In the humanities, what are the settings of interpretation? How does design allow us to rethink the normalization of scenarios as well as “the user”? In this case, Sara Hendren’s work on accessible architecture is compelling.

How is interpretation embodied and situated in time and space? How does design help us attend to the particulars of situations, especially to the particulars that matter or make a difference? Here, we repeatedly drew from Karen Barad’s work on mattering and boundary-making practices.

What does a given design value or reify, and who does it exclude? Simone Browne’s recent work on surveillance technologies and practices is very informative here.

How is design also inquiry, or not simply an instrumental means to an end? Here, we considered work by Carl DiSalvo, Daniela Rosner, and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.

How are projects designed to be maintained and repaired over time? Which design methods frustrate “make or break” models premised on innovation above all else? In this instance, we might visit the “Reclaiming Repair” project by Lara Houston, Steven Jackson, and Daniela Rosner.

How might humanities projects start with design instead of ending with it? That is, how is design much more than the “polish” we apply to surfaces immediately prior to publication or release? Here, Anne Balsamo’s work on design and culture is key.

How might we design contexts for interpretation, not just stuff or objects? The book, Context Providers, by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna, prompted this question in particular.

Finally, how might design foster deviance in interpretation, or expose and experiment with norms in a material or affective way?

I was honored to present with Kim, Padmini, and Jacque. Our MLab work is inspired by Kim’s “Fashioning Circuits” project, Padmini’s work on “making culture,” and Jacque’s collaborative approach to data, sound, and touch. My notes for the panel, which was oriented toward group discussion, are below. They draw from my experiences with the Kits for Cultural History project.

A Design Practice to Prototype the Past

In the MLab, we’ve been “prototyping the past” by prototyping absence, a process that involves remaking historical technologies that no longer exist, no longer function, or exist only in part in museums and collections. Thus far, we’ve remade technologies such as early wearables (1860s), early magnetic recording devices (1890s), and early optophones (1920s-40s). In so doing, we produce digital models of these technologies as well as tactile components for assembly. These materials are circulated online and by post, and we also exhibit them in galleries and other memory institutions. With them, our aim is to not only test historical claims about early technologies—how they functioned, how they were embedded in culture, and how they were maintained—but also foreground the labor at play in them, including work by people such as Mary Jameson (a key developer of optophones; photographed below) who are largely, if not entirely, absent from scholarship in media history. At the same time, we research against the assumption that we can inhabit or fully recover the positions of people and things in the past.

Mary Jameson reading Anthony Trollope’s The Warden on an optophone, ca. 1921, care of Blind Veterans UK

You might call “prototyping the past” an instance of multimodal scholarship. However we define it, design has played a key role in its articulation across the humanities and fine arts. In fact, during the last year or so, we’ve been moving toward a particular sort of design. At HASTAC, I briefly outlined this design approach (such as it is) in about five minutes through six points. In the MLab, we’ve become especially interested in:

Design as an attribution practice, which attends to the intricacies and specificities of labor. For instance, we often use patents and illustrations to prototype early technologies in 3-D. However, patents very rarely give attribution to people who ultimately maintain or develop the technologies at hand. To what degree can design highlight those missing names today? Or how can it prompt people to consider important differences between labor now and labor then?

Design as inquiry (see Rosner), where we develop scenarios for interpretation, not replicas of historical objects. When we tell people we’re prototyping the past, they tend to assume we’re making exact reproductions for display and circulation. However, we’re not invested in copies. We’re interested in treating design like writing, archival research, and trial-and-error experimentation, among other techniques. The resulting objects manifest arguments made about the past, not re-presentations of history. How, then, might design resist tendencies to treat objects that look historical as historical reconstructions?

Design for experience (as opposed to form) without “users,” but with people who are negotiating with materials—testing, twisting, bending, altering, misusing, repurposing, glitching, and critiquing what’s in circulation. Put differently, we’re leery of creating instructions for people or giving them step-by-step instructions to follow in order to assemble early technologies, in part because instructions are biased (e.g., the invisible narrator) and generally foreclose spaces for experimentation or alternatives. How do we design research so that inquiry continues through other entanglements of meaning with matter (see Barad), against the “receipt” of dead objects to be used or frozen labor to be cited?

