an intellectual tradition, a normative frame and an institutionalised practice – and this is the core of the deconstructive approach of the posthuman (ibid., 30). For Katherine Hayles, like for Donna Haraway, the posthuman evokes the exhilarating prospect of leaving some of the crusted categories behind us as it provides the option of rethinking what being human means. It signals the end of a certain conception of the human, which may have applied, at best, to a small fraction of humanity, she argues, namely those who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualise themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice (Hayles 1999, 286–287). Therefore, Hayles attacks the classical humanistic notion that subjectivity must coincide with conscious agency, in such a way as to avoid some of the mistakes of the humanist past, notably the liberal vision of an autonomous subject whose manifest destiny is to dominate and control nature. Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, she contends, the posthuman offers us the resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines (ibid., 288). Furthermore, the humbling experience of no longer being a unitary subject, Braidotti argues, anchors the now fractured subject in an ethical bond with alterity, with the multiple external others that are constitutive of the entity that we out of idleness and habit call ‘self’. A materialist politics of posthuman differences therefore, calls into accountability a ‘we’ that is evoked and actualised by the post-anthropocentric creation of an inclusive ‘pan-humanity’. It elicits a collectivity that is not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, ancestry or the melancholia of unpayable ontological debts, she writes, but rather by the compassionate acknowledgement of their interdependence with multiple others (Braidotti 2013, 101). In a similarity to Hayles, Braidotti thereby politicises the posthuman – beyond just sharing the social with organic and inorganic nonhuman others, to furthermore include the ‘others’ that have not been included actively in the development of our current conception of the human subject. Thus, the cyborg, that she argues includes not only the glamorous bodies of high-tech, jet-fighter pilots and athletes, but also the anonymous masses of the underpaid digital proletariat who fuel the technology-driven global economy, without ever accessing it themselves (Braidotti 2013, 98).

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And so, what one might unassumingly have associated with the human or the subject swiftly dissipates, and it emerges that we were in fact never ‘the rational man’, the superior species or autonomous subjects – not from power and delude, but also not from designed systems and things. Some could afford to delude themselves into illusions of sovereignty and control, while others (both people and things) paid for that indulgence. We have, in this way, never been human and we have never had things, not as humanism would have it, and not as romantically as the Enlightenment would believe – we were always co-evolving as a prototype of and with our own inventions. Therefore, the reflections in this book have provided an attempt to discuss and delineate the potential of a ‘subject’ that transpires as a designed assemblage of human and nonhuman elements, not afraid of irrationality and standing on insecure ground in a collaboration with its co-components against larger apparatuses of power. Striving to contribute to this debate from a design research perspective, it instigated a practical engagement with vibrant matter and entangled resistance. It endeavoured into exploring a way to grasp and comprehend these relationships that we find ourselves in with systems and things, re-understanding the positions and roles of people and artefacts beyond the crusted categories of object and subject, and organic and artificial – decentralising and dispersing subjectivities, sharing autonomy and selfhood with our companion elements with which we become human. This, however, without in any way leaving behind humanity, empathy, ethics or responsibility – on the contrary. The work has attempted to locate alternative conceptions of agency – agitated, collaborative and phantom – in order to encourage the negotiating assemblage to take accountability back into their shared hands. To emerge, together, as comical clerks and biased bureaucrats, critical nodes and counterapparatuses. To become in the common deed, rather than becoming the extension of the rationales and motives covertly lurking in the dispersed and unknowable complexes of swarming powers. The decentralisation of the human and the democratisation of the self therefore, serves to regain the agency of agency on terms that are rather less duplicitous and delusional, terms that may be more applicable to the present. It advocated actively doing drag with things, producing dada over data, and performing a subtle waggish wizardry – in short, in these times of ontological crisis, being willingly displaced from the centre of the world by colluding with ambiguous things. Therefore, as a practical approach to engaging with this theoretical call, the idiosyncratic design-sociological experiments in the project were an attempt to over-entangle oneself in this social-material conflict, entering head-on and hands-on into an arbitration with things on the subject of subjectivity, in order to explore, and on this basis jovially locate and formulate alternative positions – who we could perhaps also be. Thus, it argues that in times of crisis, we must emerge as accumulative errors, in a memorandum of misunderstanding, living in a betasocial, practising demo democracy with our very own others. Only with shared agency can we

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really act, and only when we learn to speak with each other (across species) can we really argue. In this way, we must embed ourselves deeply in the dual and diffuse apparatuses of power, becoming a force rather than an instance, and being the screw loose in the machinery that we built. It is in this way that we take the backdoor, becoming in and with the system to produce an active politics, a shared form of protest within the materially social and artificially organic mesh-network-ecologies that we ignited.  

