Tactical Humanities Lab

A hybrid space for technical production and humanistic inquiry.

Tag: THL

Project Introduction: Meditations on Memory – Emma Goldman

February 22, 2019 /

The idea of digital versus analog recollection is a driving force. When I began this project, I didn’t fully know what I was expecting of it, or myself, in the process. I wanted to build something immersive and nostalgic and home-y, but struggled with the initial direction. There was no real storyboard for this, it built itself as I was rediscovering my past and overlaying it with that of others. Meditations on Memory (the working title for this piece), came from a place of something unknown and desired. I knew I wanted to open a dialogue about the way we remember things, and how these memories can become universal in different ways. Humans, in many ways tend towards the egotistical (not necessarily in a negative context, but simply that of seeing themselves everywhere), projecting ourselves into the images/memories of others, in places we feel most comfortable.

The physical representation of this project has been one of the primary focuses in the current stages of planning, as the digital is in flux and grows/changes as I do. The original presentation was in a room with three projected screens on varying surfaces. The first was a flat, plaster wall, the second a brick, textured wall, and the third a sheet hung across the room. Of this presentation, the sheet I thought was the most interesting and effective in portraying the feelings I had imagined. It gave the narrative a base in a home-like environment and opened new ways of viewing I hadn’t even considered in production. The most interesting thing about the sheet was the addition of dynamic viewing that it opened to the audience. The sheet allowed for viewing on both sides, allowing for the play of shadows to become a new part of the story. This was particularly important given the original vision of this piece involved the shadows of the observers a lot more than the first showing allowed. The use of shadow was meant to literally project the viewers into the video, physically placing the individuals into the piece so that they might see themselves more literally. This technique is something I hope to utilize more in the future of the piece.

Other considerations I have been making in the evolution of this project is the way the environment effects the way it’s viewed overall. The hope is that Meditations…can be a moveable piece, curating individualized experiences per location so as to best fit the given environments.  However, there has to be some sort of consistency throughout the pieces that will eventually make up this unit so finding the right setting is the current focus. An idea I’ve begun dabbling with for this is that of the living, or bedrooms in houses. Taking things like curtains, and altered furniture to create a more home-like atmosphere. I think of it in the mindset that so many stories are told and written in those rooms, that having that environment recreated, even indirectly, might make the viewing experience more digestible.

 Another main factor I’ve been taking into consideration in the development of this project is the attention span of the viewers. The initial version was a whopping 6 minutes and 30 seconds, all of which were incredibly fast paced, and (I think) lacking in a lot of ways. While the imagery was nice, many of the clips felt rushed and left the observers either confused or wanting more (not in the best way). I think that slowing many of the clips down, and breaking them into smaller vignettes that can later be pieced together (also in response to the given venues) is something that has worked greatly to the evolution of the piece. This breakdown has also allowed me to piece together stronger stories over the varied screening surfaces (no longer necessarily limited to just three) because of the way shorter pieces of narrative can be carried out over a longer time utilizing a lot more stillness [i.e. if there are three screens and each has a similar image at different points in a story, two of the screens can be still while one progresses towards the next until all three have played].

I’m really excited to continue working on this project and to see how physical production might change the way it can be observed as a whole. I’m also looking forward to sharing the experience here, so keep an eye out for what’s to come!

If you’re interested in seeing the original video that accompanied this installation, feel free to view it here, just know a whole lot is changing!

Also! If you want to read/look at the stuff I’m lookin at (for this project) rn, here are some links/titles:

Emma Goldman is a Junior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute pursuing a dual degree in Philosophy & Communication and Media. Over the past year they have begun a dive into media production, primarily focused on allowing for more accessible communication in technical areas. They also have a black cat named Cagney who they love very much.

Introducing the Tactical Humanities Lab of 2019

February 20, 2019 /

The Tactical Humanities Lab (THL) at Rensselaer is our effort to epistemically and institutionally produce DH and DH labs as within the boundaries of STS. The word “tactical” has for us a double meaning. First, it is a recognition of the deployment of the term already in DH, used somewhat flippantly as a way to “get things done” (Kirschenbaum 2012) in the contemporary university. While we certainly do not support the managerialization of higher education, we believe that “tactical” in this sense can be more than just a way of “accepting [our] parasitic relationship to the host” of academic administration (Raley 2014). Tactical-as-instrumental can also a way of making humanities and social science research knowable to administrative systems, funding systems, and broader cultural narratives of academic research. In this way, “tactical” DH operates as a intra-institutional translational platform (Malazita, 2018a), in similar ways that translational medicine practices have been constructed as ways of empathetically bridging biomedical research and diagnostic practices with patients and the public (Wang 2012).

Second, we use “tactical” in de Certeau’s form, as the practice of small-scale, everyday resistances to larger systems of power (de Certeau 1980). Part of this commitment is disciplinary; STS scholars tend to construct the field as strongly oriented with social justice and normative approaches to scientific, technological, and knowledge practices. Another part is our location in an engineering-centered institute, where laboratory practices and technoscientific innovation are the major knowable genres for framing social and political change.

