Introduction to the contributions of the publication

Dear Anonymous Reader,

Digital technologies are now part of our daily lives. Digital maps, smart appliances, email, digital cars, websites, printers, and other black boxes. For many of us, these technologies have become so mundane that we hardly see them anymore. We just take them for granted. In this way, we simply accept their terms and conditions and ignore the effects and biases they entail. While digital technologies are specifically designed to fade into the background, there is a growing need to examine not only their technical but also for their cultural and social implications. What power structures, cultural circumstances, embodied knowledge, social conditions, colonialial histories, and capitalist logics are built into digital infrastructure?

With the invitation to “re-code everyday technology,” we invited 12 artists and researchers to rethink, redo, reinvent, reshape, respond, and reveal different aspects of the digital technologies that have become so commonplace in our society. Among the different perspectives included in the resulting publication are artistic, design-oriented, and scientific reflections or interventions. Our hope is to make you stop, think and reconsider – it is therefore not our goal to create a unified, seamless experience, but rather to make room for non-functional, bumpy, subversive, and sometimes ambiguous perspectives. What unites all the contributions is the shared understanding that technology, society, politics, and culture exist in complex interrelations and interdependencies

Extending beyond the scope of a classical glossary, this contribution deals with basic concepts in publishing and everyday technologies. It uses the format of the “glossary” as a starting point for the everyday transfer of knowledge.

Most of the technologies we interact with in our everyday lives are “black boxes.” The inability to peer into these technologies and the difficulty of understanding them frequently lead to calls to “open up the black boxes.” In his essay Do not open that trojan horse, Yifeng Wei examines this basic approach and asks whether keeping black boxes closed can be a strategy for marginalized groups.

Anyone who sends an email to info@mariosantamaria.net will always receive the same reply – that Mario is asleep. At a time when constant availability via email or Zoom is all but expected, when productivity is the new measure of success, when information is available 24/7 – Mario is happy to be asleep. This conceptual work Auto-Sleep by Mario Santamaría is just an email address with an automatic reply.

Navigation apps such as Google Maps promise frictionless navigation. The essay Mischief Managed discusses the underlying complexity, as well as the limitations, glitches, and disruptions that come with mapping technologies. Guilherme Maggessi shows that map apps are more than mere representations of physical space and how they are being used subversively in different communities.

Cars are such a common ordinary technology that they are now an integral part of society. Few technologies have such an impact on us, the city we live in, or our lifestyles. Almost unnoticed, cars have turned into computers. In his project Cars Driving Cars, Diego Trujillo Pisanty documents how the data from his car is collected and repurposed.

Jian Haake challenges designers' tools with a speculative modular synthesizer for generating print files. How do our digital tools operate, and who has the power to decide? In her contribution, she illustrates the potential inherent in playful and self-empowering tools.

Choreographing You is an interactive website that explores online tracking algorithms and their impact on our daily lives. Through a series of choreographed prompts, users are encouraged to reflect on their online behavior, with each click serving as a physical enactment of their digital actions.

How can obsolete technologies be made useful again and what stories are hidden in their pasts? By deconstructing the fax, Lars Hembacher and Paul Eßer explore it as a medium and a social phenomenon.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips can be found concealed in many devices: bank cards, smartphones, key cards... In his contribution Attaching as active practice, Benno Brucksch explores the relationship between digital information and physical objects. The essay highlights the power to shape human behavior and relationships with such technologies. A call to playfully explore technology and unlock its possibilities and implications.

With autobiographical playing cards Heartbreak cards, Naoto Hieda juxtaposes the fast world of social-media overload with a slow, personal response. An experimental website shows how the cards can be made and changed again and again.

HTML and CSS are among some of the basics when it comes to designing web pages. Nami Kim asks important questions about teaching students these basics. In a series of interviews with students, which appear as radically handmade websites, she asks questions about power relationships and self-empowerment in digital media.

Cutting the Cloud is an artistic research and hacking project that uses low-cost, battery-powered temperature sensors to explore the various social and societal implications of smart-home technology. A website designed as a diary documents the process of opening the devices, thereby disclosing the circumstances of their production.

This publication is an ongoing research project of the working group for unusual input and output media at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz and the NODE Forum for Digital Arts. In that spirit, we want you to see this publication as an invitation to respond to: unusualmedia@nodeforum.org

In early September of 1940, a special unit of six senior British military officers and researchers met at London Euston Station with a highly guarded secret. They were transporting a black metal box that was later brought to Liverpool and then handed over to the US. Inside was a cavity magnetron, the latest British military technology that promised to be the end of World War II. After the fall of France, the British government had became increasingly alarmed about a possible Nazi occupation. In such an event, the Nazis might seize any inventions that had not yet been produced due to the lack of adequate resources and unfavorable conditions in the UK and use them to immediately strengthen their military position. Hence, after early preparations by Henry Tizard, who was the main advocate of the mission, and with the approval of Prime Minister Churchill, who hoped to support the Alliance, the Tizard Mission was approved to further increase military technology cooperation among the Allies.