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MATERIAL DIPLOMACY It seems that within this complex and connected intertwinement, we witness an auxiliary dimension of politics and ethics arising, shared not just conceptually, but practically, in the mundane everyday life that we subsist in with things. Therefore, the lens of political systems is a fruitful framework to grasp and describe the lurking convert powers and parallel paradoxical agendas and gameplays that are currently impelling us. Theories of democracy that assume a world of active subjects and passive objects, political theorist Jane Bennett argues, cannot persist as viable descriptions at a time when interactions between human, viral, animal, material and technological bodies are becoming increasingly conditional. If human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant nonhuman others, and thus human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by an entourage of nonhumanity – then the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory can be neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but must be, rather, the ‘ontologically heterogeneous public’ (Bennett 2010, 108). Therefore, we need to devise new procedures, technologies and regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, she contends, and we must learn to listen and respond more attentively to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies and prepositions. Not just for the sake of fairness, but because these expressions are profoundly important to the health and vigour of the political ecologies to which we belong (ibid., 108). Moreover, besides inviting the nonhuman into politics, it is an indispensable condition for a functioning and accountable ontological democracy to comprehend the subject position of the human co-citizen as acting in an entangled liability – thus, the posthuman is not post-political. The posthuman condition does not mark the end of political agency or responsibility, Braidotti stresses, but a re-casting of it in the direction of relational ontology. And this is especially all the more important as what she calls the ‘political economy of biogenetic capitalism’ is post-anthropocentric in its very structures – but it is not necessarily or automatically more humane nor more prone to justice (Braidotti 2017, 251). This, in turn, raises questions not just of a new conception of trans-species politics, but as its faithful civic sidekick, also of new ontological ethics. Both kinship and ethical accountability need to be rethought, Braidotti argues, rethinking the links of affectivity and responsibility not only for non-anthropomorphic organic others – but furthermore for the technologically mediated newly patented creatures that we are sharing our societies with (ibid., 103). Because as we emerge as posthuman subjects, acting in multiple modes and conducted by copious codes – we have reached a particular point in our collective history in which we simply do not know what our enfleshed selves, minds and bodies can actually do. And this is something that we need to find out, Braidotti argues, by embracing an ethics of experiment – an ethical imagination in the form of ontological relationality, a sustainable ethics for a non-unitary subject that rests on

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an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others (Braidotti 2013, 190). What we need, as Foucault puts it, is a new economy of power relations – the word ‘economy’ being used here, he writes, in its theoretical and practical sense (Foucault 1983, 209). Or as Haraway contends, the post-anthropocentrism of these scientific, globalised and technologically mediated times makes it only more urgent that we rapidly work towards ‘a new techno-scientific democracy’ (Haraway 1997, 95). In a sense therefore, there is a flourishing imperative to perceive and think up what one might call a new entangled ontological politics. As we are conditioned and co(n)demned to freedom, negotiating bodies and will with our social-material companions, it becomes progressively more important to understand the players and positions in this politics. While this is outside the scope of this book, it nevertheless does raise some crucial questions for further thought. It seems that we have been busy transferring and embodying the politics and hierarchies of the human world into a society of things, but then what political systems of things are we enabling, what regimes of material-power did we incite – are we establishing a connected social order of things, with class systems, race and gender hierarchies? Do we, or will we have a society of second-class code, pedigree products and patriarchal machine learning – and might that elicit ideas of digital welfare, black market IoT and queer pattern recognition. Are there things which can reproduce and ones that cannot, things which are intellectually more capable to act out and advocate their cause – can we speak of material equality or bandit things. As connected things become omnipresent, will they align to covertly practise a parallel politics, and might this be a socialist society, or did we conceive them to have a capitalist lineage, and is that hereditary? We do not have to look very far to observe the material politics that we have already set in motion hitherto. Ubiquitous capitalism seems to emerge wherever it sniffs out data, and as bodies become life-mined for capital, we hardly have to consume anything any more, we just need to exist to become value – click, swipe, search, breathe. Meanwhile, we witness the muscular establishment of a global algorithmic aristocracy as a mere handful of exceedingly influential corporations increasingly share the power to write the rules under which we digitally share our opinions, emotions and experiences – as well as our curiosities and insecurities. And although the nobility is chiefly based in Palo Alto, they are increasingly establishing embassies throughout the globe, bestowing upon the proletariat freedom, possibilities, connections and promises of a better world. Concurrently, however, we can observe the growth of micro(controller)-Marxism, as hacker and maker movements mobilise to move code and skills across borders, gradually eliciting a possible superstructure for social change as they share both philosophy and dexterity with their techy comrades. All of these systems, moreover, are functioning parallel to each other, as spin-offs, spill-overs and pushovers move values and political agendas to and fro.

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So, in times of connected augmented bodies and minds, where we operate in analogue-digital borderlands, the break with traditional perspectives of humanism is not just urgent but inevitable, hence we must begin to understand the ‘us’ in order to act on human-nonhuman globally civic terms. From ontological publics and material-empathies to post-anthropocentric ethics – we must open up the idea of the crowd and the commons to involve all agents. Conflict theorist Johan Galtung, the principal founder of peace and conflict studies, proposes a distinction between positive and negative peace – peace, he argues, must be perceived as more than just the absence of blatant violent conflict, in his case ‘negative peace’. For a society to exist in positive peace, there must additionally be a range of collaborative and supportive relationships among groups (Galtung 1964). In this sense, it seems that we might currently be operating in a state of negative peace with our material nonhuman co-citizens. Because while the forces at play are rather covert, they are moreover quite unscrupulous and fierce. In situations of negative peace, therefore, there is a need for arbitration between groupings, and we, I would argue, still have a fighting chance to enter into material diplomacy and open source politics, to encourage the values of techno-socialism and corporeal-democracy. To develop a novel scheme for power and ethics on this basis, before negative peace conspires to become open conflict. And so, it is time for a coup – for taking back the assemblage, for overthrowing the lurking powers of ubiquitous capitalism and the algorithmic aristocracy that we have ourselves elected. Rather, we shall instigate a move towards shared accountability, decentralised selves and democratic referendums, speaking triplespeak to the gentry while we generate a DIY/DIT sovereignty through making corporeal-democracy. In the demo democracy with things, we will take the other party seriously and negotiate with them on collaborative terms. Experimenting more with our own fractured subjectivities and political becomings, we will enter united into the unknown, materialising something beyond our limited imaginations, encouraging something novel to emerge between people, systems and things. With our co-citizens then, we will enter into a negotiation on impartial terms, defeating the state of negative peace and the adverse expansion of parallel politics and covert conflicts within it, as we will engage in not just an active, but a critical politics with things. In the era of entanglement, we cannot afford to not take things seriously, to not create ‘ontological publics’. Despite the difficulty in giving up the disposition towards human self-centredness – in times of the posthuman predicament, things are not just ‘also part of the social’ (Latour 2005) but are acting as political co-conspirators and forming political factions. And as they are in us, on us and between us, we are becoming not just alongside things, but have become synthetically kindred with them. And so, we must stop engaging inconsequently, also theoretically – always giving up a trifling bit of power, but not really altering our understanding. We need to explore in all seriousness, in theory and in practice (and better somewhere in between), possible new political coalitions with our (sometimes even independently) acting social-material compatriots.

