Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research

TRANSMISSIONS

TRANSMISSIONS

CRITICAL TACTICS FOR MAKING AND

COMMUNICATING RESEARCH

EDITED BY

Kat Jungnickel

THE MIT PRESS --- CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS --- LONDON, ENGLAND

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Arnhem Pro by The MIT Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jungnickel, Katrina, editor.

Title: Transmissions : critical tactics for making and communicating research / edited by Kat Jungnickel.

Other titles: Transmissions (M.I.T. Press)

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009762 | ISBN 9780262043403 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Communication in the social sciences. | Social sciences—Research—Methodology—Case studies.

Classification: LCC H61.8 .T73 2020 | DDC 001.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009762

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

1: INTRODUCING

CRITICAL DISCOMFORT

2: POETRY AND WRITING

3: MACHINES FOR ENQUIRING

4: MAKING AND WEARING

PUBLIC MAKING

5: EXCHANGING

6: PLAYING

7: LIVING WITH

HOLDING AMBIGUITY

8: SLOWING

9: PERFORMING AND PROVOKING

10: WRITING OUT OF TURN

EVOKING THE SENSORY

11: LISTENING

12: CATALOGING

13: RESPONDING

INDEX

List of figures

Chapter 3

FIGURE 3.1 TECHNICAL DRAWING OF ENQUIRY MACHINE 1: INTERVIEW MACHINE. IMAGE BY …

FIGURE 3.2 MAKING EM1 IN AN INNER-CITY OFFICE BACKYARD, CENTRAL LONDON (2010). …

FIGURE 3.3 PERFORMING EM1 ON HACKNEY STREET, EAST LONDON (2011). PHOTO BY THE A…

FIGURE 3.4 EM1 PASSING THROUGH A EUROTUNNEL LUGGAGE SCAN. PHOTO BY THE AUTHORS

FIGURE 3.5 ONTOLOGICAL DISRUPTIONS. IMAGE BY THE AUTHORS

Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.1 SEWING PATTERN GUIDE FOR OUR VERSION OF BYGRAVE’S 1895 INGENIOUS CON…

