A key element of our project is providing audiences with the necessary historical, cultural, and military origins of the Tennis for Two game, which dates back to 1958. I have been grappling with the challenge of how—through a process of designing a kit and reconstructing a videogame—we can (if at all) better understand and communicate the working assumptions and procedures that informed the game’s composition. For example, in the case of Tennis for Two, it is important to attend to the socioeconomic politics of war in the 1940s and ’50s, the development of radar systems and surveillance in the U.S., and the vexed relations between university laboratories, computation, and nuclear nonproliferation at the time.

At the moment, my primary question is how—when producing cultural criticism about old technologies—some hands-on engagement with historical materials fosters a distinct and recognizable form of knowledge. Returning for a second to what both Nina and Shaun suggest, how do we better understand the affordances or scholarly benefits of exploratory, multimodal approaches? And, without being reactionary, how does a “materials first” mode of learning-through-doing inform a long tradition of media theory and technology studies?

In grappling with these questions, I’m studying work by Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, Matt Ratto, and Friedrich Kittler (among others). If we want the Tennis for Two kit to facilitate experimental approaches to history and material culture, then it is worth considering how exactly tacit engagements with technologies prompts cultural critique. It is also worth asking what exactly something like “critical making” entails. In what follows, I catalogue and respond to a few ideas about making and building in the humanities in order to better situate them in the context of our Kits for Cultural History project.

Defining Critical Making

In “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Matt Ratto suggests that critical making stems from a “desire to theoretically and pragmatically connect two modes of engagement with the world that are often held separate—critical thinking, typically understood as conceptually and linguistically based, and physical ‘making,’ goal-based material work” (Ratto 253). Here, Ratto’s definition satisfies our desire to blend the processes of critical engagement with the process of making. And later in the article, he elaborates on critical making:

A critical making project involves three stages, analytically though not functionally separable. The project may start from any of these. One stage involves the review of relevant literature and compilation of useful concepts and theories. This is mined for specific ideas that can be metaphorically “mapped” to material prototypes, and explored through fabrication. In another stage, groups of scholars, students, and/or stakeholders jointly design and build technical prototypes. Rather than being purposive or fully functional devices, prototype development is used to extend knowledge and skills in relevant technical areas as well as to provide the means for conceptual exploration. A third stage involves an iterative process of reconfiguration and conversation, and reflection begins. This process involves wrestling with the technical prototypes, exploring the various configurations and alternative possibilities, and using them to express, critique, and extend relevant concepts, theories, and models. (Ratto 253)

This elaboration satisfies most of the requirements we have in place for the kits. To be sure, all of us involved in the project have undertaken a process of reviewing relevant literature, useful concepts, and applicable theories. What’s more, our work on the kits constitutes conceptual exploration, knowledge expansion, and critical reflection, even if—at times–many of our ideas actually emerge from the process of making (rather than being mapped or projected onto the materials at hand).

To Ratto’s compelling work, I wonder if we could add the question of how the Kits for Cultural History (in particular) and making-based projects (in general) could better speak to audiences outside of the academy, or to people who are simply not interested in academic research. This suggestion is not to imply that our kits cannot include theory or deep historicism. Instead, it is to gesture toward the possibility that the kits could be meaningful for audiences who have no knowledge of (or investment in) the theoretical work privileged by many academics. By extension, could this desire to engage audiences beyond our campuses help us resist the binaries of reading/making, thinking/doing, and mind/body?

Chasing Spectres

Elsewhere, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler argues that “media always already provide the appearances of specters” (Kittler 12), and that any media will contain “unavoidable traces” (8) of makers or authors. In the case of the Kits for Cultural History, if we are reconstructing technological experiments through exploratory means, then we are also chasing spectres. As Kittler suggests, “media always already provide the appearances of specters” (12)—say, the trace of the subject’s voice projected through a gramophone, or the photograph of a long deceased relative, or the faint hint of otherwise invisible labour. In the case of our kits, we are trying to take Kittler’s observation a step further by attending (as best we can) to how spectres are generated through mechanisms, procedures, and transduction in the history of electronics. How to achieve this attention through an embodied critical practice that augments our reading and writing—or how to chase the spectral through making—remains a significant challenge for our ongoing work.

Comparing Building with Writing

As we unpack these ideas through the kits project, it will be interesting to see how our discussions and conceptions of making develop and change. As Ramsay and Rockwell claim in “Developing Things: Notes Towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities,” if “the quality of the interventions that occur as a result of building are as interesting as those that are typically established through writing, then that activity is, for all intents and purposes, scholarship” (83). Ramsay and Rockwell suggest that language or writing is not in and of itself critical or scholarly. That said, can we think of building, making, or tinkering in similar terms? When reanimating old tech or reconstructing technological experiments, might there be a kind of “intervention” that could be recognized as scholarly? An intervention that wouldn’t necessarily demand justification or explanation through writing?