Design for responsibility. The very word, “prototyping,” typically elicits speculations about the future, but we can conjecture about the past, too. (See Butler and Kraus.) When we do, we need design paradigms that push conjecture beyond play or “screwing around” toward responsibility: to recognize how experiments with history involve spectres of the past. Through sonification, tactile media, and collective experience, Wernimont and Stern’s The Eugenic Rubicon gives us examples of how to engage history with such sensitivities (or sensitive data) in mind. In short, how do we design to combine entanglement with action and attention to difference?

Design-in-use (see Botero et al.), where iteration and frequent testing across settings eclipse prototyping in the abstract toward some ideal form. When it calls itself “critical,” this approach to design interrogates norms, including how technologies shape experience and proliferate values. Such norms emerge from the privileged positions and embodied habits of designers, together with the default settings of technologies and spaces, and iteration may expose or rewrite them as well as commonplace proclivities toward “the user.”

Design for diffraction (see Barad and Wark), where prototypes of the past do not duplicate or mirror history but instead navigate and foreground our contingent relations with material culture. The past and present are produced together, over and over again, with patterns and change. Following Wark’s language (see pages 158-165 of Molecular Red), we might say that prototyping the past does not prototype the objects of history; it prototypes processes of knowledge with an emphasis on the apparatus of knowledge production. How might design focus on the physical arrangements and phenomena that distinguish process from product, observer from observation, or this sensation from that one—on the matter, meanings, and practices that, in short, make boundaries?

I’m in the middle of writing a short publication (in design studies) that details some of these points. More soon!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Featured image care of HASTAC 2016.

The publication consists of five components: 1) an essay by Jentery that discusses the relation between the Kits for Cultural History and Fluxkits from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s; 2) a slideshow of posters by Victoria and the MLab team that document our process of making the Early Wearables Kit; 3) an “unboxing” video by Danielle and the MLab team that shows how someone might interact with the Wearables Kit; 4) a Github repository by the entire MLab team that contains the Kit’s core files and components (see our previous announcement for the repo); and 5) a brief “about” page describing the project.

Along with the recent exhibition of the Wearables Kit at Rutgers, the MLab’s appearance in Hyperrhiz demonstrates our multimodal approach to publishing Kits for Cultural History. We hope that this new issue of Hyperrhiz will inspire more, like-minded publishing projects across the arts and humanities.

Post by Tiffany Chan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news, exhibits, and fabrication tags. Image care of the Maker Lab and Hyperrhiz.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, exhibits, and news tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and the Maker Lab. Thanks to Jim Brown, Helen Burgess, Robert A. Emmons Jr., David Rieder, and everyone at Hyperrhiz and the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University, Camden.

The Early Wearables repo includes 3-D models for the skull stick-pin, historical illustrations for contextualizing it, a guide for interpreting it, instructions (starring Trouvé himself) for ways it may be assembled, and a box for storing, arranging, and circulating the Kit’s components in tactile form. Also included are references for further reading, photographs of the Kit’s recent exhibition at Rutgers University, metadata for the illustrations, and abstracts for academic essays about the Kit. The repo provides a thorough overview of the Kit’s different components together with documentation for how the Kit was assembled. It also expands scholarly communication by bridging gaps between 2-D and 3-D media, digital and tactile materials, and technical and cultural approaches.

The repo is divided into subfolders according to its components: box, essays, exhibitions, guide, history, mechanism, and skull. Each folder contains prototype images and process documentation (in the form of posters) as well as files for each component. The type of file varies by component. For example, the box folder contains CorelDRAW (CDR) files for the Kit’s container as well as Adobe Illustrator (AI) files for Trouvé’s signature (“L. Bienfait”). Meanwhile, the guide folder contains four versions of a guide for contextualizing, interpreting and assembling the skull stick-pin. It includes a “pageSpreadView” for reading the guide as a two-page spread on a screen and a “sheetsView” for ease of printing. Elsewhere, the history folder contains various JPG files accompanied by Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) and Bibliographic Ontology metadata in XML and RDF formats.

For more details, see the ReadMe file in the repo. Have fun!

Post by Tiffany Chan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news and fabrication tags. Image care of the Maker Lab and GitHub.

