Gallery September 12, 2014 Justin Leave a comment

On Saturday 6th September, a convoy of technology enthusiasts, science clubs, hackerspaces, and rogue makers gathered in the Corn Exchange of the Brighton Dome for the city’s fourth annual Mini Maker Faire; ‘a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness … a place where people show what they are making, and share what they are learning.’

Make magazine and the first couple of Maker Faires sprung from the culture of the mid-2000s Bay Area, and a lot of the subsequent ‘maker’ movement has been shaped by an approach and ethos peculiar to its Californian origins.

I was interested to see how this Brighton-based event was inflected with something altogether more UK-specific — shared nostalgia for amateur radio and the BBC Micro; a greater emphasis on repair, craft and the textile arts; and a mode of user innovation bending and building on an already-established folkway of steam rallies, model railway hobbyism, and garden shed tinkering.

August 6, 2014 Justin Leave a comment

As some of you already know, as part of my PhD research at the STEPS Centre, I’m going to be heading out to Gujarat later in the year, to start a period of fieldwork on urban water supply infrastructure. At this stage, I’m planning on focusing on the activity of city engineers, plumbers and field technicians, and people making use of water storage and rainwater harvesting apparatus in their own homes and workplaces.

Building on research undertaken at Wageningen University in the Netherland, I’m framing my research as a technography; something that, at its simplest, can be described as ‘the ethnography of technology-in-use’ (Glover, 2011); looking less what people say (in interviews, focus groups, etc.) than what they actually do — their use of tools, technology and various forms of organisation to work (together?) and get things done.

As part of my research, I’m intending to use photography to create a record of the sequence of activities undertaken by the groups that I’m going to be studying, and with this in mind, have signed up for a documentary photography short course at the LCC in early September. This isn’t going to be conventional portrait or landscape photography, but nor is it story-driven photojournalism. It’s going to require a sensitivity towards those I’m working with, a certain agility and responsiveness, and an ability to filter what’s relevant from what isn’t.

As far as I can see, the only way I’m going to be able to develop this particular (and quite specific) set of skills is through first-hand experience, and I’m eager to get a sense of how this might work before I go. With this in mind, I’m looking for people based in the southeast of the UK or in London; whose work (or hobby) involves making, tool-use, or working with others to achieve specific ends; and who wouldn’t mind a slightly awkward researcher with a camera hanging out in their workspace for a day or half day in late August, or September.

If anyone has any leads, however vague, or if you just want to get a bit more information about what I’m up to, send me an email at <justin(dot)pickard(at)gmail(dot)com>.

June 20, 2014 Justin Leave a comment

The Túnel coach has been further delayed. Ducking into the public bus shelter in the hope of evading the all-permeating liquid mist, you jostle for space with a Swiss pensioner in a dated wearable, two identikit businessmen, a gaggle of furtive students, and a young African woman talking excitedly in heavily-accented Portuguese. Sliding through the headlines, the world sluices in through the periphery of your consciousness — smouldering conifers, rolling brownouts, dead songbirds.

The coach rolls up just as you consider cutting your losses and hailing a car. An exhalation of pressure as it lowers to let the Túnel party faithful on board. The pensioner shoots you a look of unconcealed loathing as you touch your ring to the reader. The light blinks green, and you shuffle to the back of the vehicle. Bags thrown into the overhead rack; arms and legs contorted as you wedge your body into a window seat. A city glimpsed through fogged glass, then a border crossing. The coach grinds to a standstill. Chicken wire mesh fences and floodlights; machine guns; sniffer dogs; berets and Kevlar and heads-up displays. Documents are checked, identities confirmed, and the coach pulls back out into the gloom.

Eventually: ‘TÚNEL.’ The cooperative’s name and logo are the only lights in the fog, the obnoxious, backlit san serif a lighthouse guiding them in to land, each letter the size of a small van stood on its nose. You still aren’t quite clear on what it was that attracted the Mexicans to the former CERN complex in the first place. Perhaps an echo of the aura and prestige of ‘big science’ had lingered, even as the desks, lunch tables, and server racks of yesterday’s scientists and graduate students were consigned to a phalanx of rented skips. Perhaps the company founders were simply suckers for a vintage piece of mega-engineering, or got some perverse kick from filling the pipes and tunnels of what was once a glimmering cathedral of transnational scientific collaboration with a shoal of genefixed Latin American salmon. Allowing for a grim, thin-lipped smile, you lever the bag down from the overhead rack as the coach pulls to a stop, and prepare to disembark.

