Temporal Poetics as a Critical Technical Practice

Mindful makers: Question prompts to help guide young peoples' critical technical practices in maker spaces in libraries, museums, and community-based youth organizations

This article interrogates the intersection of queer diasporic identity, collective Socio-Political Identity, and the ‘algorithmic gaze’ through a critical Practice-Based Research (PBR) methodology. Situated within the sociopolitical rupture of post-2019 Hong Kong, the authors examine how collective culture and the homogenizing forces of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) enact a dual erasure of local queer narratives. To address this, the study proposes a ‘Queer Social Ecology’ framework, adapting Bronfenbrenner’s model to map the coercive pressures exerted on the queer subject. Through the coproduction of the animated documentary Rhythms of Identity , based on the oral history of a Hong Kong migrant (‘YC’), this research demonstrates how animation functions as a ‘conditional space’ for articulating inarticulable trauma. Furthermore, the project employs Critical Technical Practice (CTP) by operationalizing GenAI not to refine but to perform bias—generating visual ‘glitches’ that expose the heteronormative exclusions of machine learning. The article argues that participatory animation serves as a vital counter-archive, preserving the texture of lived experience against the sanitizing forces of state power and technological standardization.

This article reflects theoretically on the conditions of possibility for critical work to be conducted in the context of the digital humanities and aims to provide a broad conceptual vocabulary suitable for supporting and expanding this rapidly changing subdiscipline. It does so by elaborating on the framework of critical technical practice (ctp) first proposed by Philip Agre, suggesting how this notion might be connected productively with philosophical lineages of antipositivist epistemology, but as such traditions are reimagined and retooled for today’s informational contexts. Here, ctp is considered through the work of sociotechnical problematization, especially by the various techniques that differentiate existing infrastructural solutions on the basis of the purported material problems and difficulties they claim to address. The origin of Agre’s notion of ctp is linked back to its inspiration in the specific methodologies and concepts in the work of Michel Foucault. It is also suggested that other important connections to the thought of Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilles Deleuze can be made. While presenting a rich set of resources for the consideration of sociotechnical problems, the argument is made that these resources might be productively placed in dialogue with existing digital methods and techniques through a reflection on media aesthetics. The article concludes by illustrating the relevance of this general framework with reference to a number of projects by media practitioners relevant to digital humanities, including the work of Rosa Menkman, YoHa, Julian Oliver, Dmytri Kleiner, and Esther Polak.

This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.

opinion Free Access Share on Critical technical practice lab, M-ITI Author: Chris Csíkszentmihályi View Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 24Issue 3May + June 2017 pp 16–19https://doi.org/10.1145/3073064Published:27 April 2017Publication History 0citation629DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads629Last 12 Months144Last 6 weeks26 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF

ABSTRACTThis article documents and reflects upon a pedagogical project aimed at fostering critical engagements with technology in the context of a graduate research and learning laboratory at the nexus of computer science, design, engineering, and architecture. With the notions of critical technical practice and reflective practice as touchstones, the project links a specific tradition of twentieth century design pedagogy to critical sensibilities drawn from the field of science and technology studies (STS) in a space we call the ‘research studio.’ The methods and examples presented illustrate how this hybrid pedagogical model can cultivate the critical imagination of learners – their ability to place critical and sociohistorical reflection at the centre of creative technology design – and show that the fields of design and STS offer distinct but mutually enriching traditions of learning and research. The article offers insight to educators and researchers across STEM and humanities fields interested in engaging with technologies not merely as subjects but also as vehicles of scholarly and creative inquiry.

When designing mobile technologies for young people in social situations, there is a need for methodological approaches that allow the researcher to capture the intricacies of use within the context of day-to-day situations. As will be discussed in this paper, one of the most effective ways of achieving this is through the use of multi-disciplinary methodologies provided by HCI. However, while traditional approaches usually draw on ethnography or psychology for the sociology component, the study reported on in this paper, inspired by the work being conducted within the emerging field of Critical Technical Practice, introduces cultural theory into the multi-disciplinary mix of a user centered design project. The result is the development of the Swarm mobile phone prototype.

The two cultures described in 1959 by C.P. Snow still haunt the University where he developed his reputation. While the policy legacy of that debate is often reduced to concerns about numeracy skills and the supposed objectivity of quantitative evidence, the class distinctions of sophisticated culture versus lowly trade are again being blurred by social media and generative AI. Working in the other Cambridge, at the MIT AI Lab, Philip Agre advocated critical technical practice . Amid widespread anxiety about the ethics of AI, this is often taken to be an appeal for engineers to be guided by the humanities, and for interdisciplinary centres to focus on the ends rather than the means of AI research. However, in the machine learning era, that agenda can easily become statistically reactive rather than analytically descriptive. In this paper, I argue from the perspective of craft and design, that the most significant distinction, and opportunity for collaborative endeavour, is not between the disciplinary differences between the sciences and humanities, but between interdisciplinary cultures of making and of observational critique.

This chapter proposes that augmented reality art and open data offer the potential for a redefinition of urban interventionist art practices. Data has emerged as a significant force in contemporary networked culture from the commercial commodification of online presence as practised by internet giants Facebook and Google to the 2013 revelations of the unprecedented scale of the US Government’s data collection regime carried out by the NSA (Gellman and Piotras, U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data--us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html, 2013). Big data and its effective deployment are seen as essential to the efficient running of any enterprise, from city governance to commercial enterprise and, of course, government intelligence services. In parallel to developments in big data, open data sources have proliferated opening access to myriad data sources previously only available to government and corporations. We have seen advances in techniques of data scraping and manipulation which have democratised the ability to parse, analyse and effectively manipulate data, and developments which have powerful implications for artists and activists. This chapter examines the possibilities for redefining the activist art practice of urban intervention with data and augmented reality to introduce new hybrid techniques for critical spatial practice (Rendell, Critical spatial practice. http://www.janerendell.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/critical-spatial-practice.pdf. Accessed 18 September 2017, 2008). The combination of AR and Open Data (in the broadest post-wikileaks sense) is seen to provide a powerful tool-set for the artist/activist to augment specific sites with a critical, context-specific data layer. Such situated interventions offer powerful new methods for the political activation of sites which enhance and strengthen traditional nonvirtual approaches and should be thought of as complementary to, rather than replacing, physical intervention. I offer as a case study this author’s NAMAland project, a mobile artwork which used open data and augmented reality to visualise and critique aspects of the Irish financial collapse.