The Wearables Kit prompts people to reverse engineer and reassemble an electro-mobile skull stick-pin intended for cravats, designed by Gustave Trouvé, built by Auguste-Germain Cadet-Picard, and exhibited at the Exposition universelle in Paris in 1867. Powered by a 1.5-volt zinc-carbon battery located in the wearer’s pocket, the skull was said to snap its jaws and move its eyes. To activate the battery, the wearer would flip the pocket battery from a vertical to a horizontal position. Once activated, the battery would trigger a mechanism (resembling that of an electric bell) hidden inside the skull, which was less than two centimeters in diameter. This combination of electricity with jewellery was not only unique for the 1860s; it also suggests the stick-pin was an early wearable technology.

To our knowledge, only one instance of this stick-pin exists in a memory institution today, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. However, it cannot be accessed, and it is not accompanied by the original battery. After significant research, including archival work and rapid prototyping experiments, the MLab wonders if the skull was ever fully automated. So, with the Kit, we submit our suspicions for conjectural manufacture: a combination of critical distance from early wearable culture with immersion in the particulars of the pin’s design.

The repository for the Wearables Kit is now online, and a poster for our “Prototyping the Past” panel is below. Hope to see you on Friday, November 20th!

“Prototyping the Past” | A Panel Discussion
Tiffany Chan (MA, English), Katherine Goertz (BA, English), Danielle Morgan (BA, English), Victoria Murawski (MFA, Visual Arts), and Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor, English)
Friday, November 20th | 12:30pm | David Strong Building C116 | Poster

The UVic Maker Lab will discuss their approaches to rapid prototyping and media history, with an emphasis on their Early Wearables Kit (Volume 1 in the Kits for Cultural History series).

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news tag. Poster by Victoria Murawski.

In his new book, Conversations in Critical Making (CTheory Books, 2015), Garnet Hertz includes an interview with Jentery that explores the Kits project in general, and the Wearables Kit in particular. You can read the conversation between Hertz and Sayers on ctheory.net or in the open-access, PDF version of Hertz’s book. The Kits are also referenced in Rebekah Sheldon’s chapter, “Object-Oriented Ontology and Feminist New Materialism,” in The Nonhuman Turn (Richard Grusin, ed., U. of Minnesota P., 2015). Sheldon describes the Kits as a “compelling alternative” to distant reading. Elsewhere, Jentery’s Scholarly Research and Communication article, “Why Fabricate?” (Issue 6.3, 2015), focuses more generally on the MLab’s ongoing fabrication research, including ways to remake technologies that no longer function, no longer exist, or exist only as illustrations or fictions.

This month, UVic published a short article detailing the Wearables Kit. The university also featured the Kits on its homepage. On October 29th, CBC’s All Points West (90.5FM Victoria) hosted Jentery for a conversation with Robyn Burns about the Kit and our work at the MLab. Soon, we’ll be launching the Wearables Kit online, together with publications in Hyperrhiz and Visible Language.

Post by Katherine Goertz, attached to the KitsForCulture and Makerspace projects, with the fabrication tag. Featured image for this post care of UVic and the MLab.

Iteration 1: Gears and motors

The first design emerged from discussions between Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, and me. At this point, we had little more than a handful of images of Trouvé’s “bijoux électriques.” In fact, our focus at the time was on creating a prototype of a Kit that recreated Trouvé’s illuminated jewels. (Nina and I had previously presented a version of the Kit with a prototype of an illuminated hairpin at the Western Humanities Alliance 2013 meeting at the University of California at San Diego, and she and Jentery presented another version of it at HASTAC 2014 in Lima, Peru.)

We originally conceived of a Kit with several jewelry pieces, including the illuminated hairpin and skull stick-pin. Katie first approached the stick-pin mechanism in the context of Trouvé’s watchmaking background. She used Cornell University’s Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) to design several gear system prototypes for the skull in sketch, digital model, and paper form. She then published her early sketches and ideas on the design. KMODDL’s library of geared systems was a useful resource for considering many different ways to think of how a geared system might work in the piece. It also provided detailed models that we adapted for prototyping purposes. (Below is an example of a paper prototype Katie constructed.)

Building on Katie’s work, Nicole Clouston adapted existing designs in the MLab for use in the skull and made several geared system models using CAD software. For the purposes of historical precision, she also hand-carved a version of the skull in basswood that we then digitized using a structured-light scanner. I adapted this scanned model to make room for the interior mechanisms and later fabricated versions of it using the MLab’s 3D printer, desktop miller, and laser cutter.

