creativity/machine

This steampunk keyboard does all kinds of unspeakably pleasurable things to me. Steampunk, by the way, is defined by the maker as the practice “wherein the craftsman demonstrates the construction of artifacts from an age of steam and brass”, and also refers to a genre of speculative fiction:

The term denotes works set in an era when steam power was still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

via boing boing and MAKE.

I’ve workshopped the affective and/or visceral dimensions of our engagement with ‘obsolete’ technologies before, thinking about the example of majestic theatre organs, in a post called love and the mechanical sublime, andanother one about typewriters. There’s much more thinking to be done though, and there’s definitely a kind of steampunk vibe behind the widespread recent scholarly enthusiasm for the more curious objects from the history of new media, especially in early modernity and the Victorian era, as well as popular histories like Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. Which reminds me, anne mentioned this new book to me the other day, must check it out too:

Residual Media, Ed. Charles R. Ackland, U of Minnesota Press.

In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year’s new? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as “the new” in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?

Residual Media grapples with these questions and more in a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of essays. Beginning with how cultural change bumps along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts, the contributors examine how leftover artifacts can be rediscovered occupying space in storage sheds, traveling the globe, converting to alternative uses, and accumulating in landfills. By exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media, the essays here combine theoretical challenges to media history with ideas, technology, and uses that have been left behind. From player pianos to vinyl records, and from the typewriter to the telephone, Residual Media is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.

Or am I just fetishising the means? And if so, and more importantly, how can something that feels so good really be wrong?

I captured this ‘event’ in my morning commute for Glen (well, and a little bit for me re: gender and the mastery of technologies).

Current thesis word count: 26,733 (URGH).

I just can’t seem to avoid the craft at the moment.

Current thesis word count: 24,017

The refusal at work in these DIY communities is not only a refusal of the affluent Western individual’s interpelletation as the consumer of inauthentic, technologised and mass-produced artifacts; it is also avowedly a recuperation of everyday domestic labour and productive leisure - knitting, sewing - from their undervalued status in contemporary regimes of cultural value. However, these practices are very often recuperated for hipness via the (sometimes post-feminist) differentiation of ‘indie craft’ from the middlebrow aesthetic of the mainstream ‘craft store’.

Anne asks: At what point does collaboration cease to be reciprocal and simply become appropriation?

I’ve written many times, here and elsewhere, that I question the kind of reciprocity at work when a small group of people profit from the work of many others.

[…]

In the past I would have considered these things amongst the ill effects of capitalism, but now I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. After all, some of this labour is actually being done for free. Out of love even, like with Flickr or any number of mod communities. The DIY ethic, in fact, is based on the power of creative re-use and re-appropriation. But these terms are now being tossed around in software and hardware development like organisations and companies only care about democratic participation, and not profitability.
[…]
At what point are labour and love exploited? When does collaboration become appropriation?

I’ve written an alarmingly long and incoherent response in the comments section of the original post.

The perverse lo-fi, lo-tech aesthetic of DIY tech objects - and a very particular ‘mastery of technologies’ discourse - is showcased here:

and here…

and here

Friday is for…flickr-ing.

DIY culture as niche market: ReadyMade: A magazine for people who like to make stuff

I’m frantically busy planning a course and finishing off some outstanding articles, all without my sexy home PC which has some fried hardware and is in the shop, so I haven’t had much time online lately.

Nevertheless:

From Empty Bottle, a vigorous, and highly Romantic post-punk blogging manifesto well worth reading. You’ll have to go read it as I’ve quoted only a teeny bit, but it’s the bit that resonates most with my belief that there is something very interesting about contemporary amateur production - something more than a “revival” of an earlier, more productive time. Stavros the Wonderchicken says:

Write well, write badly, whatever, just create. If you are saying things that stir people, they will respond.

If you can’t write well, write with such passionate muscularity that people stand back and go ‘whoa!’ Make things, reach out to people. If you write well, keep doing it, and get better, and don’t kiss ass for personal gain. If not, just go, bash that keyboard, make a hideous, amateurish squall, one to which, if it has some kernel of glorious truthtelling, people will respond. The mass amateurization of nearly everything is good. If you’re a gifted amateur, the world will beat a path to your, er, door.

To which I would add: and never mind if the path to your door remains overgrown with weeds - be process-oriented, people.
Yet again, thanks to bloody Anne for finding better stuff than me. Which is starting to get mildly embarrassing.

craftster.org is a repository for hip, crafty, DIY projects.