Years later, that little box inspired a metaphor used in cybernetics, a field concerned with control and feedback that emerged in the 1960s. To paraphrase the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, a black box is an apparatus that operates with visible inputs and outputs, but without revealing anything about the inner structure that makes such operations possible.^[1] Cybernetics has had a profound effect on today's technologies, especially artificial intelligence, in which the concept of the black box is especially evident. In contrast to its successful debut in the Tizard Mission, the black box is rather the subject of considerable criticism in relation to AI.

Media theorist Alexander Galloway defines two types of black boxes. The first type, the black box cypher, reminiscent of the black box in the Tizard Mission, is a cloaked node with no external connectivity. The second type, which Galloway calls the black box function, grants access, but only selectively and according to specific grammars of action and expression.^[2] The black box function is a better expression of our cybernetic digital age. It seems to be open in a sense, offering an inviting interface to interact with. This interaction, however, obscures the fact that what has been granted is only the functioning of the black box, not its decoding. It appears to reveal its inner structure but only leaves us with a more detailed, interactive, and yet impermeable surface. We modulate Photoshop using GUI (graphical user interface), and we operate Microsoft Windows using a keyboard and mouse. The more we seem to learn about their complex inner workings, the more we are restrained by the human-machine interaction.

The black box was invented to divert attention with an ordinary exterior, to obscure with limited inputs and outputs, and to encrypt secrets with overly complex inner structures. That is why, ever since the birth of the metal box, there have been calls to open it. Or perhaps much earlier, since the demand for transparency and the disdain for hidden agendas permeating life in every sector of society. We become frustrated when we lack the ability or the right tools to understand something built with our own knowledge, and we become even more worried when we realize that it may someday have the potential to be somehow out of our control. Opening the formidable black box seems to be the only choice left.

The urge to “open the black box” has peaked in recent years with the widespread use of AI. In Europe, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates the right to explanation. It states, “(the data subject should have) the right ... to obtain an explanation of the decision reached.”^[3] The reason why there is so much concern about AI functioning as a black box is that the complexity of a neural network will impede any attempt to investigate and correct the flaws from which ethical issues and false decisions might emerge. Despite its military origin and its strong connection to cybernetics and machine learning, the term “black box” is by no means technical jargon. It is no less important in disciplines such as philosophy. In “Opening Pandora's Black Box,” the introduction in his book Science in Action, Bruno Latour gives an example of how a scientific concept can be a kind of black box. Revisiting the story of the DNA helix, he suggests that this concept is so widely accepted as an axiom that it is the default for all biological research, and scientists will never attempt to open this socially constructed black box.^[4] Hence, once a black box is established and the critical voices recede, we lose interest in opening it.

Unfortunately, all attempts to open the black box, whether in machine learning or in deconstructing knowledge production, remain at best a noble wish. This is why the corresponding regulation in the GDPR has been the subject of so much debate, because the overly broad scope of so-called automated decisions could neutralize the right to explanation.^[5] Moreover, fully understanding a neural network is nearly impossible. In a similar vein, Langdon Winner argues in his essay “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty” that the effort to unpack technology and look inside the black box is superficial.^[6] Although such a reading seeks to think of technology as a social construction, this method, for instance, lose sight of marginalized groups who have no voice in technology and yet are profoundly affected by it. When Winner says that the black box is empty, he is warning us that understanding technology alone does yield sufficient social benefits. On the contrary, what we should do is reconstruct technology.

Following Winner, is there any other way to make use of the black box other than opening it as we instinctively would like to do? Can we reconstruct the black box? A timely reminder comes from Kavita Philip. In her so-called postcolonial computing, Philip offers several ways to contemplate current technology through a postcolonial lens. One of the tactics Philip proposes is to “investigate its (technoscientific object's) contingency not only locally but in the infrastructures, assemblages, and political economies that are the conditions of its possibility.”^[7] In other words, instead of taking technology and the culture surrounding it for granted, we should ask what milieu it comes from and what makes us accept it as natural.