Iteration 2: Magnets

Once we printed a handful of gears and tried constructing the mechanism at scale, we realized our approach wasn’t going to work. Given the size of the skull (height: 9.2 cm, width: 1.5 cm, depth: 1.6 cm) on the original pin, the design required a tiny geared motor (comparable in size to the motors used to vibrate pagers or cell phones), which we do not believe was available during Trouvé’s time. We also did not have access to materials allowing us to make parts at that scale, and—perhaps most important—we also considered the assembly of the gear design too complex for the Kit‘s audiences to manage.

After some more research on Trouvé’s life and works, as well as conversations with William J. Turkel, Devon Elliott, and Edward Jones-Imhotep, we shifted our attention to telegraphy, which likely inspired Trouvé’s methods. For this design, I prototyped a simple telegraph sounder and—for comparative purposes—a solenoid switch as well.

The idea was that a small electromagnet could be placed inside the skull, and the jaw could act as the armature with a small hammer that, once attracted to the magnet, causes the action of the jaw to swing upwards towards the eye sockets. The added benefit of this mechanism is that the action of the magnet results in an audible “clack” sound, perfect for a teeth-gnashing motion and in many ways comparable to the sounds of a telegraph. I designed the solenoid circuit as well because it utilized the same amount of current as a telegraph sounder yet resulted in a slightly different behaviour. In the solenoid, a plunger is pulled into a magnetized shaft. With a plunger attached to the jaw, the solenoid allows for greater range of motion, meaning the jaw would be free to swing more, albeit at the cost of some of the clacking sound.

At this point, we used the MLab’s laser cutter and milling machine to rapidly prototype designs across a variety of materials. For the purposes of testing, I milled most of the parts in acrylic and installed a solenoid in the skull. Our first working prototype was complete!

Iteration 3: Interrupter Bell

While the solenoid skull worked, its mechanism was unreliable. (I credit this more to shoddy design on my part than to the feasibility of the actual mechanism.) In the interests of improving the prototype, the team felt compelled to return to the diagrams of Trouvé’s electro-mobile jewelry and consider new approaches. We also contacted the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose collection includes one of the only extant electro-mobile stick-pins. The Museum kindly supplied us with additional information that allowed us to add some nuance to our approach. Here is a sketch of a prototype we developed after our conversations with the Museum.

But later, Devon Elliott, Jentery and I pieced together a third idea: a self-oscillating electromagnet configuration resembling that found in an interrupter bell, which is similar to a telegraph sounder. (See the public domain GIF below for an example.)

Animation that demonstrates the mechanism in an electric bell (image in the public domain).

In this version, the armature is replaced by the jaw, with a lever attached to the hinge that also controls the movement of the eyes. As long as the lever attached to the jaw is touching the pin (which is connected to a lead on the battery), the circuit is live, causing the magnet to attract the lever, which in turn forces the jaw closed and the eyes down. This force also breaks the circuit, thereby causing the magnet to stop attracting the lever. Thus there is an oscillation between an on and off or a “jaw-up” and “jaw-down” state. My most recent work on the skull involved making a large model of this electromagnetic mechanism and designing the lever system using CAD software. Images of both are below.

Conclusion

While this aspect of the Kits project is not quite complete, I feel proud of how it has progressed, not only due to the various insights afforded by the designs, but also because of the methodological approaches we developed in order to speculate about the particulars of media history. The work has amounted to a close reading of technology: in the absence of first-hand knowledge, we have taken an historically informed approach to deciphering a mechanism and experimenting with versions of it. Perhaps even more important, the Kits’ collaborative research model has proven both invaluable and absolutely necessary to creating prototypes that balance technical particulars with historical, cultural, creative, and conjectural methods.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images, sketches, and videos for this post care of Shaun Macpherson, Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, Danielle Morgan, and the Maker Lab, except where otherwise noted.

As I outlined in a previous post, we used examples of jewellery cases (or jewel caskets, as they were often called) from the Victorian period to inspire our design of the kit’s container. Since the content of the kit is electro-mobile jewellery, a jewellery box makes sense not only thematically but also for arranging small parts, intentionally structuring access to elements of the kit, and keeping everything secure. We began this process by sketching cases inspired by various jewel caskets.

