ISSUE #24 Digital Materialities

Introduction

This issue brings together contributions that question the materialities of digital technologies, and the ecological, class, racial and gender concerns that run through them. Each author has developed critical perspectives that shed light on different aspects of the notion of ‘materiality’. These perspectives refer to the materials that make up our digital tools and their deathly extraction; to the environments in which the materials evolve, and the meanings attached to them; to the relations of power and labour that constitute them. The feature as a whole is resolutely opposed to the idea of a ‘dematerialisation’ that is said to have accompanied the transition to digital technology.

The contributions all share the common approach of adopting creative research’s methodologies. They develop analyses based on field research and/or theoretical and historical intersections. They also propose artistic and design forms that work on speculation and outline possibilities for seeing differently, and doing by other means. In short, the input of creative research is significant: it enables us to map out emancipatory perspectives in our relationship with the digital world.

The feature opens with a contribution by HEAD researcher and designer, Cyrus Khalatbari, which acts as a methodological guide for artists and designers. Khalatbari invites us to go beyond the pleasing aesthetics of platforms, to open up the black boxes of our technologies, so as to create objects that put the so-called ‘immateriality’ of the digital world at a distance.

Art historian Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel and philosopher and HEAD lecturer David Zerbib have set out to describe the contemporary conditions in which digital images come to life. According to them, it is the infrastructures, the programmes that generate the images, that are at the heart of today’s ‘theatre of visual operations’, more than the content of the images or their medium. Their reflections stem directly from the AIAIA Sweatshop exhibition they organised at the artist-run space in Duplex, Geneva (17 May – 21 June, 2024). The works in this exhibition are described in the consequent article. In her contribution, artist and researcher Raphaëlle Kerbrat reveals the theoretical depth of her work Si (1-bit computer), presented as part of the AIAIA Sweatshop. Her installation, in the form of a computer reduced to its essential components, makes the signal that drives the device both visible and sensitive. Through her practice, Kerbrat defends the importance of creating the conditions for users to pay attention to the ‘weight of data’.

The following two contributions address the consequences of extracting natural resources to compose our digital devices and technologies, through film or artist video. In her video Bedrocks for Digital Systems, the artist, researcher, and HEAD lecturer Mabe Bethônico examines, in collaboration with the artist Victor Galvão, the colonial logics concealed in our smartphones, computers, televisions, and so on. As shown by Bethônico, the materiality of these devices literally screens out the geopolitical inequalities and the violence of extraction that characterise their production. The short film Kasiterit by the artist Riar Rizaldi is available in full for one month on the ISSUE website. Rizaldi’s work was recently exhibited at the Centre de la Photographie Genève¹, and Kasiterit has been shown at a number of international festivals and in the form of museum installations. In it, a voice created by Rizaldi and produced with artificial intelligence questions its origins on the island of Bangka, in Indonesia, where workers extract the tin needed to manufacture and operate the most contemporary technologies.

Artist and researcher Cindy Coutant is head of the [Inter]action option in the Visual Arts department and curator of the exhibition The Future is Unmanned at the LiveInYourHead space (7 February – 13 April, 2024). In her eponymous article, she lays bare the gendered and deleterious symbolism attached to contemporary technologies. Drawing on cyberfeminist writings, Coutant calls for a vengeful return of the ‘bodies swallowed up’ by the grand narrative of progress: those of aliens, gremlins, and waste. ‘Learning with waste’ is the proposition put forward in the drawn article by artist and anthropologist Anaïs Bloch, who is working at the HEAD within the framework of the Discarded Digital research project. Bloch reports on her discussions with Gerry Oulevay, a self-taught artist and inventor who works with digital waste to create unusual objects and installations. As with the other articles in the feature, it explains how to listen to dissident and minority voices revealing the complex intertwining of digital materialities.

Faye Corthésy

Photo credit: Screenshot from the film Kasiterit (Riar Rizaldi, 2019)

Notes

A Phantom Ride of the Sunda Plate [https://www.centrephotogeneve.ch/en/expo/riar-rizaldi/], cur. Holly Roussell, Danaé Panchaud, and Claus Gunti, 6 December 2023 – 11 February 2024

Content

Ingrid Burrington, Sand in the gears, 2018.

From cloud aesthetics to alternative circuits and assemblages

From the seminal “cloud” metaphor to green buttons and blue thumbs-up emojis, our interactions and dominant discourses around the digital embody a specific capitalistic agenda: the one of technology as a commodity fetishism we simply consume and later trash without understanding how it operates. In addition, these interfaces and metaphors hide the complex human, material and environmental assemblages enabling, operating and optimising our digital processes. Drawing from this context, the article is intended for artists and interaction designers interested to critically engage with technology and their “blackboxes”. It argues for the importance of bridging design with social sciences and ethnographic fieldwork. Through this lens, it posits that designers can, first, better understand the lifecycle and infrastructures of our electronic objects as well as, second, create artefacts that nuance and critique these dominant narratives and beliefs around digital “immateriality”.

Cyrus Khalatbari

The milieu is the message.