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POSTHUMAN DESIGN Where then can we possibly theoretically situate the future of this ‘posthuman’ subject – a creature created by fire, philosophy, plastic, pixels and politics. How can we begin to envision the fate of these creatures that we have become, when theories hitherto have already so fondly embedded us in the ‘after’ – postmodernism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, post-agency, post-discursive-material-perceived-deflective-non-real-realism – what comes after-after? And if we accept this new perspective on the posthumanist human, decentralised and fractured, entangled and amalgamated, a complex assemblage that ceaselessly generates a dynamic life of itself – then do we not need a concept of a post human-centred design, or even more urgently a posthuman-centred design? If we are no longer autonomous subjects, not in ourselves rational or superior, but rather, we are an entangled species – acting together, sharing in a sense-making process, sharing common bodies. Then we might consider not just overcoming our superannuated perspective on the ‘human’, thus on ourselves, but also on our design approach. Because as identities, bodies and acts blend in the process of becoming, one might question – who or what are we then designing for? If human-centred design has long designed for a rational stable human – an illusion of humanism – then we must destabilise the concept in the field of design. Are we perhaps designing for rapid protopeople, humanodes and open so(u)rcerers – and how might that then change the concept of design? Human-centred design is in itself a depiction of good intentions, namely the shifting of power, including elements such as involving ‘users’ to better understand their practices, needs and preferences (for instance Buchanan 2001; Norman 1986). In the era of the entanglement, however, one might wonder whether these approaches have nevertheless come to an end of their practicability, as they operate – from a posthuman perspective, on flawed assumptions, ignoring the actuality that design is producing and a product of. Human-centred design is for instance built on the assumption of a content ‘user’, a rather naive or even banal figuration, that does not take into consideration the complexity that this ‘user’ is embedded in. The mere idea of user-centred design, furthermore, does not consider this user being in a dual position of being equally used by their contrivances, nor the swarming powers and parallel politics that they are operating within, and it in itself promotes a horribly instrumental relationship towards all of our nonhuman companions. It might in fact be the peak of the mountain of species superiority, to not just assume a one-way relation of use, but to furthermore establish it as the ‘centre’ of design. Moreover, despite the ‘good intentions’ of human-centred design – and although the name itself makes it particularly difficult to deflate – it might nevertheless be a rather urgent issue to revise the ‘subject’ that it assumes, rather than simply continuing to put the human (whoever is lucky enough to be included as) at the centre

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of the world. A world that they were a part of creating, but never did, and certainly no longer, control. Such an uncritical, homogeneous and idealised image of the human is merely blinding our view of the ontological crisis that we are embedded in and further manifesting a skewed counterfeit and asymmetrical comprehension of power. In the posthuman era there can be no charlatan assumptions of essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and information, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, machine teleology and human goal (Hayles 1999, 3). From a design perspective therefore, continuing to research, work and produce the material world around us based on these ingrown assumptions, supervened by the presumptions of humanism, falls into the ceaseless jeopardy of latently inscribing and re-establishing the assumptions of its foundation, namely capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative and postcolonial practices. And this, moreover, hidden under the guise of inclusive and empathetic values – but good intentions aside, ‘human’ and ‘user’ centred design might nevertheless need an update of their centres. In this sense, we must change the definition that we assume in the design discourse, which often, similarly to humanism, assumes the concept of a content (hu) man. As feminist, queer and decolonial studies have delineated, this conception is furthermore quite often a rather Eurocentric and heteronormative image, as it has inherited its assumptions from a long history of operating in a humanism-dominated society (Braidotti 2013, 15). Therefore, a posthuman-centred design not only challenges the assumptions of species superiority – the being in command of the material world or the presumption of an autonomous subject position – it furthermore opens up the discussion of what counts as human and whose human voices are heard. In this way, it is not just a tactic of experimenting more with transspecies empathy, politics and ethics – but furthermore allows for the inclusion of more heterogeneity, queerness and polyvocality in design. Because design can bring to life the in-between monsters, and as we know from queer theory – ‘the monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities’ (Halberstam in Barad 2015, 391). Therefore, an important component of a posthuman approach to design would be the element of re-politicising the debate at a time when the human-nonhuman debate is taking on a rather uncritical and ‘safe’ turn. What is striking about science and technology studies for instance, Braidotti argues, is the high degree of political neutrality that it expresses about the posthuman predicament, a shortfall influenced by Bruno Latour’s anti-epistemology and anti-subjectivity position. They tend, she argues, to dismiss a revision of the ‘subject’, despite the fact that a sustained political analysis, including issues such as norms and values, forms of community bonding and social belonging, both assumes and requires a notion of the subject (Braidotti 2013, 42). It is vital therefore not just to politicise the notion of the posthumanist subject, but in its collaboration, also of design.