Now, if we temporarily shift our attention from the black box to the call to open the black box, some questions arise. Who, or which social class, most strongly supports opening the black box? In which countries is this ethos most widely accepted? What is the social, cultural, and historical background? Is it merely a coincidence that opening the black box corresponds to surveillance capitalism’s drive for information totality?^[8] What if the discourse of opening the black box is based on Western and even imperialist values? Moreover, if we consider the impulse to open the black box to be the ideological expression of the dominant class that possesses the resources and technology, should we question the issue from the perspective of the weak? If we are going to be rebellious, how about considering alternative ways to use it, for instance, by keeping it closed?

In human history, there have been other metaphors for keeping secrets other than the black box. There has been Pandora's box and the Trojan Horse, both vessels of subversive and rebellious power. It is worth asking why Latour chose Pandora's box rather than the Trojan Horse as a metaphor to illustrate his reflections on the DNA helix. We haven't yet considered what we can encode into a black box and when the appropriate time to open it might be. What distinguishes the Trojan Horse from Pandora's box is the nature of the power within – the potential for evil that could destroy human civilization, or the resolve needed to overcome tyranny. While Pandora's box reminds us of the danger of opening a secret carelessly, the Trojan Horse is an example of the kind of secret one keeps until the right time. In her notorious essay “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power,” published in 1984 in Art After Modernism, Lucy Lippard associates the Trojan Horse with activist art. ^[9] In her account, activist art unpacks itself within the art institution, masquerading as an aesthetic object or event. For Lippard, the crucial point of the Trojan Horse metaphor is that art and aesthetic production, as well as the activist movement, originates outside of a community or institution and moves inside. It acts under the enemy's skin, right in front of those who need to be subverted. Hence, staying inside the black box is not the choice of a coward, but a tactical method – a way to challenge the existing regime.

Recently, the theft scandal at the British Museum was the perfect opportunity to revisit Nora Al-Badri's work “Babylonian Vision” (2020). For a long time, museum collections have been in the spotlight for their relationship to colonialism and imperialism. Often these cultural artifacts are relegated to glass cages in the name of preservation, and the fact that they were torn from their homeland and original contexts is not given sufficient attention. But in the meanwhile, calls for the return of these artifacts continue.^[10] Aside from the physical artifacts, another tough issue to resolve involves the copyrights of digitized materials and documents. To address the contentious ownership rights of digital cultural heritage, Nora trained a neural network on more than 10,000 images of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian, and Assyrian artifacts, which she acquired legally and illegally from five different museums. Though she asked for permission from these museums in advance, only two of them provided access to their open API.

The advantage of using deep learning is that, because AI functions like a black box, these newly generated deepfake artifact images are now unrecognizable from their original “parents.” Ironically, the black box in GAN (generative adversarial network) poses a challenge to institutions that serve as a continuity of imperialism and colonial exploitation. It is because of the black box in AI that those institutions can no longer claim their controversial ownership. Ownership thus leads to the current predicament whereby the ownership of one's own culture cannot be decided by one's own people, but by historically dominant countries and individuals. Nora's black box isn't meant to hide, or at least not entirely, but to open, to liberate one's culture from the prison of disciplined, institutionalized cultural institutions. In the same way that what we put in a black box can make it either into Pandora's box or a Trojan Horse, to cite Al-Badri's own words “what is at issue is the meaning that we give to data.”^[11] In this case, Robin Hood’s digital black box is more emancipatory than simply a problem of ethics.

Today, a black box can do more than simply conceal secrets. It is not limited to the class that controls the latest technology or that hoard the most cultural resources. On the contrary, it is a weapon, the Trojan Horse of the digital age, allowing the weak the chance to confound the powerful, to taunt them with an opaque joke until the day when the subversive power can finally be unleashed within. Just like the words inscribed on the Golden Snitch in Harry Potter, “I open at the close.” Before the dawn arrives, well, let's keep the black box closed.

info @ mariosantamaria.net

For many years I had a sleep disorder, going to bed after dawn and spending the middle of the day sleeping. Even as a child, I remember that from time to time I would go to school without sleeping, preferring to stay awake all night alone in my room. Over the years, this has led to a lot of professional problems, and I have had to look for excuses to justify my unavailability.

So, as an experiment, I decided to use autoreply to manage my emails, my anxiety about responding, and my guilt about not responding or responding too late. The business logic of these technologies has merged our lives and our professions, but for artists the practice of art has always been inseparable from the life of the artist. Why not play with that? I had already done other experiments that conflicted with machine temporalities. I had programmed my website hosting service to be available only 23 hours a day, without specifying at what hour or during what minutes the website would block all the IPs trying to communicate with the server. I like the idea of a temporality that includes failure and setback. In opposition to the idea of 24/7, I set out to create a 23/7 time that is just as rational but that contains its own contradiction.