In the Lab, Shaun, Katie and I have been getting our hands dirty with some old technologies in order to prototype Tennis for Two, a process whereby I have gained a better sense of how electronic displays and oscillation actually work (some spectres included). While Shaun’s prior experiences in circuit-bending, tinkering, and electrical work have proven useful, soon enough we will be headed into territory largely unfamiliar to us. As we continue to engage and tackle these questions and materials, it will be interesting to discuss how the processes of making facilitate historical research and cultural criticism. After all, building and making are integral to the kits project. But how exactly learning happens through building and doing, or just what scholarly interventions might occur through making, is a question that still demands further consideration and development.

Post by Jon Johnson, attached to the KitsForCulture category, with the physcomp and fabrication tag. Image for this post care of Jon Johnson.

I ultimately chose the process of circuit-bending. By drawing on a number of theorists, including Tara Rodgers, Lev Manovich, Alexander Galloway, Ian Bogost, Richard Grusin, and Jay David Bolter, my project—a circuit-bent Super Nintendo (SNES) controller that can be used to glitch any SNES game—suggests that glitching participates in a kind of applied media archaeology that helps media scholars contextualize the very processes of play. Any user of my “glitch controller” can gain an understanding, however rudimentary, of how the SNES gaming platform works and how it interacts with other technologies (e.g., television sets). At the same time, my project investigates how “game-first” glitching (that is, strategically glitching in a way that sustains gameplay instead of creating unplayable interfaces or games) influences how we understand and study game culture, algorithmic artifacts, and play itself. It is worth reiterating that my approach is contingent upon haptic exploration and depends highly on trial and error. While I have made a conscious and deliberate attempt to glitch as strategically as possible, I must acknowledge my initial and ironic unfamiliarity (given how many hours I have put into playing games on the platform) with the architecture of the SNES console. I must also acknowledge that this glitch controller project is but a springboard into further academic study and investigation. Below is a snapshot of the project, but please note: none of what’s below is intended to be a guide or “how-to” for circuit-bending. These are not instructions. I conducted this project with supervision. If you are unfamiliar with electronics, then do not try circuit-bending.

In the project, the glitches themselves become less like “on/off” operator acts and more akin to fluid acts of play. That is, the glitch controller is meant to be utilized and played while another player is engaging the game itself. Of course, it is important to note that by contextualizing this mode of glitch-play through a “closed” or “boxed” object—namely, the controller—I am partially undoing the work of experimentation and haptic tinkering that I have been so keen to do. In other words, I am ironically continuing in the tradition of providing a polished, user-friendly device that mimics the practices of video game companies like Nintendo or Sega.

To build a prototype, I first needed a controller. I was able to find a used NES controller from a local thrift shop.

After purchasing it, I quickly pulled out the controller’s guts and got to work. I installed a socket in the SNES for all the required wires. Adding several feet of wire to each point resulted in a significant amount of unwanted distortion and “grain” when playing the game. Here, I can’t help but think of Tara Rodgers’s suggestion (by way of Barthes) that such “grain”—emerging as a result of glitching, tinkering, or hacking—constitutes the “body” (Rodgers 317) of the producer/maker within the game/instrument. Regardless, some of the distortions were much worse than others, invariably resulting in me picking new points to solder and bend. It was definitely a frustrating hiccup to hit at a somewhat late point in the build process. Eventually, the controller started to take shape. After removing the guts, I attempted to reinstall switches and buttons from the original controller. After playing with different combinations of switches, buttons, and potentiometers, I decided to select two potentiometers (each connected to two switches) along with four main push buttons. I decided on push buttons for a couple of reasons. For one, somehow the push buttons feel more “gamic.” Generally, video game controllers do not feature on/off switches. Instead, video game controllers generally demand a certain sense of engagement; Mario would not really be Mario if one could simply turn on a jump button that would repeatedly have the character jump at the correct intervals. By having the glitches connected to push-buttons, then, the glitch-player is unable to be overly passive about her/his involvement in the game being played. That is, she/he cannot simply engage in a configuration act. Instead, the glitches are meant to be expressive and continually experimented with. They are meant to be tweaked.

Eventually, the controller was finished.

Here are two very brief videos of the glitch controller in action.

While I am relatively happy with the final product, I am interested in expanding the glitch work I have done here to include sound. It would be interesting, I think, to have a separate controller that would primarily bend and tweak sound and music within the game. I look forward to seeing where this project goes and will keep you posted about new research developments related to physical computing, gaming, media archaeology, and the like.

Post by Jon Johnson, attached to the Makerspace category, with the physcomp tag. All images care of Jon Johnson.