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The field of design, through its crux in material translation, has the ability to make this politics applicable to the present. And therefore, there lies in it the chance to add something very valuable to this theoretical debate, namely an exploration from an intervening design perspective. Because when this discussion is not based just on generating a novel description, a conceptual framing, an observation or analysis, but on the down and dirty confrontation of working with material and networks, then the responsibility and consequence is shifted. It is not Bruno Latour’s ‘taking into consideration’ actants and locating ‘hybrids’, it is not Donna Haraway’s conceptional tool of the ‘cyborg’ or Karen Barad’s analytic lens of ‘intra-action’ – when it comes to design, the metaphysical and scheming implications of the subject matter are altered. Because in design, we are deliberately dealing with actants and hybrids in a hands-on process of fabrication, we are bringing about the possibilities of action and the limitations of imaginable aspirations of cyborgs, and we are heavily embedded in the intra-activity of designing itself. In terms of Butler and Barad’s arguments that it is ‘not about the doing but the deed’, we find ourselves quite literally in the position of constructing the material possibilities for that deed, and for the doing of it – in the most unnoticeable, covert and mundane way. As a field, we are a large part of infusing the soft powers that the human-nonhuman assemblages live and fight within, so we can choose to burn the fuse. Within this new materialism, where matter matters and entanglements raise political and ethical questions, we have the chance to bring them into being – as live, tangible and perhaps more intelligible prototypes, and and thus, as more graspable theory. Thus, in these times of ontological crisis and embedded entangled entities and environments, there exists an urgency to consider this topic in regard not just to the analytical positions of new materialist and critical posthuman theory, but from the science of the artifice itself – we need to have a voice. Within the posthuman predicament, we need to locate and produce new spaces for manoeuvring – with both emancipative and critical (poss)abilities. And this, as a design practice – applying these reflections in a tight-knit collaboration with critical making and tactical media. This is what I call a posthuman design. However, in the same way that critical posthumanism goes beyond the idea of a homogeneous conception of the human in humanism without losing its roots in the empathy and ethics that surround the being a human being, a posthuman approach to design is not a call for giving over the world to machines or transcendence, but rather a call for designing for the posthuman assemblage. It is a conception of the concept as being (1) posthuman-centred as a decentring of the human ‘subject’ in design, (2) posthuman-centred as an engagement in the process of designing on more inclusive terms with nonhuman others as active agent in the process of critical making, and (3) posthuman-centred as a practice of raising entirely new critiques and questions through prototyping a differently intelligible contribution to a theoretical debate. In this sense, it would indeed seem beneficial to further explore what might emerge theoretically from the perspective of not just observing but intervening –

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from the actual engagement with systems and things. Seeing as the movements of new materialism and critical posthumanism are in their nature incredibly transdisciplinary, one might assume that fertile collisions might occur, and new questions be raised, when taking the design theoretical considerations and sharing them in these spheres. Because as most of this theoretical debate still views matter as a somewhat abstract concept and from an observational distance, we were able to entangle ourselves in it, to be knee-deep in mysterious matter. Design is able to bring ‘matter’ back to mundanity, and thereby back down to earth. It has the ability to engage with the ‘ordinary’ power plays, mundane intra-actions, and the applied ethics that have been scripted into things. Thereby, the field encompasses the capability to not just ‘acknowledge’ the posthuman predicament, but – since we are in the midst of a crisis – make it possible to act on (or with) it within everyday life. Applying the framework of critical posthumanism to critical making and thereby to design is vital, therefore, not just for the field of design research, but moreover for the fields scrambling in this difficult debate. Because it is one thing to speak about the decentralisation of the human and the democratisation of agency and subjectivity, and quite another to apply that to the world in a material and practicable form. It might, however, be well worth the wrestle, as it allows the bringing into being of new possibility spaces – tangible issues and matters. If we manage to move from the logic of the Enlightenment to that of the entanglement, then we could perhaps finally learn to engage with ourselves as fluid and unfinished. As designers, we can choose to be actively part of creating the blur, rather than producing the reproduction and consolidation of the current. In designing for the posthuman entanglement, we have the chance to prototype what it might mean to endeavour in a research practice that moves from ‘on’, to ‘with’, to even ‘by’ things, comprehending and making practicable new premises. We can take the tools where they lie (Butler 1999, 185) and use them to unbox the systems, creating a space for human-nonhuman collaboration, rather than scripted reason, encouraging the DIY hacking of everyday life. We can play with soft power rather than ignoring it, and tactically tackle relationships. In this way, we could use the tools and thoughts in design to open up design – bringing into being things that rather than acting as guides, mentors, regulators or critiques, can act as frameworks for potential happenings, as open scripts that encourage the rethinking of ‘use’ as improvisation and possibility. And through opening up artifice we can furthermore unbar the entangled connected posthuman itself, which must here too be seen as a framework for potential happening. As material-discursive tricksters, we can create artefacts, systems and frameworks that encourage entering into a healthy confusion, learning to be critical components in the production of ourselves. Through a jury-rigged DIY-sovereignty, and hence through the distributed invention of bodies, aspirations and possibilities, we can work to bring about critical materiality as an infusion into the rational, self-governing assemblage. Using tactics of opposition, we can be part of enabling abjects – creating impossible things (what Jane Bennett would call formerly-

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known-as-objects, Bennett 2010) for impossible people (now formely-known-assubjects). The three experiments carried out in this project were a prototype of this prototyping – they were an attempt to materialise making more space for doing what we wouldn’t do, finding what we are not looking for, and becoming something extra-ordinary. From being prototypes of our own inventions and surrogates of ourselves, to being open unfinished nebulous assemblages – we attempted to fabricate an in-between space for negotiation, doubt, serendipity, non-sense and becoming together differently. When post becomes neo, we become pre. And so, we must elicit makeshift medleys that can actively engage in preformativity with their fellow components – mis-making, un-doing, re-becoming – temporarily attached to each other as a prefix, becoming through the non- re- un-. Thus, in terms of ‘what comes after after’, I would not want to claim to know, nor would I like to already-know, but from the more hands-on perspective of the design research field, adjacent to this work would be an exploration, in both practice and theory, of this urgency. Of removing the stable human and user from the centre of design and design research, moving, perhaps, from humanism to anti-humanism, to trans-, post-, and pan-humanism, passing by the neo, to finally become with many in the prefix.  