It’s not something I’m aware of. I don't receive a copy of the email. It’s just sent out automatically. Sometimes I think about it when I’m writing to people who aren’t part of the art world, and I speculate about their reactions. Many people, when they receive my “sleeping” email for the first time, write back thinking there was a mistake. Others write to me just to say that they laughed when they read it and that they would also like to be sleeping, but they can't, they have to work. When some people who haven't written to me in a long time receive the message, they tell me that they missed it, as if it were already a gesture of their personality that refers to a personal treatment, like a tic or those little phrases we use when we speak. I do understand my autoreply as an example to be followed, but as an absurd distortion of the temporality of communication, which makes other options possible. I have also felt bad because I have the privilege to say that I am sleeping, even though often I am not. But sooner or later I do have to respond. It’s something that many people simply don't dare to say or can't. I am not aware of how this affects me. I justify it as part of my artistic practice, and I am aware that some people don't like it.

In the last year the project has appeared in some exhibitions, and I have received many emails from people I don't know writing to me to wish me “good night” or “sweet dreams.” I had never thought about this shift in the project. I find it wonderful to receive emails of this kind. Sometimes I respond with a selfie from bed and a “thank you” to prove that I was indeed still in bed and that a stranger can send me an inspirational message without it having to be a work proposal.

“The map never lies,” says Professor Remus Lupin to Harry Potter, after Harry informs him that the Marauder’s Map pointed to the presence of a known-to-be-dead wizard in the Hogwarts castle.^[1] The map in question, an invention of four adolescent wizard friends, allows its users to see anyone in the vicinity of the castle’s grounds in real time, as long as they promise to be “up to no good.” As a fan of the Harry Potter universe, its books, films, and fanfiction, I find the idea of the Marauder’s Map fascinating. There is something satisfying and subversive about this idea of a cartographic technology that can only be used as long as its users – in this case, a band of unruly students – commit to doing no productive good. It seems to me, however, that there is something flawed about the idea that a map made by teenagers could never make mistakes or lie.

As Ruben Pater states in The Politics of Design (2016), the “notion that maps provide an objective or scientific depiction of the world is a common myth.”^[2] In his critical examination of modern cartography, Pater ties its colonial origins to the difficult task of translating something spherical – like planet Earth – into a flat surface. A possible result is the “Mercator map,” which has been the standard map projection since it was drawn by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. The cartographer used “compass directions as straight lines” and depicted the world from a sixteenth-century Western European point of view. His drawing depicts the countries in the Northern Hemisphere as bigger than the ones in the Southern Hemisphere, thus demonstrating graphically the political and economic sovereignty of the West. Although many have pointed out that the Mercator map misrepresents the world, it is still used in geography classes, schoolbooks, and our phones – with apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps.^[3]

Like the technology of cartography itself, the use of maps has evolved far beyond its original nautical purposes. This development, however, does not guarantee that a map, as a technology for finding one’s position(s) and way(s) in the world, is foolproof. This is a realization that came to me from the palm of my hand and motivated me to write this essay. During my last holiday, some friends and I wanted to travel from a small town in Italy’s southern coast to a slightly bigger town, where we would take a train to another town. Google Maps showed us several routes. We chose one, turned on our GPSs and, as good users do, walked to the departure point and waited for the bus to arrive. But it never did. We wandered around and found what looked like a memory of a bus stop: a precarious, rusting steel structure with broken glass, covered with band stickers and posters from the recent past. Puzzled, we rummaged through the website of the Italian Railway and managed to find out where the bus actually departs from. One hour later, we took it. Actually we should have noticed from the start that something was wrong. The route of the bus, as visualized by the app, was the main giveaway. The red line traveled over the ocean and crossed multiple roads before somehow arriving at its destination. It was nonsense, and yet Google Maps, with its supposedly seamless, all-knowing interface, clouded our judgment. This made me think about how the app’s database works much like my memory, with its average human unreliability at remembering information and its ineffectiveness at retaining it. Maps, especially ones like Google Maps, are dressed in the digital gloss of seamlessness and are good at making us believe that what they tell us is true, while many times it is not. What I would like to think through in this text is how such moments of informational glitch in Google Maps – a technology that is allegedly always up to date – may help us critically investigate our relationships to these way-making technologies, while at the same time inspiring the creation of alternative maps.

