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Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping

what about upcycling?

It’s important to note that several maker projects, such as some listed on both Thingiverse and Instructables, center “up-cycling,” which repurposes old, unused objects in various ways, largely to keep items out of the discard pile, out of the landfill.

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the discard pile 1 plain 2023-07-07T20:25:35+00:00
Often in a computer lab, you’ll see discarded, “old,” dirty, broken, un-loved computer parts sitting around collecting dust. How do the decapitated, dismembered bodies provide an affective shock to viewers? Can that make them care more about discarded objects? Can necropolitics extend to non-human things?

This reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of a Klee painting entitled “Angelus Novus” (and another artist's rendition) that:
shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.¹

Must progress always be positioned as the opposite of care and repair? Must making be positioned outside of care and repair?
Unanswered Questions:
►What happens to computer waste?
►Must “progress” mean leaving an endless trail of waste and destruction behind us in its wake? Is this really progress?
►How do we practice a politics of care in relation to our encounters with things (human and non-human)? In a climate of disposability, how do we get people to care about the things around them? Which things are disposable? Who does the disposing?
►How does black-boxing contribute to waste? In other words, how does our lack of knowledge about computers (beyond our use of them) contribute to our lack of concern for repair and care?

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Footnotes:
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 249.