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CERTAIN UNCERTAINTY Uncertainty has never been our strong suit, it is perhaps the strongest complex of the contemporary human, as we have great difficulty dealing with ambiguity, and possess an inordinate fear of the unknown (Bauman 1989). However, as we transform rather swiftly into being both the vehicle and driver of novel and unfamiliar power plays, we might have to engage in this unknowability, to disperse in the fluidity, to become it. This research project was a practical attempt at doing so – of fabricating the real-fake, the surrogate social and the phantom intermediate, of becoming one’s own research problem, engaging in hesitation, doubt and ambivalence, and accepting a certain uncertainty. It was, one might say, an experiment in itself – not just in terms of the design experiments carried out within it, but through the framework of ‘grinded theory’, the project existed at the nexus of theory and practice, relying on an iterative process of actively not knowing. In this sense, we believed that a practical engagement might elicit a distinct perspective on a theoretical debate, but the answer of how to do that surfaced through the process of doing. What it meant to prototype thinking spaces, to enter head-on into conjectural surrealism, to think through making and to produce plug-and-play spin-off theory – that was something that happened. In this sense, the design works that emerged from this framework were constructed as spaces of negotiation, in order to locate the in-betweens of phobias and philias, finding and locating collective practices of agency through a mode of intentionally unintentional design activism. While that might seem to exist as a paradox in itself, and perhaps it is one, it was nevertheless an applicable one. The shifting, merging and blurring of object and subject positions, the ceaseless attempt to invert the world, the striving to live in a condition of coincidence, was all an unfolding of an intelligible form of applied inconsistency. As a perhaps slightly odd mode of design practice, one could say that it was the ceaseless not knowing that the projects provoked which helped us come to knowledge. Since we entered into the project with the aim to make a ceasefire with things, we moved from crisis to truce, from truce to armistice, and from armistice to treaty, enabling a different politics with things – another framework for acting, making sense and merging bodies. In this way, the prototypes enabled a view from inside the entanglement – creating possible impossible spaces, as experienceable situations materialised into a speculative actuality. Moreover, as the framework of the project was based on an autoethnographic engagement, and thereby on being in the dual position of being both researcher and researched, this overall ‘tactic of design research’ allowed for the experience of becoming one’s own research problem. In a sense, one might say that we became the object of research of our own research, hence allowing not just an immensely immersive point of view, but the emergence of what one might call ‘a critical sociology of the self’. While an autoethnographic approach in itself encourages the criti-

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cal reflection on one’s own position, this project perhaps even entailed taking one step further, as the critical frameworks were particularly tailored to and constructed for this critical experience of a fractured self. And so, the theoretical concepts that we grappled with as they emerged out of the design projects, as well as the abstract and political questions raised within the overall theoretical debates delineated in this work, came to life – literally, as we performed them. In this sense, it was a rather curious process of knowledge generation, as it was generated not just by us, but through us. Abstract questions were made intelligible, and answers were prototyped and experienced, occurring as we acted them out – one cannot answer a question concerning intentional nonintentionality for instance, does one not make it. And so, we became not just our own research question, but perhaps also its answers. Furthermore, a curious aspect of this research framework was the fact that it transpired as what one could perhaps call ‘causing a design-sociology’. First of all, this entailed the curious aspect of inventing the social situation that one was observing (or in this case perhaps, being observed by), and so, the situations investigated were in fact prototypes in themselves. They did not pre-exist the situation, nor are they existent now, they were in fact just fabricated for the sake of investigating a social space that did not yet quite exist – thus investigating a speculative actuality. One might wonder why one would do such a thing – invent a social context in order to sociologically investigate it – but this is exactly where design research and sociology clash and merge, or at least it is one of the trembling convergences. If one wishes to sociologically engage with a possibility space, a thinking space that has not yet been materialised, then one must invent it. One then has the option to engage in the hypothetical actuality, emerging into a critical sociology of the palpable suppositional. Therefore, one could say that causing a design-sociology caused an inadvertent mode for performing this critical sociology of oneself. Instead of looking at, that is, this process allowed the ability to look in. By making an alternative experience experienceable and graspable in an individually attuned and idiosyncratic manner, it is not only that the experiments unveiled covert compulsion, haphazard habits and bizarre bafflement, they were furthermore customised to provoke our personal presumptions and individual issues. As a practice of critical design-sociology therefore, the experiments enabled an immersive play with social-material power, the seducing of oneself into new possibilities – and somewhere in between the actuality which we were never fully able to grasp and the un-realness of the phantom-social that did in fact exist, we engaged in a strange hyper-subjective laboratory of the self. However, although the fact that these immersive experiments of being encapsulated in our own homes and bodies provided a space for a concave confrontation of controversies, the fact that the experiments were carried out intensely within a limited time-frame furthermore meant that we could externalise ourselves from the experiences once they came to an end, enabling a critical perspective from the (in)outside. Therefore, although the research practice emerged