Sketches of a Victorian jewel casket care of Nina Belojevic and the MLab

Once we decided what components we wanted to comprise the case, we began working through several iterations of the design in Rhino 3D. While creating the 3D model, we wanted to represent the aesthetic intricacies of a Victorian jewel casket, which could be manufactured using some of the CNC (computer numerical control) equipment we have in our Digital Fabrication Lab. Since such equipment can be difficult to access (e.g., due to costs, training, and matters of infrastructure), we also wanted to make it possible to render a simpler version of the box using hand tools. Although a simpler version may lack the intricacies of Victorian caskets, many details can be added to the base model during post-production. These details include illustrations, engravings, and hardware.

In fact, when designing our base model, we did not include the details for a finished box. As such, that model does not include any decorative elements. Its surfaces are rather minimalist, not Victorian, in their design. To this model we add engravings and other features corresponding with Victorian caskets. These features complement the guides for the early wearable kit, but—with the simple base model—we also want to encourage audiences to create their own variants or editions.

As you can see, the Rhino model comprises the basic elements of the case. It shows the rounded and beveled edges that follow a Victorian aesthetic, and it has been rendered to the size we require for the final kit. Again, details can be added during production and post-production: prior to fabrication, the desired box material can be selected; different types of silk or satin lining can be inserted; surface illustrations can be painted on or engraved; and hinges, ribbons, or knobs can easily be added.

For our first iteration, we decided to laser-cut the jewellery case with an Epilog Helix 40-watt laser. We cut the external components of the case from 6mm baltic birch, and the internal components consist of 3mm baltic birch.

While this prototype is a simpler, flattened version of the 3D model created in Rhino, such simplicity allows us to quickly construct materials that we can user-test with multiple audiences. Since we designed the case to encourage audiences to move through the kit in certain ways, explore it, immediately find some components, and search for other components, this user testing is essential to our research. For instance, we have included two “hidden” compartments in the bottom section of the kit. They hold historical materials and require some digging to locate. One compartment contains schematics and technical articles about the electric jewels from the period; the other compartment contains texts on jewellery etiquette as well as images of some of the women who modelled electro-mobile jewellery. User testing tells us whether these hidden compartments do in fact afford certain arguments about early wearables, or if the kit design should be revised and improved.

After cutting all the pieces, we stain them to give them a richer colour. Although we used baltic birch, which can be cut very easily with a laser, we wanted to follow the look of the Victorian jewel caskets we found, which mostly consisted of darker materials (often of lavish woods, such as mahogany and rosewood). To achieve a similar look, we chose a walnut wood stain. We then assembled the boxes using wood glue, clamps, and hinges.

We are currently finalizing all of the kit’s various parts, such as the guide, the milled skull, jewellery pin components, and an electromagnetic mechanism for moving the skull’s eyes and jaw.

Image of an early wearable kit care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

While we plan to manufacture physical kits that can be mailed, we will—as I suggested earlier in this post—also make available digital files for all components of the kit, including the case. We are eager to see not only how our audiences will engage the complete kit, but also how they might modify, realize, and construct the kit using the digital models, descriptions, and historical media we provide. After all, our goal is not to tell people how early wearables were built. It is to prompt them to prototype versions of history through today’s materials and technologies.

Image of an early wearable kit care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan. Sketches and videos created by Nina Belojevic.

Inspired by grangerizing as well as Visconti’s notion of book hacking, we used Georges Barral’s biography of Trouvé, Histoire d’un Inventeur, as the base text for our early wearable guide. Since we could not work from a hardcopy of the biography, we instead printed a public domain PDF. We then used Victorian illustration styles to create something between a grangerized book and a zine. Zines usually represent subcultures or ideas that are not generally acknowledged in popular publications. Thus it seemed fitting to use the zine format to represent an inventor who, despite his numerous inventions and contributions to Victorian culture, remains minimally referenced in scholarly work. Some of our design influences include riot grrl weekly zines, various punk zines from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and Anna Anthropy’s videogame work, all of which combine forms of cultural criticism with experimental media.

During the process of making the guide, we designed three rough prototypes: the first could be read like a regular zine but also unfolded into a map-like series of instructions for building early wearables, the second intertwined instruction and information in a vertical format, and our final design contained a removable mini-booklet of instructions inserted into the grangerized text. By using manual and digital methods to mix contemporary and Victorian aesthetics, we wanted these physical guides to look and feel collaged. We also wanted them to exist as middle states, somewhere between distinct moments in history.