*

“Bonjour, monsieur. Sorry for keeping you waiting. What seems to be the issue?” Sonja scratches her nose with the iridescent gilt nail of the little finger on her left hand.

“Ah.” The caller looks up. “The house meter isn’t working. The bladder is in the socket, and the seal worked, but your system won’t recognise it.” Cow farts, subvocalized Sonja, mentally consigning the board of Helvetic Biogas to the eighth circle of hell.

She leaves it slightly too long, and the next line of the script flashes up on the prompter. REQUEST TAG CHECK.

“And the tag?” A rustle of papers and fabric, as the caller steps away from their screen. After a brief silence, she leans in: “It should be at the bottom.”

“The light is green. It’s on and broadcasting, and everything.”

“Right. Well, have you tried—”

“I’ve done everything the agent suggested.” He sounds as tired as she feels.

With an audible sigh, Sonja pulls up a map of the neighbourhood; enters some numbers into a cell in a spreadsheet; tucks an errant strand of hair back behind her ear as the route-planning algorithms do their thing. “Right. One of our field technicians is already in the area, monsieur. I’ve added you to her roster; she should be with you within the hour.”

Disconnecting the call, Sonja removes her earbuds, and, with a flick of her wrist, puts the camera to sleep. She glances down at the agency dashboard, a thin strip of translucent white across the bottom of her screen. She’s banked enough calls from earlier in the week to extend her mid-morning break by a good half-hour. Should be long enough to nip down to Denner and get some of the sundries Jay and their neighbours have added to the shared list.

‘Biofortified milk, dried cricket protein, sanitary towels, toilet paper, piracetam.’

Grabbing a coat, backpack, and umbrella, she takes the tiny, rickety lift down to the building lobby. Fliers for ayurvedic medicine, child-minders, distance learning tutors. A handwritten ad for firewood. Putting her bag down beside the letterboxes, she unzips it, reaches in, and pulls out a small shrink-wrapped parcel blazoned with translucent Chinese characters. Ripping through the thin plastic, she removes a protective face mask and pulls it over her head. It’s slightly too small, and the elastic cuts into her ears. Pulling on her rucksack, she eyes the main door. ‘This handle,’ it reads, ‘is disinfected four times a day.’ Sonja isn’t convinced. Pushing the main door open with her elbow, she steps out into the biodiesel-tinged drizzle of Geneva in the spring.

In the skies to the west, against a slate grey backdrop of snowless mountain peaks, a mid-altitude platform cycles through ads for bacterial detergent, solar installation loans, and Catalan electric bikes. To the south-east, far beyond the swings and rusted roundabout of the neighbourhood park, cows in bulging backpacks shift and shuffle awkwardly on a far hillside. If she cranes her neck just right, Sonja can hear the distant hum of surveillance drones, circling overhead. Gritting her teeth beneath the mask, she pulls up the collar on her fleece, and flags down a passing car.

*

Written by Justin Pickard for Superflux, as scene-setting for their week-long HEAD MEDIA DESIGN workshop ‘FAILED STATES: Tactical Design for Uncertain Futures.’

December 30, 2013 Justin Leave a comment

2013 was a chain of islands in a rough and inky sea.

A gathering together of network-enabled weirdos: in a listed former town hall, an empty office block in Manchester, a Brighton coffee shop, a Dutch art gallery, on an East German fishing boat, at a synthetic biology conference at a London university.

A four-thousand word essay on the open hardware efforts of a Polish-American physics graduate. Twenty-thousand words of MSc thesis, written at speed. A preliminary PhD research proposal. A fast-talking, gin-fuelled podcast on science, technology and innovation. A blog post for The Guardian. A series of slightly-too-long talks on 3D printing, design futures, and philanthropy & appropriate technology.

A day lost in Harvard’s Arnold arboretum. A compendium of surreal Japanese ghost stories, translated by a Greek-Irish journalist a hundred year prior, read from the Kindle in an American burger restaurant as the Snowden saga unwound, in real-time, on satellite TV. A feather from a dead turkey found while walking in the New Hampshire woods.