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within a highly subjective setting, the concepts generated on its basis rather reflect the slanted perspective of the externalised self. As the process fluctuated between practice and theory, we also oscillated between the positions of being researcher and researched, as well as object and subject in the investigation – and therefore, while theoretical concepts were intuitively invented and accumulated during the view from the inside, during the process of practice, they were later clustered and theoretically contextualised, providing a view from an externalised self. And so, this research framework enabled the clashing powers of present and possibility, construction and abstraction, as the doing and the being done to evolved in the deed itself. The ‘material turn’ and the posthuman predicament collided with active making, as the idea that we are becoming with many was fabricated, subjectivities were actively fractured, being a node was critically enacted, and species literally met as we actually brought one home. By re/en/acting rapid proto-being, speaking bot as a humanode and waggishly wizarding as open so(u)rcerers, the concepts developed in this thesis were generated on the basis of the experiments; meanwhile, one might also say that through these engagements we emerged as our own proof of concept. Moreover, the fact that the experiments were carried out as a mode of ‘live’ sociology brought with it the aspect of engaging in a generative analysis. Emerging as live research subjects and research objects in these cross-species surrogate situations, making experienceable shifted ‘object’ and ‘subject’ positions, and engaging in in-between moments that were frozen temporarily in time, meant generating an analysis as one finds oneself in the middle of it. In this way, the construction of odd ad-hoc socials and live entangled prototyping meant understanding as one oneself transpires. These are times where a multitude of the urgent issues that we must deal with in society lie outside the boxes that we have defined – outside expert knowledge from niche sciences consolidated in ‘disciplines’, outside the boundaries of what was traditionally attributed to being ‘human’ or ‘artificial’, and even outside the borders of our own human capacities of sensing, perceiving and comprehending. In order to access this therefore, we must position ourselves in the awkward in-betweens – in-between disciplines, in-between binaries and in-between human and nonhuman. This is not a particularly painless task for the uncertainty-phobic human, submerged in humanism’s homogeneity, bathed in anthropocentric convictions and deeply entrenched and materialised in dualisms. Nevertheless, in this uncomfortable urgency, design as a research field, with its intervening approach, has a capability to comprehend the material-social powers at play by prototyping productive precariousness. Engaging in the crisis, not merely from an abstract theoretical perspective, nor from a conventional sociological one, but from the very core of the social-material problem – the constructing of it. This puts design on a very fertile ground, as practising a generative and intervening design-sociology – the live processing of conflictual materialities – can transpire in the things not yet described,

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not yet discovered and the data not yet found. Simultaneously, however, this places design in highly treacherous territory, as no matter what it does, it will be fabricating social im/possibilities. In this way, the approach of ‘grinded theory’, which with its rigorous indiscipline subsisted at the nexus of clashing methods, theories and practices, delved into the void at the centre of design research – namely its lack of a centre at all. This decentralisation of the field bolsters its ability to operate in the in-between, to fabricate it – and through this process to locate and draw on the productive forces of scientific obscurity. In the case of this project, the spinning wheel of theory and praxis acted as a generator of questions and reflections that would not have emerged had one not swivelled wilfully on in the spin. In a sense therefore, the approach of grinded theory provided a framework for the ad-hoc construction of design theory, which transpired from the core of the subject matter itself. It did so by making sure to not be sure – not pre-formulating a hypothesis, not imposing authority on matter, entering into a rigorous indiscipline and systematic anarchy to secure a certain uncertainty. And in doing so, it has attempted to demonstrate the value of practice as theory, artefact as sociology, and thus understanding designing as much as an epistemological practice as it is an ontological one.

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Tactics of Criticality Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi

COMPOSING CRITIQUE Critique seems to have been put severely under critique in the last decades. In 2004, for instance, Bruno Latour notably raised the question of why critique had run out of steam, asking his fellow inquirers what had become of the critical spirit, but concurrently, whether we should even be at war, we, the scholars, the ‘intellectuals’ – whether it is even our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins, to add deconstruction to destruction, more iconoclasm to iconoclasm. And if so, moreover, within our rehearsed practice of practising such criticality, he questioned whether we are even aiming at the right target, or perhaps rather fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, and leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats that we had not anticipated and for which we are thoroughly unprepared (Latour 2004, 225). Should we apologise for having been wrong all along, he ponders, or should we maybe instead bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself – and perhaps do a bit of soul-searching (ibid., 227). Has criticality become normalised and civilised through its being long rehearsed and practised in the critical sciences, operating within the microphysics of power in academia, to produce that which is acceptable as scientific discourse (Foucault 1970)? Has it too become commodified as commodification has proceeded to complete its comprehensive colonisation of social life (Debord 1967)? And if this is the case, then what tactics of criticality might we have left to find a distressed inlet, what means might we still have to exercise genuine critique – forms of criticality that can discover and describe obscure and covert dilemmas. And what role might making play in making critiques? In hindsight, following the experiment of practising critical theory displayed in this book – namely the attempt to design situations that provide a slanted viewpoint in and on a drenched and saturated present in order to produce theoretical reflections from a skewed vantage point – the following segments arise as potential pipelines to criticality. They are, in their inceptive expressions below, a kind of inventory of the residual ruminations on possible tactics of criticality that emerged from this project.

Design as Critical Cultural Inquiry In its core function, design unweariedly de/constructs culture, as it is a substantial part of creating the modes by which social life is made and remade, forming the conceivable concepts, customs and conducts of society. It disables and enables individuals and collectives to perceive and produce im/possibilities in their busy building of betterment. This is the capability and consequence of design’s existence, it seems. However, perhaps it is also the ground for its aptitude to scrutinise, as making critical cultures may elicit cultural critiques – especially if these prototypes of

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‘critical cultures’ (such as situations in which human and artefact co-exist on divergent terms) subsist ad interim in time and space, as in the case of the experiments in this project. As a form of critical cultural inquiry therefore, design seems to have the ability to surface covert concerns, inequalities, powerplays – concealed convolutions and tragic trajectories. And through its inherent filter of making matters of concern tangible thought-experiments, it does not shy away from taking on prodigious and abstract questions – such as ‘how can the human decentre themselves’ or ‘how could we enter into a temporary truce with culturally colluding things?’ That, because turning sizeable critical questions into things has the intrinsic property of grinding issues into component fragments. Meddling with materiality, as it is an empirical substance, makes the geopbytic nanoscopic. It embodies one way of transforming a massive context into a materialised empirical encounter, revealing hidden critiques disguised in mundanity. It will, through the approach of ‘design as a mode of critical inquiry’ delineated in this book, only ever produce an insight from a perspective based on a translation of concerns back into a critical culture – and thus it will be far from all-encompassing. Its strength though, by the means of its strong subjectivity and situatedness, is that this is a form of critique that has the dexterity to raise radical reflection in context.