FIGURE 4.2 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM BYGRAVE’S 1895 GB PATENT 17,145 "IMPROVEMENTS IN …

FIGURE 4.3 USING THE BODY TO MAKE SENSE OF 1890S CONVERTIBLE CYCLING COSTUMES. …

FIGURE 4.4 MULTIPLE STILL IMAGES TAKEN WITH A CEILING CAMERA BECAME TIME-LAPSE …

FIGURE 4.5 ALICE ANGUS EXPLORES AND INTERPRETS THE RESEARCH IN HER ARTWORK. PHO…

FIGURE 4.6 TALKING AND DEMONSTRATING THE RESEARCH AT LONDON’S SCIENCE MUSEUM. P…

Chapter 5

FIGURE 5.1 EXAMPLE OF TWO ITEMS EXCHANGED DURING SALT-WINNING: EQUAL TO OR GREA…

Chapter 6

FIGURE 6.1 CHILDREN IN THE CLASSROOM CODESIGN THE DIMENSION OF WHAT IS SOCIAL P…

FIGURE 6.2 SOCIAL PLAY PROJECT. IMAGE BY THE AUTHORS

FIGURE 6.3 A PARTICIPANT ATTEMPTS TO PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF GAME AND GALLERY LI…

FIGURE 6.4 CCP GALLERY INSTALLATION: MINECRAFT MEETS LEGO (LEFT) AND IMAGES FRO…

FIGURE 6.5 PARTICIPANTS AT MPAVILION DESIGN THEIR DIGITAL ADAPTATION FOR THE UR…

FIGURE 6.6 THE PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF PLAY AT MPAVILION. PHOTO BY THE AUTHORS

Chapter 7

FIGURE 7.1 GUIDE FOR PLASTIGLOMERATE PICKING. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAELA GREEN

FIGURE 7.2 MANUAL FOR COMPOSTING PLASTICS. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAELA GREEN

FIGURE 7.3 PLASTIGLOMERATE WALK IN ICELAND. PHOTO BY THE AUTHORS

FIGURE 7.4 COMMON MEALWORMS AND STYROFOAM PUT TOGETHER IN A SPROUTING JAR FOR T…

FIGURE 7.5 PARTICIPANTS’ COMPOSITIONS MADE FROM BEACH FINDINGS. PHOTO BY THE AU…

FIGURE 7.6 FIRE SET ABOVE GROUND, ENDING A PLASTIGLOMERATE WALK. PHOTO BY THE A…

Chapter 8

FIGURE 8.1 POLLEN IN THE MAKING I. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR

FIGURE 8.2 MORE-THAN-HUMAN ASSEMBLAGES IN POLLINISING ZARAGOZA. GROUP WORK AT E…

FIGURE 8.3 GROUP WORK AT ETOPIA.

FIGURE 8.4 POLLEN IN THE MAKING II. GROUP WORK AT ETOPIA.

Chapter 9

FIGURE 9.1 OPENING CEREMONY, APT8 AT QAGOMA, AUSTRALIA. PHOTO BY M. SHERWOOD

FIGURE 9.2 SAVAGE K’LUB, WHAKAWETATEARA (CLEARING THE WAY), APT8 THE QAGOMA, AU…

FIGURE 9.3 SAVAGE K’LUB INSTALLATION, APT8 AT THE QAGOMA, AUSTRALIA. PHOTO BY N…

FIGURE 9.4 ENTRANCE TO SAVAGE K’LUB, WHAKAWETATEARA (CLEARING THE WAY), APT8 AT…

FIGURE 9.5 OPENING WEEKEND, SAVAGE K’LUB INSTALLATION, APT8 AT THE QAGOMA, AUST…

FIGURE 9.6 PLAY WITH YOUR BIRDS, 2015. SITE-SPECIFIC BUILT ENVIRONMENT, PAPER T…

Chapter 12

FIGURE 12.1 A CABINET OF CURIOSITY: THE LIBRARY’S DEAD TIME, BY J. POLLACK AND …

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection directly emerged from a series of conferences and networking events under the banner Transmissions and Entanglements. The project was initially supported by an Economic and Social Research Council Knowledge Exchange grant with support from Intel Corporation (ES/K008048/1). This funding provided the valuable opportunity to gather a diverse group of people who practice social research in wild and wonderful ways.

The overall aim was to explore emerging and experimental research transmissions in and outside the academy. I knew of many individuals using hands-on, materially oriented, theoretically informed critical and creative approaches in their work. Yet, I felt at the time there were few opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion or debate about these practices. Over a period of three years, I organized a series of events, and a network developed of regular attendees experimenting with materials, sites, and technologies in their research. They included curators, artists, filmmakers, photographers, craftivists, designers, technology industry researchers, anthropologists, computer scientists, and sociologists as well as urban studies, media, and communications, textiles, and medieval study scholars. There were students, professors, early and mid-career researchers, consultants, and individuals running their own businesses. And they came from Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Illinois, Lancaster, London, Oxford, Malmö, Madrid, Melbourne, New York, Oregon, Toronto, and Vienna.

Four Transmission events have been held (so far) at Goldsmiths and central London locations, the Digital Cultures Research Lab, Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, and Intel Science and Technology Center at the University of California, Irvine. Some were two days long. Others involved week-long series of curated events, with film screenings and panels, performances and sewing workshops, bike rides, exhibitions, large public talks and smaller invited symposiums and object-oriented Show and Tell sessions. Participants read poems, shared images, talked and debated, performed their ideas, displayed objects, and made things. Some even took up the challenge of experimenting with new transmission practices during the events. Overall, the network offered time and space to discuss practices and collectively build on shared ways of working. Together, we began to forge a shared critical body of knowledge about the possibilities and consequences of different research transmissions. It was invaluable for me in developing confidence about my own practice and in learning ways to articulate what I felt I had been doing for years. I heard similar feedback from others. As a result, my thanks go not only to the authors who invested their time and research in this book, but also to the many inspiring people who attended and supported the events and who in conversations over the last few years have deeply informed the work that follows. I also wish to thank Katie Helke and Virginia Crossman at MIT Press and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, as well as Rebecca Coleman, Julien McHardy, and Michael Guggenheim for their encouragement and readings of draft texts.