I use Google Maps almost every day, primarily to estimate how much time it will take me to go from place A to place B. Having lived in Vienna for over four years now, I would say that I know my way around. Nevertheless, I continue using Google Maps as a means of self-assurance. While most of the time I do not follow Google Maps’ directions, it does gives me extra confidence that if I happen to lose my way, I know it will guide me back because generally it is right. It is easier to make mistakes if you know the correct answer isn’t far away. Often, when I happen to veer off the recommended path, I come across something new – a park, a shop, a place to eat. In such situations, I navigate public space by simultaneously forgetting and keeping Google Maps in mind. This allows me to pin things that are of interest and/or important: where I work, where my friends live, where most of my social interactions take place. Using Google Maps is not just about finding my way around but also about keeping track of my way(s) in the world. While I could tackle this subject from the point of view of privacy and the ways in which Google Maps learns from my habits, I would rather examine the moments when it fails to meet my expectations.^[4]

While technology renders itself invisible through its smoothness, glitches and failures serve as reminders of its presence. It is in the moments that Google Maps does not work that I notice it. As Sara Ahmed suggests, “[w]hen something stops working or cannot be used, it intrudes into consciousness.”^[5] There is a lot to be learned about tools by examining how they are used. In her book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Ahmed traces the process by which the word “use” acquired its symbolic status and how it is used in language. She wants to understand how “use” gives form to things, bodies, and spaces, and how “use” can change depending on where and when something or someone is “put to use.” Ahmed’s vast project tackles the term “use” through various analytical lenses from literature, philosophy, biology, gender studies, and institutional critique. These multiple threads are brought together by the idea of “queer use,” which has informed the way I think about the projects discussed below.

The combination of the words “queer” and “use” might suggest that there is also something we can call “straight use” that represents the intended functionality of the object. Designers, myself included, usually design things with their “straight use” in mind. When I design a poster for an event, I want to convey information in such a way that as many people as possible are interested enough to show up. What I do not think about when I design a poster is how it will be used to decorate the venue of the event, how it will hang in people’s homes like a painting, or how it will eventually be used as Christmas wrapping paper.^[6] While some things are shaped by how they are used, use itself is shaped by what can be done with those things, both materially and technologically. To use something in a queer way means using it “for purposes other than … intended.”^[7] “Queer use” highlights the individual qualities of things, “rendering them all the more lively.”^[8] To make use of something in a queer way means unleashing the potential of a thing by paying attention to what else it can do. While I myself, as a queer person, would like to read “queer use” in a strictly positive way, it must also be pointed out that uses can also be discriminatory, such as using the collaborative features of Google’s Local Guides platform, which allows users to change the names of buildings as a way to keep local information up to date, to incite racism.^[9]

On account of the Google Maps’ failure during my holiday and Ahmed’s description of “queer use,” I started looking differently at way-finding and way-making technologies. The ghostly bus stop may have a remnant of some path that was once useful to someone else. The fact that an “out of use” bus stop appears on a map is a glitch. This glitch is a witness to the map’s memory. This bus stop is a memory, although maps are not supposed to have memories. It is a leftover, the removal of which has been delayed. In an attempt to gather such leftovers, spaces that were once “put to use,” even if only for a fleeting moment, designer Luca LaRochelle created Queering the Map, a platform that engages with the question of what "futures might emerge from this kind of embodied knowledge.”^[10] This “community-generated, counter-mapping project" allows its users to record their experiences as text and place them in the physical space of a map, therefore exploring the tension between physical reality and affective memory.^[11]

As a frequent visitor to the website since its first iteration in 2017, I have been surprised by its current size: the pink world map, sourced from Google’s API, is flooded with black pins representing individual contributions to the platform. While reflecting on the platform’s development, LaRochelle has pointed to the difference between understanding Queering the Map as a map of queer stories (which it is) and as a map that is “queer."^[12] While the former points to the platform’s content, the latter grasps its form. To design a map that is queer or a map that is meant for “queer use” can point to two different desires. One aligns with Ahmed’s concept of “queer use,” meaning a map that is used in a way other than how it was intended, while the other points to its intended usership. In the case of Queering the Map, this distinction is irrelevant since the platform performs both.^[13] It is a digital map that creates a space for a worldwide community of queers that is outside of “algorithmic control” and the “endless north/south (straight) scroll,”^[14] thereby using of a map not to find one’s way, but to lose one’s way.^[15]

Queering the Map conceived of a map that is queer because it helps its users lose rather than find their way. The publication Queeraspora Collective Mapping is as much about collecting single points to be found or lost as it is about the lines that can be drawn between them. The publication, which stems from a collaboration between Queeraspora,^[16] Queer narratives, mapped,^[17] and city/data/explosion,^[18] is “the self-documentation of the daily lives of its contributors and their personal geographies as queer (post-)migrants, refugees, BIPoCs in the city of Bremen.”^[19] Slightly bigger than a horizontal DIN A4, the book is held together by only two Chicago screws, suggesting that this project is a work in progress.

