Conference Notes by Meg Houston Maker

Allucquere Rosanne "Sandy" Stone (University of Texas at Austin)

She takes a poll of the audience: What mode of speaker would we prefer? The "wise kind elder," or the "fire breathing barn burner?" The audience votes for the barn burner [MHM: I voted for wise kind elder, one of only two of us to vote this way. I'm always in the minority.]

She shows examples of her work, some of which concerns affordances and anti-affordance behavior, such as a sugar bowl that flinches away from the hand as it reaches for it, and a send-up of the film "Winged Migration" in which cleaning product bottles stand in for the migratory birds. [MHM: it's amusing, but it seems like it's supposed to be subversive, yet doesn't have that impact.]

New Media: a term first used in the 1920s, and referred to lantern slides combined with gramophone records, which was novel at the time. There is a separation between mentation and making. What is the conception of human existence that permeates our work and gives it meaning?

The arc of death-by-naming: something emerges as an oppositional (culturally oppositional), and you write about it, then other people start writing about it, and there's an efflorescence on the topic. People who study it meet at conferences, so it's a nomadic discipline. Then someone invents a jargon for it, so they can get a job, and suddenly, there are books in the bookstore with the jargon or name on the cover. So if you owant to keep your discipline alive, you have to focus on the framework, the metaphysics of the pedagogy.

The codeswitching umbrella -- at UTexas, the ActLab she runs is a messy, creative, unintelligible space, and she's responsible for codeswitching it into products, language, and structures that are digestible to the institution. The prime directive of the Actlab is to "Make Stuff." It should feel like a space of possibility. When students enter the space, they should feel like they've crossed the "limin," the threshold, into another realm, a realm of exploratory behavior.

Her program is interested in "knowledge in the body." She says, "Knowledge is in the senses meeting the world and feeding the imagination so... Engage the senses with purposeful physical activity." They do all the "fun tech stuff" but at the bottom of what they do in New Media work is about the metaphysics of healing.

Comments

[Doug]

It sounds like she is trying to do what she can, where she is, knowing that eventually it will be taken over by externalists, but preserving as long as possible a space for people to learn by trying things.

This is the kind of experimentation we could use a lot more of -- doing something that hasn't been done to see what happens, then attempting to respond honestly to the results. If this were really a major part of academia, it would make a lot more sense to me. Instead, in practice, there's a lot of pre-framing of the questions to make sure they're publishable, or fundable, or at least explicable as questions, and not, "I wondered what would happen."