Early in 2015, we made mock-ups of how we thought we might integrate historical newspaper clippings, annotations, illustrations, and Barral’s biography through collage and drawings. Here’s one instance of those mock-ups:

As the guide progressed, we developed the collaged aesthetic:

For the inserted instruction booklet, we modified a photograph of Trouvé and turned him into a narrator, who playfully conveys instructions for building the stick-pin in multiple ways. Should audiences trust their narrator? Is he reliable? What is his bias? His pedagogy?

Since we are foregrounding the role that prototyping, revision, and decision-making play in the construction of technologies, we wanted Trouvé’s narration to give the sense that the reader/builder is meant to explore tangible possibilities alongside him instead of somehow replicating his procedures, which—to be clear—we cannot fully recover or even mimic in 2015. The instruction booklet can be read in context with the rest of the guide, but it can also be removed and used during the assembly process. Because the instructions can be held in hand, audiences don’t need to stare at a screen while they are unpacking a kit or making a wearable.

In order to situate early wearables in the context of Victorian culture, we explored six aspects or “keywords” (in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s work) that may have contributed either to the skull’s design or to the way early wearables such as the skull stick-pin were received. The sections on clocks and telegraphs briefly touch on the way those technologies may have influenced Trouvé’s design choices, while the segments on class and gender give some context for cultural etiquette around jewellery during the period. The mourning section addresses mourning jewellery traditions in Victorian culture, where skulls were significant symbols central to what Susan Elizabeth Ryan calls “dress acts.” Additionally, the section about performance describes instances where Trouvé’s jewellery was worn publicly. As often as possible, we drew this information from books and newspaper articles from the period. Below is a photo of the gender section. In the future, we’ll be adding more sections, including sections on the role race, positivism, and electromagnetic worldviews played in early wearables.

To bind the guide, we used a pamphlet stitch and nested the instruction booklet inside the guide with leather string:

Finally, the guide was ready to be placed inside the kit:

Together with a calling card, of course:

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and the Maker Lab. Thanks again to Amanda Visconti for her history of grangerizing: https://drc.usask.ca/projects/archbook/grangerizing.php.

The slides for my SAA talk are available at jentery.github.io/saa/ (source files at github.com/jentery/saa/tree/gh-pages). During the talk, I concluded with some issues anchored in what—following feedback from Kari Kraus, Devon Elliott, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Kevin Kee, and Turkel—I’m calling a “license for speculation” in media history. That concluding portion of the talk is below, together with a drawing, by Danielle Morgan, of a stick-pin from our early wearables kit. Feedback welcome!

Literary and media studies tell us how histories of technologies are rife with contingencies that are frequently erased or ignored after the fact. In the particular case of Gustave Trouvé’s electric jewelry, our approach in the Maker Lab raises numerous epistemological questions about doing media history today, especially through emerging technologies. While unpacking these issues is beyond the scope of this talk, I will briefly outline them here.

First, when seeing the past through today’s technologies, how should scholars conjecture about materials—such as inaccessible, broken, or dead media—not at hand? In other words, when and on what grounds do we have license for speculation? Once articulated, such a license could spark more than a mere repurposing of new gadgets for historical purposes. It could support a legible methodology for doing media history computationally.

Second, a growing concern about remaking old media is how to better translate computation into cultural criticism. In many ways, these concerns rehearse longstanding debates about “critical” distance and “uncritical” immersion in scholarly research. For example, where Victorian electric jewelry is concerned, we must ask how the very act of remaking now cannot be completely detached from material conditions then, including how jewelry visibly marked class, reified gender, and sourced its materials and labor from Europe’s colonies. Although Trouvé’s electric jewelry was satirical and never intended as fine art, it was not somehow divorced from the inequalities of its time, either. But does immersion in technological processes help scholars better understand historical forces? Does it further our complicity with them? At the moment, my argument for the Kits involves a combination of immersion and distance, without the assumption that we can ever perceive like anyone did back then. Still, the details and consequences of such a method need to be further tested, especially as they relate to media history as a form of social and material history. Until then, remaking old media may fail to convince historians and critics.

Finally, as technologies such as photogrammetry and 3D scanning become ubiquitous, scholars need to further explore the effects of their naturalization through digital devices—to tease out when editorial decisions are delegated to them, how, under what assumptions, and to what effects. Without such attention, we risk running history in the background.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of the Shakespeare Association of America. Stick-pin drawing care of Danielle Morgan.