I also extend my thanks to my teaching colleagues and students at Goldsmiths. Like many research practices, mine is crafted through reading, talking, and doing, and reading, talking, and doing some more. I have been fortunate to convene a core masters class called Visual and Inventive Practice at Goldsmiths for several years.¹ Each term, students bring their research to life in different dynamic forms. Over a ten-week period, they reflexively and experimentally produce a body of critical and creative work that responds to a social problem. They exercise their sociological imagination—an idea coined by C. W. Mills in 1959 that links small and intimate experiences with larger social and political issues—and in the process they push themselves and their practice into new places.

Several aspects of this course have enriched ideas in this book. First, how much can be learned from exposure to others. The diversity of work generated in the course is matched only by the life experience, skills, and interests of the international cohort. Some with theoretical training bring a desire to experiment with practice, while others want to combine existing practice with theory. While this gives everyone the wobbles for a few weeks, it is always rewarding. Learning to make and communicate a wide range of ideas to a wide range of people is an immensely valuable critical skill.

Second, the course untethers students from a single instrument or form. They explore and engage social worlds with and through different media. They put ideas into practice and try out tactics for making and communicating research differently—with food, video, installation, performance, clothes, visualizations, different sites and platforms, human and nonhuman bodies, found objects, and more. With limited time and budget, they have to be inventive and resourceful. Improvisation is key. Along the way they develop verbal, visual, and sensory vocabularies to articulate their practice. Critically, this isn't just about the use of visual and inventive methods or only about new ways of communicating findings. Here, the what (of their research) and the how (they bring it into the world and share it with others) are intimately connected.

Third, and linked to this, is how students are encouraged to keep their thinkings and doings in the research. We ask them to value their work in progress; to reveal their workings; to render visible their meaning making. This requires careful attentiveness to the specificities of practice and more than a bit of courage: what decisions were made, what happened, what worked and didn't, what spectacularly failed, and what surprised them. And what they get out of doing this is a deeper understanding of the up, down, and sideways nature of research. Appreciating and sharing the inner mechanisms in this way produces nuanced, layered arguments and different entry points, which in turn invites viewers closer to the work and makes it all the more compelling.

What is pivotal in this course, in my own trajectory, and what I think emerges most strongly in this book is a shared drive to do meaningful creative and critical social research through the means and modes most appropriate, sometimes irrespective of disciplinary frameworks and normative edges. Engaging in this kind of practice sparks the imagination. It can generate new spaces to think, explore, and experiment, giving rise to unexpected connections and ideas, as well as engagement with different publics. It can also be a lot of hard work: physically, emotionally, and politically trying. This book directs much-needed critical attention to some of these research happenings in practice. I've greatly appreciated the chance to learn from others and try out new things in the process, and I hope readers will be similarly inspired.

NOTE

1 This core module in MA Visual Sociology is team taught with Nina Wakeford, Michael Guggenheim, Rebecca Coleman, Britt Hatzius, Ali Eisa, and Alan Stanley.