The publication contains the “self-documentation” and “personal geographies” of its contributors, not in the form of traditional maps, but as hand-drawn lines that are printed on transparent paper. These colorful lines form crisscrossing paths; sometimes they form shapes akin to a city map or to a scene in a comic book. Some lines are straight and sharp, while others are made up of smaller lines or dots. Similar to LaRochelle’s Queering the Map, these personal maps do not designate specific spaces, streets, or buildings, but instead document individual queer and diasporic experiences and relationships to the city. While some of these maps are concerned with city spaces, for instance bus stops, squats, and public buildings where queer demonstrations or Queeraspora meetings have taken place, others are memory and narrative driven, drawing lines through time, not space. They recall moments of joy and/or struggle upon arriving to a new city, excitement about new opportunities, frustration about being misunderstood, and curiosity upon discovering a queer BIPoC scene where they feel welcomed. What is generative about the publication is that its design allows contributors and readers to place individual maps onto the collective stack of queer diasporic memories in order to discover overlapping moments. In the very way in which the publication is bound, the maps not only represent individual experiences, but also reveal affinities and differences within this community. The publication features inlays with pixelated images of meetings and happenings by and for Bremen’s queer diaspora community. It is only on the last page of the publication that we find a satellite image of the city of Bremen, which situates these “personal geographies” in space.

Projects like Queering the Map and Queeraspora Collective Mapping are able to create room for experiences and memories that are at once polyphonic and singular, harmonious and dissonant. These projects make “all the more lively”^[20] the potential of mapping tools to serve as archives of human memory and experience.

Going back to Google Maps, the Mercator projection, and Ruben Pater’s discussion in The Politics of Design, it would be interesting to ask a different design question: What if the problem of and about maps is not necessarily about form but rather about practice? If the function of a map is to help find one’s way, from whose perspective do “we”^[21] look at public space? In the spirit of Queeraspora Collective Mapping, and in light of current technological possibilities, especially platforms like Google Maps, we may ask: How many maps fit into one

As I come to the end of this text, I notice how I have prioritized the information that maps give me over what takes place in public space. I often forget that streets, parks, and buildings are memories in and of themselves, holding traces within the pavement, walls, and ground. In Vienna, the city I reside in, the city's administrators are quite preoccupied with preserving monuments, buildings, and other urban infrastructure. There is also a community of researchers, artists, and architects, who reflect critically on the urban landscape and its ties to Austria’s fascist and colonial past(s).^[22] One such individual is Andreas Brunner, a co-founder of QWIEN – Zentrum für queere Geschichte Wien, who offers regular queer walking tours (Queere Stadtspaziergänge).^[23] QWIEN offers tours about the her*histories of queer people in Vienna as a way to communicate to residents and tourists alike the heavily researched and theory-based work that they do as an archive, a library, and a research institution. By making these her*histories visible and accessible, Brunner anchors them in the city’s history and, like Queering the Map and Queeraspora Collective Mappings, makes well-traveled paths and queered spaces from the past accessible again to younger generations who might still feel lost in Vienna’s straight ways. One focal point of these tours is the persecution of queer people during the Austrofascist period.^[24] Oftentimes, reflecting on these stories of persecution is a difficult but necessary task. There were few records of queer people at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, and many of them come from criminal files and police reports.^[25] By reading these documents in ways other than intended, researchers are able to piece together traces of queer existence. By using the format of the guided tour to disseminate this information, Brunner makes “queer use” of it, not only by providing information about the places and people, but also by reconstructing and reactivating relationships that History^[26] was unwilling or unable to sustain.

In this text, I wanted to take the first step toward exploring how designers, technologists, researchers, and activists make use of tools and technologies for “way-finding and making” that can be considered queer. Here “queer” means, as Sara Ahmed suggests, making use of something in ways other than it was intended and using something with a queer user or audience in mind. In compiling this collection of projects and practices, I wanted to identify a number of projects that use mapping technologies in different media and that are engaged in grassroots practices of activating public space with and for queer people. The tools with which we, queer designers and technologists, map our world, our relationships, and our lives in public and private spaces will only be adequate to those for whom and by whom they were created. This essay is an attempt to encourage reflection on practices that address public space in both its real and virtual manifestations through the lenses of memory, affect, and embodied knowledge.