Everyday Life Laboratory In this way, the experiments in this book demonstrate a way in which the concealed mundanity of everyday life can surface as thought-terrain able to be tread upon, by making the everyday a laboratory of critical thought, of covert power plays. And this, not by politicising the patterns and paradigms of other people’s products and practices – but rather of one’s own, re/en/acting one’s own conventions unconventionally. Nonetheless, and precisely, it is in the moment of the ‘private as political’ that the political becomes relevant as a private concern, and it is exactly at the moment of the ‘political as private’ that the personal engagement and confrontation provides an intimate point of view, releasing a potential perspective on a common concern. Because by locating and disrupting one’s own regular routines and habituated habits, as well as by living in a prototype of alternative modes of politics with things, the personal becomes a lens from which common concerns can surface and become visible and formulated. In this way, everyday life as a lab (temporarily living in the ordinary with the unordinary, engaging in the unusual in the usual), provides a researcher with a social-material observatory, to gain novel perspectives on the most difficult concerns to capture – the ones that are concealed in the rehearsed practices of the everyday. Making it a laboratory thereby opens it up to be a site of experiment, of exploration, provisionally unfamiliar and temporarily unaccounted for.

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Speculative Actuality And so, in the context of acting as a mode of critical inquiry – it is a distinct ability of design to make an alternative social reality temporarily liveable and experienceable by materialising the elements that toss mundanity out of the realm of the ordinary. And this manufacturing of a speculation into a lived actuality (albeit for a moment), provides a particular chance to reimagine and recast the ‘now’. It entails not looking back at the ‘what-was’, nor looking forward into the ‘what-if’, but rather engaging resolutely with the ‘what-is’. However, as the ‘what-is’ is always already dispersing, as a site of research it is a uniquely difficult space – it cannot easily be introduced into a whole in order to examine it, because we can never see it for the first time, thus making it an inaccessible space to which we have always already had access (Blanchot 1993, 239–245). Therefore, in order to access the ‘what-is’, it seems that one must change a familiar aspect of it, in order to once again make it noticeable – one must intervene in it, in order to be able to observe it. Thus, in the case of this project, the merging of intervening and observing approaches to discovery meant literally constructing relatively real realities – making it so real that one could actually reside in conjecture, inhabit inquiry, exist in a proposition. As the situationists have argued – philosophers have long interpreted situations, the point now is to create and transform them (situationists in Plant 1992, 20). As a form of research performativity, one might say, this design of sociological situations, or the social situation created and transformed by means of design, created a space to negotiate a personal political play. Both ‘performativity’ and ‘play’ are here meant as serious acts, however, in the same way that acts of drag provide an earnest rendition of gender performativity that disturbs a binary comfortability. In this way, opening up a critical space to rewrite cultural practices with maladjusted systems and things, within a situation of speculative actuality, provides a space of exploration in which one can probe pre-alpha versions of an alternative now.

Spectacle Design Perhaps we are presently living in a highly ubiquitous and thoroughly interconnected rendering of Guy Debord’s 'society of the spectacle' (Debord 1967), in which the commodities rule, and compliant consumers are increasingly mediated through transactions reified in interactions with steadily more interconnected things. If this is the case, which indeed it might be, if the motives and consequences of a capitalist rationale have breached the enterprise of society to the extent that they become hidden in the everyday, and in the every-thing, then what role must a critical practice of design play within the spectacle? The situationists inspired themselves by dada and surrealisms’ modes of interrupting and subverting the means and modes by which realities themselves are fabricated (in their case, language and images) to challenge

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conventional arrangements of reality. By taking the means of the source of the controversy itself, these movements all attempted to shift power relations by inflating ‘the spectacle’ to the extent that it lost its holding ground, thereby deflating it. Must we then make a spectacle in the spectacle? Might this in fact be one of the only means that we have to interrupt and subvert the powers at play, the ones that we both articulate and are the vehicles of (Foucault 1980, 98)? Must we construct crisis in the crisis? Because as a tactic, we do have the chance to rephrase and rescript the things that we are already deeply in collusion with in the performing of social life. And as these things are no more blameworthy than we ourselves are in the maintenance of the current social-material jurisdictions, we must align with this artefactual artifice to make a crisis within our own crisis. We must explore the practice of inversion as a mode of subversion. So even if we do not, say, manage to engender a post-capitalist society in the very near future, since ubiquitous capitalism has turned our every move and contemplation into something that can be capitalised on – what can we do as capital? Hack the life-mined stock market as contraband currency? Bargain with phantom data, trading social spectres with bartering bots and curious crawlers?

Tactical Making And this is where tactical making comes in. Tactical, because the power of the weak and dispersed is battling the strong and their strategies with tactics, developing poaching ploys and treacherous trickery to surface polymorphic situations (Certeau 1984, 37). Creating temporary reversals in the flows of power to be never perfect and always in a continual process of questioning the premises of the media (Garcia and Lovink 1997). And making, as in the case of critical making, because it connects materiality with the politics of its affects, attempting to consolidate critical thinking with critical fabrication (Ratto 2011). Tactical making, as a synthesis, means being technically troublesome, making clutter in the categories, using tactics to tamper with technics. It is a mode of putting things into a divergent context in order to explore what they could be, opening up technologies before we assume and accept too quickly what they are, and in this correlation – who we might be. For the sake of subversion, tactical making means not de-mystifying things (opening up the black box), but re-mystifying things temporarily, in order to be able to explore what they might be. And this, not to solve clearly identified problems, because that would be assuming too quickly what the problem is, and thus where the critique lies – but rather to discover, through practice, yet unidentified ones.

