Technology is also necessary to the expansion of knowledge, according to Simondon. It is not the mere application of scientific knowledge, so much as it is the precondition for there to be such a thing as scientific knowledge: if only because scientific knowledge is generated when technology doesn’t work as expected, when it breaks down or deviates from its utilitarian function.
If things work then we’re not interested in why. When they don’t work properly we start getting curious and develop science to give us explanations for why they don’t work. Then we can fix stuff.
Decades before the fact, Simondon is here theorizing and advocating what today would be called hacking and hacker culture. Indeed, I think that the culture of hacking still has not caught up with Simondon, in the sense that hacking is mostly justified in pragmatic and/or libertarian terms, whereas Simondon adds a third dimension, a depth, to hacking by showing how it is essentially tied to technology as a basic component of human beings’ presence in the world.
Hacking is a way to figure out where things break, or work. To lead the way for “scientific” development to follow up in the wake of the not working. Hacking and dirty invention are not only a valid methods of inquiry, they are vital. There are interesting parallels with CS Peirce’s abductive reasoning.
The transmedia-ARG bit of the marketing campaign for the new Deus Ex looks more intriguing than the game itself. There is a beautifully shot, live action mockumentary trailer around that paints a wonderfully scary picture of a business led, augmentation driven world. Very invasive/pervasive, and one of the commenters is the author of a fictional book with the critical, tongue in cheek name of “Augmented Reality”.
Whilst reading this morning I found what is probably the most straightforward and easy to understand explanation of Technicity. It is a heavily used, but highly disputed term amongst DCRC researchers.
The power of code to transform everyday life is not simply a function of extent or pervasiveness or visibility, but primarily of effect. Technicity refers to the extent to which technologies mediate, supplement, and augment collective life; the extent to which technologies are fundamental to the constitution and grounding of human endeavor; and the unfolding or evolutive power of technologies to make things happen in conjunction with people (Mackenzie 2002). For an individual technical element such as a saw, its technicity might be its hardness and flexibility (a product of human knowledge and production skills) that enables it, in conjunction with human mediation, to cut well (note that the constitution and use of the saw is dependent on both human and technology; they are inseparable). As Star and Ruhleder (1996, 112; our emphasis) note, ‘‘[A] tool is not just a thing with pre-given attributes frozen in time — but a thing becomes a tool in practice, for someone, when connected to some particular activity . . . The tool emerges in situ.’’ ‘‘In large-scale ensembles, such as an automobile engine consisting of many components, technicity is complex and cannot be isolated from the sum of individual components (and their design, manufacture, and assembly), its ‘‘associated milieu’’ (e.g., flow of air, lubricants, fuel), and its human operator(s), that ‘‘conditions and is conditioned by the working of the engine’’ (Mackenzie 2002, 12).
Last Sunday I had the pleasure of talking at the Shepton Mallet Digital Arts festival. I’ve uploaded the slides for the sake of just getting them live. I’ll have to get back around to writing it up, but that might not happen now for a couple of weeks.
Though in place of having to write it up, I’m more than happy to visit anyone and rant on about teaching creative technology.