ASSIGNMENT OBJECTIVE: Get experience understanding and describing a technical process. Consider how technologies are made invisible or, or how they are naturalized in our society or environment. Use research to develop ideas for material interventions. Develop counter arguments, criticisms and modes or strategies of deconstructing technological fantasies.

Two steps to this project: 1. Describe or explain a technological process, product, system, structure or event. Your explanatory narrative can be based on any one or all of the following: a) field observation (watch, follow, track-down, investigate) b) interview (talk with people working with the processes) c) print or media research (books, magazines, technical journals, etc) 2. Denaturalize, poeticize, de-construct, de-center, politicize, metaphorize, reverse the subjectivity or otherwise reconstruct your straightforward explanation in such a way that you create another kind of understanding of this technology. 3. caution: try to meld or contrast the steps or perspectives in an interesting way: do not lose the objective material in 1, rather see how they might address or argue or form a dialectic with each other. It can be ordinary; barely noticeable subjects are sometimes the most interesting to think about. Possible subjects: Local canneries, making soup, wine industry (okay to follow through from class introduction). What does the city of Davis do with its waste? Follow trucks and document the disposal process. Where is the water/sewage cleanup process? Medical technologies: Prosthetics, pills and implants: do you know a cyborg? Find a unique approach to explaining this concept. Specifics v. generalities: Write about classes of technologies (such as SSRI¹s and anti-depressants) if you want to discuss their social roles, for example. But it is better to pick as specific a subject as possible, and focus on degrees of scale; how does a small process affect an entire region? (cf; irradiation of tomatoes changing the way they are packed and picked (where does the irradiating source come from? How does it get to the cannery?), or ­ another one-- meth production)

APPROACHES

Abstraction/Removal of Context: Maquilopolis: by Vickie Funari and Sergio de la Torres: Watch this on Tuesday night Oct 10! See how the makers/subjects perform the movements of factory jobs in a field outside the factory: think of how the meaning of these processes and this work is changed by this treatment which both abstracts the labor, but also gives a deep subjectivity.

Ethnographic Approaches: Cement and Speed by Michael Taussig: (ethnologist on cement, imperialist intervention, and the interdependency of technologies) www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/01/05_michael_taussig.pdf also see My Cocaine Museum http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/790096.html Speculative Drama: cf Indistinguishable Fire by Harun Farocki (also base materialism) ³Base materialism² Considering the matter of fact raw materials of technological production: How does the rationality and civility of everyday technological optimism suppress the actual calculus used to measure the value of life? ³the bodily fat of a normally constituted man would suffice to manufacture seven cakes of toilet-soap. Enough iron is found in the organism to make a medium-sized nail, and sugar to sweeten a cup of coffee. The phosphorus would provide 2,200 matches. The magnesium would furnish the light needed to take a photograph. In addition, a little potassium and sulphur, but in an unusable quantity. These different raw materials, costed at current prices, represent an approximate sum of 25 francs.² (Dr. Charles May quoted in Bataille et al, Encylopedia Acephalica, London, Atlas 1995) Textual Readings: interpretations and visual representations of technologies. What kinds of discrepancies are there between an industry (what it does) and how it is publicized? See http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader3.html New Visual Technologies in the Bazaar: Reterritorialisation of the Sacred in Popular Final note: THIS SHOULD BE ORIGINAL RESEARCH AND WRITING. All quoted material to be referenced. Get names and positions of interview subjects, and include all textual and image sources in your last page. WRITE descriptively: working around the need for a picture and attempting to describe the materiality of the thing. If you are looking at a digital technology‹make sure part of your paper deals with its materiality: this assignment is not about virtuality. technology 1615, "discourse or treatise on an art or the arts," from Gk. tekhnologia "systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique," originally referring to grammar, from tekhno- (see techno-) + -logia. The meaning "science of the mechanical and industrial arts" is first recorded 1859. High technology attested from 1964; short form high-tech is from 1972. Tech as a short form of Technical College (Institute, etc.) is Amer.Eng., attested from 1906.