Today there is a plane on which the battle of images is raging, an infra-iconic plane on which the fate of images and of those who look at them – but also of the things that look at them, non-human entities of artificial vision – is largely determined. This is the plane of computational technological infrastructures, and the norms that determine their operation: the plane of the coding of reality into information, of the digitisation and storage of data. It is in technology – the dual place of both material infrastructure and computer code – that the fate of our freedoms and our imaginations, and that of images with them, hangs in the balance.

Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

David Zerbib

AIAIA Sweatshop

The AIAIA Sweatshop exhibition (held from May 17 to June 21, 2024 at the artist-run space àDuplex, in Geneva) explored through the means of art, behind the media resonances of the acronym IA/ AI, some paradoxes of the material dimensions of artificial intelligence. In a series of “rooms”, AI’s relationships with history, machines, the body, identities and technopolitics were put into context and questioned, far from the ethereal, fascinating or frightening images of a new technological power as immaterial as inexorable. This exhibition was born from a collaboration between the Digital Humanities seminar of Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel at the University of Geneva and the Work.Master seminar of David Zerbib at HEAD.

Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

David Zerbib

Si (1-bit computer): signal as a medium for representing digital materialities

The Si (1-bit computer) project, created by Raphaëlle Kerbrat at the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs as part of her PhD thesis entitled, ‘Le poids des données, paradoxes matériels et sensibles du numérique’ (‘The weight of data, material and sensitive paradoxes of digital technology’), offers to make the physical imprint of a computational process discernible. Si (1-bit computer) is based on the physical decomposition of a binary system and draws on the manipulation of silicon, a semiconductor material used to make transistors, which are at the core of digital electronics. Si (1-bit computer) operates by enlarging physical and temporal scales, stretching a logical operation over several seconds and amplifying the initial size of the components. Matter is a central element in this project, which reveals the workings of our digital devices in a way that is at once archaic and poetic.

Raphaëlle Kerbrat

Bedrocks for Digital Systems

This video by Mabe Bethônico, edited in collaboration with Victor Galvão, who also created its sound, derives from a text constructed using a cut-up technique on an article by Lee Mackinnon titled “Technologies of Romance: Mineralogy: a digital account,” published in the Science Museum Group Journal, 2019. The textual parts in the video are elusive, rhythmically relating to the work environment of extractive sites from which the main minerals used in our electronic devices are sourced, as well as to the large sales floors of digital appliances. Images were taken in Minas Gerais and Switzerland by Mabe Bethônico, but the video also includes content from her project “Museum of Public Concerns,” a visual archive compiled from multiple sources and contributors. These include a firefighter’s report, evaluating the Brumadinho disaster, images made by members of the Maxakali community from Minas Gerais, and photos made by inspectors from the Brazilian Ministry of Labour and Employment, among others. The narrative invites to reflect on the environmental and social ramifications of technological dependencies, reminding of the costs of convenience and innovation.

Victor Galvão

Mabe Bethônico

Kasiterit as A Speculative Guide to Bangka

One-third of the global tin supply is extracted from Bangka island in Indonesia. Tin is the most impacted mineral by the upcoming technological development, which includes artificial intelligence and technology for renewable energy. Natasha is a solar-powered A.I. voice, and in Kasiterit, a short film by Riar Rizaldi, they trace their genealogy and the truth of their origin; from the capital liquidity to labour dynamic. With their feminised voice—as quite often performed by other AI-powered voice assistants produced by tech-companies, Natasha narrates the emergence of tin in Bangka island and their existence from the perspective of tropical anthropology of nature, value theory, philosophy of time, genetic mutation, geopolitics, and automation.

Kasiterit is available to watch on Issue’s website from mid-July to mid-August 2024. It is accompanied by an excerpt from Rizaldi’s related PhD research.

Riar Rizaldi

Dessin de Zoë Sofoulis publié dans Exterminer les fœtus, avortement, désarmement, sexo-sémiotique de l’extraterrestre.

The Future in Unmanned

Why does the future dream of being mapped out, gridded, and automatically piloted by the culture of high technology? How does technology manage to present itself as a marker of civilisation, affirming the supremacy of certain bodies over others, and reinforcing a symbolic and social order that separates and immunises human beings from waste, the gremlins, aliens, the inhumans and other undesirable bodies deriving from the ‘civilised human’? Over the last 40 years, voices have been raised to question the great narrative of Western technology. These voices ask: ‘Who counts as an agent of technology, as a human agent, and consequently as an agent of the future?’ It is from these areas of contestation, whose return has become impossible to ignore today, that this article seeks to decipher the dream of safe, clean, objective, and rational techno-governance, which has turned out to be anti-terrestrial, excremental, aberrant, and sexually aggressive.

Cindy Coutant

Learning from waste: repairing, reusing, and diverting to regain control of digital equipment

This contribution looks at digital technology through the prism of waste and waste’s potential. The contribution is based on a case study from an ethnographic survey that Bloch has been conducting with Thibault Le Page and Nicolas Nova since 2022 at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO). One of the survey’s aims is to highlight the various forms of reappropriation and transformation that can be achieved with elements from digital equipment such as smartphones, computers, headphones, connected objects, etc., or with their components.

Anaïs Bloch