Sensible questions asked of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider. A day spent pretending to be an African subsistence farmer. A day spent trying to convince people I wasn’t a Cylon.

A Sunday morning in Eno River State Park with a university friend, his wife, their dog, and my hangover. Terrible country music, North Carolina barbecue, and Bomberman on the Wii.

A lidar elephant. The bar-tailed godwit. Drones and solar panels and shipping containers and ramps and data-sniffing bins and Google Glass.

2×2 matrices, sketched out with masking tape on an auditorium wall. A tower of smartphones, stacked face-down. Golden rice.

Coffee with a sound artist, with an urbanist, with any number of self-consciously grumpy PhD students. Beer with my brother, my father, former lecturers, and friends. Wine on the roof of a seafront apartment block, after an academic conference, shared with friends on a train. Honest conversations about the future, about family, responsibility, and adulthood in an absence of ready-made scripts.

Private security on campus, and friends on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Skype lag, power outages, and the weight of national borders.

A desk of my own.

The eldritch peaks and troughs of a theremin in the old police cells beneath Brighton town hall, and again, later, layered over field recordings of Arctic wind in the museum’s ice age gallery. A moment of clarity in the middle of an otherwise utterly overwhelming homecoming gig. Mallorcan bagpipes at an ethnomusicology conference. The thrumming of a flatmate’s electric guitar.

Digital photos of Google Maps, postal addresses, and Twitter DMs. Brunch in a diner in Dalston, then a walk along Regent’s canal. A live reading of Jose Luis Borges in a library conference room for Día de Muertos. Birdwatching at Birling Gap.

A stuffed bluejay and a squirrel with an ear trumpet. A fictional court case. The drawing of a fly in the men’s urinals at Amsterdam-Schiphol airport, both in itself, as something real, and again, later, as an illustration of ‘nudge’ theory.

 The effervescent froth of Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, watched, with colleagues, in a North Carolina movie theatre. One hundred episodes of The Good Wife. The second season of Enlightened; the fourth season of Arrested Development. The second episode of the second series of Black Mirror. Borrowed graphic novels. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. Welcome to Night Vale. YouTube videos of someone else playing The Last Of Us. Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, read in a half-hearted attempt to ignore the turbulence on a night flight from North Carolina to London Heathrow, as the flight crew talked about David Bowie and danced in the aisle.

The reedy voice of David Willetts, UK Minister for Science and Universities. An incorrect bet on the outcome of the German elections. The ever-present ghost of climate change.

A crowdfunded adventure game about a non-existent Kentucky highway.

Misgivings, judgements, anxiety, stress and exhaustion. Grumpy emails sent and received. Procrastination. Insomnia. Failure to leave the house. Friends, new and old, who caught me as I fell.

28 American teenagers wandering, baffled, through a $1.2 million smart home. An Indian tourist visa. Christmas carols, e-cigarettes, and the internet-of-things. The sketchbook of a friendly Angeleno graffiti artist encountered at RDU.

Bitcoin sent to the wrong address, a dead mobile phone, and love for a standard issue Zimbabwe bush pump. An improvised Chinese hornet-killing flame thrower. The invisible, propositional contours of an anarchist innovation studies.

A photoshopped image of the author as Winston Churchill, pasted by an unknown student into a collaborative, live-authored spreadsheet. A pulvarised jet engine, spread upon the floor.

April 7, 2013 Justin Leave a comment

‘In contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually represented by “things”—by their most conspicuous artifactual embodiments: transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads; nuclear technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by computers, mobile telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purposes. Because most technologies in our corporate capitalist system have the legal status of private property, vital decisions about their use are made by the individual businessmen who own them or by the corporate managers and government officials who exercise the virtual rights of ownership. The complexity and obscurity of the legal relations governing the use of our technologies, abetted by the reification that assigns them to the realm of things—all of these help to create the aura of “phantom objectivity” that envelops them.’

– Leo Marx, ‘Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept’ (2010)

March 30, 2013 Justin Leave a comment

This has been rattling around my head for a good couple of weeks now. Significant.