Until we see each other again, “Mischief managed!”^[27]

A machine that combusts liquefied biological remains to deliver torque and speed to the human body beyond its natural capabilities should not be considered normal. Yet, the motorized vehicle is one of the most common objects in the world today. It is almost impossible to go an entire day without encountering a car of some kind. They are so commonplace that we barely notice them anymore. We’ve learned to ignore their presence and even filter out the noise from their engines. Yet they have had a massive impact on our society, from literally shaping our cities to enabling same-day delivery. Perhaps it is the ubiquity of the car that hides all its strangeness in plain sight.

The integration of microcontrollers and processors into vehicles has endowed them with decision-making capabilities. The engine has become a computing device driven by data from various sensors. The pedals have been turned into human interface devices that can be controlled beyond their mechanical functions. In the project Cars driving cars, vehicles are abstracted into a minimal ontology based on the data that is extracted from their onboard computers. In this way, the car is reduced to the distance it has traveled, the time that the engine has been running, its speed, and the position of the accelerator pedal. This project consists of a series of experiments that explore how car data can be used to drive generative graphics and electronic devices.

Most recent cars have an on-board diagnostics (OBD) port that allows data to be read from the car’s computer using standardized serial commands. The main purpose of the OBD is to use a scanner to determine the source of a failure. However, there are also low-cost USB and Bluetooth interfaces that can provide access to real-time data while driving. In this project, one of these scanners is connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero computer. It runs a script that sends data (rpm, trip duration, distance, speed, and accelerator pedal position) every second while the car is being driven. Internet access is provided by a mobile hotspot.

Data extraction is a process of defamiliarizing. It involves separating meaningful information from the noise and chaos of the tangible world in order to see it with fresh eyes. The mere act of measuring converts reality into a caricature that begs to be visualized. Cars driving cars assumes that form must follow data, and thus creates images of cars with simple geometry that has been parametrically defined by the information gathered while driving. The resulting childlike illustrations prompt reflection on everyday car use and the time spent in traffic. These graphics are created by a computer program every time the car is turned off. The program processes the data it receives and uses it in the following manner:

• Duration determines the height of the drawing.
• Distance determines the width of the middle section.
• Top speed determines the vertical angle.
• And the percentage of time that the car was stationary modifies the color of the drawing (where red is a car that was turned on but never moved).

It can be difficult to interpret a single image because the trip data and resulting shape are greatly simplified. However, when viewed as a collection, it becomes possible to identify driving habits, recurring trips, and even the driving conditions in the city. The car thus ceases to be a functional object and becomes a reflection of routines ranging from labor to social life and leisure.

The desire to compare how the graphics change over consecutive trips inspired the create of an interactive visualization. By interpolating the shape and color of each car with the next one, the subtle differences between the trips becomes visible, especially when one of the trips is interrupted by a stop in between. This browser-based application can be seen at: http://cars.trujillodiego.com

The accelerator pedal in a car can be thought of as one of the most popular and powerful interfaces in the world. Buses, ambulances, couriers, and even warfare are moved by a foot on a pedal. But by treating the pedal as a computational interface and transmitting its position, it can also drive electronic objects, including other (toy) cars.

The data being sent by the car can be received by a microcontroller in almost real time. An ESP32 development board connected via Wi-Fi converts the position of the real car’s accelerator pedal into pulse-width modulated (PWM) electrical signals. These can replace the controllers on an electrical toy racetrack. The throttle of the real car thus controls the speed of the toy car, allowing both cars to be driven at once. For a race, two separate vehicles can be connected to a transmitter, allowing those overwhelmed by work and responsibilities to automate their playtime and play as they commute.

The experiments presented here were only possible by thinking of the motor vehicle as a computational object, freeing it from its historical mechanical identity. Imagining the car in this way opens it up to the malleability characteristic of digital systems. The car as software allows it to be re-coded as an interface that represents more than just motion and encourages reflection on how driving fits into personal, social, and urban routines.

For the project's full code and how-to instructions visit https://github.com/dtpisanty/carsDrivingCars.

Modular Matter is a tool that has been developed to playfully rethink and reimagine print design using modular synthesis. It is addressed to graphic designers and other creatives who are used to working with traditional desktop publishing software and other proprietary tools. The tool’s experimental and modular approach can help to challenge long-established ways of working and provide new impulses for graphic designers and creatives alike. By critically reflecting on the context and practice associated with the tool, Modular Matter invites users to think with the tool and hopefully find some inspiration and encouragement for their own future projects.
Modular Matter was developed in the context of graphic design and printing and was heavily influenced by critical observations about the fields’ conditions, mechanisms, and sociotechnical habits.