CONTRIBUTORS

nerea calvillo

is an architect, researcher, and assistant professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick). The work produced at her office, C+ arquitectos, and her environmental visualization projects, like In the Air, have been presented, exhibited, and published at international venues. She works at the intersection between architecture, feminist technoscience, and environmental studies, and her current research is on toxic politics, pollen, atmospheres, and queer urban political ecologies.

rebecca coleman

is a reader in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, where, with Kat Jungnickel, she is codirector of the Methods Lab. She teaches and researches on sensory sociology, the body, temporality, inventive methodologies, and feminist and cultural theory. She is currently working on a project on digital media presents funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Recent publications include a special issue of Sociological Review on Futures in Question (2017, coedited with Richard Tutton) and a special issue of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture on Feminist New Materialist Practice (2019, coedited with Tara Page and Helen Palmer).

larissa hjorth

is a Distinguished Professor, socially engaged artist, and digital ethnographer in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. Hjorth has two decades of experience working in interdisciplinary, collaborative, playful, and socially innovative digital media methods to explore intergenerational relationships in cross-cultural contexts. She has explored the sociocultural dimensions of mobile media in many contexts, such as Japan, South Korea, China, and Australia. Hjorth has published over 100 publications on the topic—recent publications include Haunting Hands (2017, coauthored with Cumiskey), Understanding Social Media (2019, coauthored with Hinton), Creative Practice Ethnographies (2020, coauthored with Harris, Jungnickel, and Coombs), and Ambient Play (forthcoming from the MIT Press, coauthored with Richardson).

janis jefferies

(http://research.gold.ac.uk/view/goldsmiths/Jefferies) is emeritus professor of visual arts, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an artist, writer, and curator, and research fellow at the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles. She has edited numerous books and chapter contributions on textiles, technology, performance, and practice research, and was one of the founding editors of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. With Professor Barbara Layne she is consultant on the Enchantment of Textile research project. Their work is supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the Milieux Institute at Concordia University.

kat jungnickel

(www.katjungnickel.com) is a senior lecturer in sociology and codirector of the Methods Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores mobilities, gender, technology cultures, DIY/making practices, and visual and inventive methods. She is expanding her sociological sewing practice in a European Research Council–funded project Politics of Patents (2019–2024), which examines citizenship via two hundred years of global clothing inventions. Recent publications include Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and their Extraordinary Cycle Wear (2018) and DiY WiFi: Re-Imagining Connectivity (2014).

sarah kember

is professor of new technologies of communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her latest publications include iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials (2016) and Why Write? Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication, New Formations (2014). Recent work includes Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (2012) and the novel The Optical Effects of Lightning (2011). Sarah coedits the journal Feminist Theory, is co-PI of an RCUK-funded project on digital publishing (CREATe), and director of Goldsmiths Press.

max liboiron

is an assistant professor in geography at Memorial University, where she directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). CLEAR develops anticolonial methodologies and instruments in the natural sciences. Liboiron has played leading roles in the establishment of the field of discard studies (the social study of waste and wasting), the Global Open Science Hardware movement, and is a figure in feminist science studies and justice-oriented citizen science.

kristina lindström

, is a designer and senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden. She works at the intersection of participatory design, speculative design, and feminist technoscience, with a focus on public engagement. Her long-term collaboration with Åsa Ståhl includes the artistic research project HYBRID MATTERs, where a combination of speculative and participatory approaches was used to engage with past, present, and future imaginaries related to plastics. Lindström and Ståhl also run the Un/Making Studio with the aim of exploring alternatives to progressivist and anthropocentric ways of thinking and making within design. Prior to her position at Malmö University she was a postdoctoral fellow at Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden. She holds a PhD in interaction design from Malmö University.

alexandra lippman

(www.alexandralippman.com) is a cultural anthropologist, sound ethnographer, and DJ who works on intellectual property, media technology, and sound. Her interest in multisensory ethnography, sound, and methodological experimentation led to her founding the Sound Ethnography Project (soundethnography.com) in 2010. She is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Pitzer College, California.

bonnie mak

is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, jointly appointed in Information Sciences, History, and Medieval Studies. Her first book, How the Page Matters (2011), examines the interface of the page as it is developed across time, geographies, and technologies.