The THL takes a bottom-up approach to DH laboratory practices. Rather than having one or two longer-term projects administered through the lab director, graduate and undergraduate students propose semester-long projects to the lab, and are free to work individually or in groups. Though several projects continue for multiple semesters, every semester-length segment is structured via a particular development and dissemination plan. The lab assumes no prior expertise in technical work or critical inquiry; students and faculty share readings, run discussions and workshops, and skillshare throughout the semester. The topics of these workshops and reading groups vary depending on the projects pursued in a given semester. The lab has no formal funding model or physical space–students and student projects are funded through a combination of scrapped-together internal and external sources, including bits and pieces of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rensselaer-based internal “accelerator” funds, faculty startup funds, Independent Study credits, and preexisting institutional research infrastructures available for supporting undergraduates. Our physical lab presence manifests through distributed temporary spaces, generally either in a conference room outside of Malazita’s office, or throughout various electronics, fabrication, and computer labs on a campus designed for STEM students.

The above probably sounds familiar to many DH laboratory practitioners–especially the contingent funding, space shifting, and sweat equity involved in holding a physically situated research practice together. Building momentum towards continuous operation is also complicated by the term-to-term, student-driven nature of the lab’s research foci. The structure of the lab leads to the production of a wide variety of epistemic subjects and objects. The students and faculty represent multiple disciplines, including STS, Arts, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Sustainability Studies, and Game Design. The project topics range across critical technical education, data visualization, reverse-engineering and hacking hardware, web-based media production, game production, bioart, installation design, and furniture design. While the array of projects and disciplines can sometimes lead to a feeling of disjointedness at the beginning of the semester, all projects are united by two lab “requirements:” the projects must be oriented toward a social or political goal, and the research teams should be interested in making their object “knowable” by DH and STS audiences.

Project Description: Circuit Bending – Ezra Teboul

May 17, 2018 /

The focus of our research is on the topics of foxhole radios & analog/digital synthesizer interfacing and their role(s) as technological marginalia. These technologies take advantage of significant scientific discoveries – such as radio, signal generation, and processing – and use them, there is no better word to describe it, for fun.

Our preliminary research shows that although foxhole radios had the potential to be tactically momentous in times of war or duress, not a single instance of “useful” foxhole (or penny-diode) radios has been documented. Similarly, synthesizers and further electronic music instruments were often born from the surplus of war-era research. The influence of this research being either literal (the EMS prototypes were assembled using leftover bomber parts that were bought secondhand in Ladbroke Grove, London) or somewhat indirect (military funding was one of the drivers of miniaturization that in turn led to the development of transistors and integrated circuits, the maturation of modular synthesizers, and, surprisingly, hearing aids – see Mills, 2010).

Aware of the sociocultural implications detailed by Sterne and Rodgers (2011), this project uses the premise of a fairly practical design challenge to ask (yet again, some might add) how a utilitarian project can be grounds for the expression of social ideals. In short, we are designing an arbitrary waveform generator in a way which can allow for the control of a hardware eurorack modular synthesizer from any Open Sound Control (OSC) capable networked device. Our prototype uses a Beaglebone, a Bela cape, C++ code, and some Pure Data patches. However, the specifics of these technical systems are less important than our recognition that they all come with some cultural and ideological baggage that prescribe the way in which we deal with their affordances and constraints. If artifacts have politics (Winner, 1988), how can artistic uses of “non-essential” systems play with these politics in a productive way?

It is important to note that we are not starting our research from scratch. Kirsten Haring’s 2006 book on the technoculture of Ham radio – amateur systems that also emerged from the surplus of WWII research – could be called a retroactive analysis of the macro effects of gender, class, and race-dependent technological developments of “non-(or less-)essential” systems. Haring’s book makes it quite clear that although the ARRL – the organization connecting amateur radio operators – eventually came to hold political weight, the origins of the practice built its somewhat significant and longlasting power as an aggregate of anecdotal, parallel, and personal developments – combining to form more than the sum of its parts. Rodgers’ more recent article Cultivating Activist Lives In Sound echoes Haring’s aforementioned point(s) as well, offering a list of possible angles from which sound can be a valuable starting point for activism. Rodgers goes on to state:

” a sonic activist might endeavor to do a small action in support of most or all of the above aspirations each day. For me, this list is a useful compass and practical guide, so that I can routinely ask myself: In what ways does my music-making today address X? How does my research further Y? If I’m not doing enough to support Z, what needs to change? It reveals how there can indeed be many approaches to cultivating an activist life in sound— many areas toward which we can direct our efforts—resulting in a proliferation of sonic-political acts that have local and far-reaching ripple effects..” (p.82)

We are not lying to ourselves about the revolutionary potential of our arbitrary function generators. We do see it as a way to elucidate other arbitrary or under-documented decisions in signal synthesis, processing and analysis (there is no political history of square wave, even though it is basically the building block of all modern communication and includes a number of standards which can be implemented in an even wider number of ways – all of which carry material significance and consequences), but that in itself is not necessarily the only motivation behind our process. Rather, I hope this project can serve as a template within sound studies and music technology for how to take devices which seem agnostic or apolitical, and show how developing them with institutional support is inherently political and should include everyday concerns of those politics. There are not many precedents for that in sound, and very few have been written about (see Rodgers, Pink Noises, 2010).

Ezra Teboul is HASS fellow in RPI’s tactical humanities laboratory researching the music implicit in circuits and code.

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