Making speculative technologies

Like most of us, I oscillate between reading and making. Often the objects I make can be seen as diagrams of ideas, of manifestations of the relationships between one notion and another. In a similar way I don’t read texts properly – in truth I am not sure I know how to – instead the texts are like images, like scraps of colour and texture. I carry them with me, take them out, rearrange them, reconsider them. Most snippets of texts are with me for years, worn and known. Recited quietly like curses, changing meaning over time, coming into focus and disappearing back into incomprehension again. Over the years my work has emerged around the notion of making machines. They are machines for thinking, living, or expression, and sometimes for making sense with. In the beginning these were all functional machines, they would sense things and react, they would make sounds or be other kinds of performative objects. But now they seem to be more and more abstract, often haphazard or even hypothetical. I make them as a way of arriving at an understanding, as if I can only process something if I re-make it myself first. When asked to write this chapter, I was thrown back into consideration of how I interact with words and things. How I collect and abuse them, assign them power as curses and shields. I taught myself to write academically, I needed to know how to do that. Now, when asked to write subjectively, I find that I write like a child. Bear with me, in the following, texts and quotes weave in and out as pieces of inspiration, illustration and reference.