julien mchardy

(www.julienmchardy.info) is a sociologist of technology, curator, designer, and publisher concerned with methods for working and thinking across different fields of expertise and experience. His work at the intersection of the arts, design, research, and publishing is collaborative, involving changing constellations of people and institutions. He cofounded the open access publisher Mattering Press and ScholarLed, a collective of academic-led open access presses.

julia pollack

is creative program manager at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois. She previously worked as a librarian for Bronx Community College in New York and as a user experience designer.

ingrid richardson

is a professor in the School of Digital Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. Her work explores social and cultural aspects of the human-technology relation, ranging from scientific and medical technovision, virtual and augmented reality, to interactive media, games, mobile media, urban screens, the internet, and web-based communication.

åsa ståhl

,

phd

in media and communication studies, is a senior lecturer in design at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. She is currently researching, with Kristina Lindström, the un/making of soil communities in the aftermath of previous industrial making. This study forms part of their ongoing research project Un/Making Matters: maintenance, repair, and composting. With a base in participatory and speculative design in combination with feminist technoscience, their work engages with publics in many ways throughout their research process, including exhibitions. The two have previously done a postdoc on hybrid matters in public engagement events as well as a joint, practice-led PhD across disciplinary boundaries on making in relation to collaborative coarticulations of emergent issues of living with mundane technologies.

laura watts

(www.sand14.com) is a writer, poet, ethnographer of futures, and senior lecturer in energy and society at University of Edinburgh. As a science and technology studies scholar, her research and writing is concerned with the effect of edge landscapes on how the future is imagined and made. For the past decade she has been working with people and places around energy futures in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Her latest book Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga is published by MIT Press.

1

INTRODUCING

Kat Jungnickel

HOW DO YOU MAKE AND COMMUNICATE YOUR RESEARCH?

What does your research sound like? Do you yell or whisper it? How does it feel to wear it, close to the skin? Can you meter its rhythm? What games does it call for? Do you perform it? How do different modes of making and communicating inform your practice, shape your stories, and engage your publics? These are some of the questions at the heart of this book.

This edited collection focuses on transmissions, understood as the tactical combination of making (how theory, methods and data give shape to research) and communicating (how we show, share, and entangle others in it). It is the research moment where invention meets dissemination. Thinking about the making and communicating of research together is to expand the usual focus on methods. Here, we explore theoretically underpinned and cutting-edge creative and arts-based practice with thought-provoking representational forms and flows of research. Our collective interdisciplinary curiosity is sparked by the critical relationship these combined components offer for doing research differently.

Focusing on transmissions in this way, we argue, draws attention to a critically important part of the research process commonly overlooked and undervalued. While new and exciting methods have been gaining traction, discussion and debate about the tactics of transmission have lagged behind. Far less attention has been given to how the dissemination of research delimits what kind of research can be done. Yet, transmission is a crucial element of the process, equally creative and innovative. Collectively, in the twelve chapters that follow, we closely consider critical tactics for making and communicating research, because we see transmissions as integral to the changing contemporary research landscape. Laura Watts articulately sums it up: If you want different stories, try different machines." ¹ This book not only critically questions the research machines we regularly use but is packed with different kinds of machines for making and communicating different kinds of stories.

Transmission is commonly defined as broadcasting, communication, diffusion, dissemination, relaying, sending out (Oxford 2016, 967). While partly useful, this definition implies a far too easy distinction between the making of a thing and its movement out into the world (in contrast, for example, with more participatory communication cultures, such as those on YouTube—see Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2016; Burgess and Green 2018). Some readers might see similarities to what have been termed outputs (especially in the current academic landscape, increasingly measured by publication). These often take the form, particularly in the social sciences, of journal articles, conference papers, and PowerPoint presentations.

The problem with outputs is that they tend to offset inputs, and as such, they separate the what from the how, temporally and materially. They suggest a linear process and end-point deliverable. The contributors in this book understand dissemination, or communication, of research as inseparable from its creation. To mark this close relationship,