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Critical Things In this way, tactical making has the ability to surface and emerge critical things. Not things that illustrate a critical issue that a maker-of-things would like to raise, as much as things that emerge to be critical in themselves. Critical towards their own heritage and function (such as a random alarm), towards the context in which they become (such as an IA whispering polyvocality into an AI system), and towards the parametres that define the realm of their relevance and the logic of their functions (such as an outeractive cloak, which needs to be read to be misread). But critical things do not take position against something, as much as they actively manufacture obscurity, construct ambiguity or fabricate non-precision. Making them entails viewing inaccuracy as something worth exploring and producing, and as a mode of research practice, it necessitates considering this a legitimate space of inquiry. Because this mode of practice produces design as a debate space, and thus critical things are discussion pieces – as acting social prototypes, they are things that can counter cultural scripts and authored expectations, producing environments that elicit overt powerplays, and raising values that could not be predicted.

Dust till Dawn Besides designing in materiality, and the approach of design practice as a mode of applying tactics of criticality to elicit a skewed perspective – allow us a last contemplation, namely concerning the matter of designing in words. Similar to the design practice in this project, which happened in a very ad-hoc plug-and-play re-assemble with lost-and-found manner – the theoretical reflections springing off the experiments emerged as a process of impromptu prototyping terms and phrases. Despite the light-hearted procedure of playfully performing with language, mock-upping meaning as it came into being – the seriousness of this practice is not to be underestimated. As culturally renegade practices such as those of the dada movement have shown, ‘Just a word, and the word a movement…the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness’ (Ball 1916) – the performing of words is indeed an act of rebellion and a vital tool of subversion. Subversion, not just of language itself, but of the meaning that it conspires with. Perhaps one of the most notable performers in this realm, Buckminster Fuller, demonstrated that by acting with language we act with social life. Finding the words ‘up’ and ‘down’ awkward in relation to the gravitational centre of the Earth, he suggested the use of ‘in’ and ‘out’ – going ‘instairs’ and ‘outstairs’, and claimed that by using these more geographically accurate terms, we realise that this is exactly where we are in fact going (Fuller 1970). The point here of course not being our misdirection, but rather the terrain that performing with words opens up. And in this sense, it is an encourage-

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ment to do so, as and within a process designing – to perform with formulations. In this sense, the procedure described in this work as ‘theorising design and designing theory’ argues that within such an endeavour, it should be permissible to just formulate a ‘theoretical term’, and then to explore in practice what it means, or what it could mean, in order to have the insights and arguments to in turn describe it. This is an engagement in a process of describing something that lies on the borderline of existing, and perhaps even, bringing it about. Not to forget that the German word for design ‘Gestaltung’ is comprised of the word ‘Gestalt’, which apart from meaning ‘build’ or ‘form’, also refers to a shady character – an incognito figure of some-thing, something not yet determined. And this brings us back to grinding, to putting abstract thoughts through a mill of speculative actuality, confronting them with the grime of social-materiality, in order to in turn whirl off new granulated particles – more particular performative words and more specified critical questions, milling one’s considerations into finer and finer dust. In this sense, one could see this undertaking of grinding theory as a process of creating theory as particulate matter – turning culture into material particles and material particles back into pulverised cultural dust. And the finer the dust, it seemed, the closer one could get to formulating a critique that lay beyond an automatically-relevant-obvious-significance, and one that began to resist the gravitational force of humanism, the force that would once again centre the problem of the ontological crisis around us. Carving out an interim in-between sphere for mediating the politics of things. Design as a novel negotiation space, a research terrain for composing a confusing conundrum with things – design as critique.

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AUTHORS

Michelle Christensen Michelle Christensen is a sociologist and designer exploring the spaces in between these realms. She studied Political Sociology at Roskilde University in Denmark (BA), Conflict Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (MA), Gender Studies at the University of Amsterdam (MSc), Integrated Design at the Köln International School of Design in Cologne (MA), and wrote her PhD in the field of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). She has worked at the Crisis Department of Amnesty International USA, was a Humanity in Action Fellow, and a Congressional Fellow in the United States Congress in Washington DC. As a researcher, she has worked at the Design Research Lab (UdK Berlin), the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and headed the area of Interdisciplinarity and Open Labs at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF). She has taught courses in conflict analysis, gender studies and design methods at universities in the Netherlands and Germany, most recently as a visiting professor at the international master’s programme (MAID) at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau. She has been a member of the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD) at Birkhäuser since 2015, and a board member of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF) since 2014. Together with Florian Conradi, she explores the potential of critical making, both in the research group that they head at the Berlin University of the Arts/Weizenbaum Institute, as well as in her capacity as visiting professor of Open Science at the Technische Universität Berlin/ECDF.

Florian Conradi Florian Conradi is a designer and researcher, combining critical theory and design practice as an approach to critical making. He studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, and Art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He went on to complete an MFA in Design at the Sandberg Instituut (Gerrit Rietveld Academie) in Amsterdam, an MA in Integrated Design at the Köln International School of Design in Cologne and wrote his PhD in the field of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Since 2008 he has been initiating socio-political design projects with institutions in the field of critical media and political advocacy, carrying out field research in Europe, as well as in the Middle East, East and West Africa. As a researcher, he has worked for the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, the Design

 AUTHORS 349

Research Lab at the UdK Berlin and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence. He has taught critical approaches to design and design methods at among other places the Köln International School of Design, the UdK Berlin, and as a visiting professor, at the international master’s programme in Integrated Design at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau. In his current capacity as visiting professor of Open Science at the Technische Universität Berlin/Einstein Center Digital Future, as well as research group leader at the UdK Berlin/Weizenbaum Institute, he explores the potential of design as a mode of critical cultural inquiry.

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