How proprietary tools shape graphic design ​

Looking at the field of graphic design, it is hard to deny that certain hardware and software are used universally. Graphic designers in large companies, creative studios, institutions, and the academy all use the same commercial toolkits that are now considered the industry standard. Owned by very a few, large companies that answer only to shareholders, these products set the norms. Rather than providing a wide variety of options and niche products, the large corporate players set standards for infrastructure, protocols, interfaces, and design options.
Everyone knows how to use these tools, but no one understands how they operate. This dependency causes a lack of agency that is not questioned enough in the creative field. Instead, many creatives prefer to feel confident in their practice, switching nonchalantly from one application to the next, comforted by the fact that they know how to navigate these familiar environments. Although many graphic designers feel very much at home in these proprietary toolkits, they tend to underestimate the implicit effects that the economic conditions and ethical issues have on their creative independence and practice as a whole.
The lack of diversity in tools not only produces a common aesthetic, often resulting in “sleek” and homogeneous visual output, but it also has an influence on the perception, experience, and imagination of creatives. The tool determines what is considered possible, and the tool’s limitations likewise define the boundaries of what can be imagined.
With these conditions and implications in mind, the need for a more independent design practice becomes apparent. If tools shape practice, the natural question to ask is: How can practice shape tools?

Counter Strategies: Make your own tools! ​

Tools are made and shaped by human beings. They don’t exist a priori, but instead are subject to specific cultural developments and conscious design choices. The most radical way to change your tool ecologies is to start making your own tools. Developing a tool from scratch, one situated and embedded in a concrete environment and shaped according to particular premises and needs, can help to address specific peculiarities and lead to better results. While a universal tool is developed to be one-size-fits-all, a DIY tool need not be compared in the first place. This can be relevant for tasks that are considered niche, but more importantly, it takes into account marginalized perspectives and urgencies.
The DIY tool can be unconventional, playful, and fun because it answers only to personal needs. Here, poetic and vernacular qualities outweigh practical and economic interests. A small, intimate gesture may prevail over a grand universal solution. With less pressure to design securely and efficiently, DIY setups often spark happy accidents and unexpected surprises, which should be welcome in any creative process.

Making Modular Matter ​

The basic idea for Modular Matter is simple. It uses the well-known concept of modular synthesis, but instead of staying in its original context of sound, the operating modes are translated and applied to the realm of print publishing.
A modular synthesizer is an electronic instrument that generates electronic sounds. It consists of many different and independent physical modules that can be connected in many ways to create and manipulate sound output.
Most graphic designers are used to desktop publishing, a computer-based technology that uses a combination of hardware and software components to produce some printable outcome. The whole operation involves input devices (keyboard, camera), control devices (mouse), and output devices (printer). It relies on a graphical user interface (GUI) and WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software. These tools and processes are so common that it is hard to even imagine a different setup.

Modular Matter is an attempt to rethink this print design workflow. Just like a modular synthesizer, the tool can be played like an instrument in order to create print layouts. This experimental and modular setup offers an unconventional, tangible approach to performing operations on text and graphics. The tool consists of several combinable hardware modules, each of which performs a specific operation with an operation-specific physical interface. The modules can be controlled by rotary knobs, slides, and switches. Patch cables can be used to connect the modules. For example, the output of one module becomes the input for another module, and so on. This is how the user creates a custom workflow for their printing project.
The physical interfaces of the hardware modules, especially in direct comparison to traditional desktop publishing, create a very unique design experience. Gestures, such as patching cables, turning knobs, and pushing (physical) buttons, are unusual with print design. This unfamiliar and at times clumsy interaction leads to a more conscious and intuitive control of the device.
In an otherwise disconnected human-computer-interaction, this hands-on approach offers an embodied experience of the underlying processes at work. The modular workflow inspires various new combinations and helps to provide a better understanding of the operations taking place. By rewiring the modules in all possible variations, the user has direct control over the infrastructure, workflow, and outcome.
This freedom to reconfigure has a profound effect. With Modular Matter, the user is basically building their own tools on the go. How the setup is configured shapes the outcome, which in turn leads to the reconfiguration of the tool, and so on. In other words, the practice feeds directly back into the shaping of the tool.

24-Hour Heartbreak Cards emerged from a practice of sharing personal memories on printed, collectible cards and is accompanied by a tutorial about the process of making them. We have become used to uploading personal stories and photos on social media that become a byte stream on the database of some tech giants. In contrast, this project takes a slow approach by transforming such moments from life into a one-of-a-kind print to be shared in real life.

Naoto Hieda is a Japanese artist living in Germany with an engineering background. Naoto is currently studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany and works internationally for theater productions and in the visual arts. In their artistic work, they question the productive qualities of coding and speculate on new forms, post-coding through neuro-queerness, decolonization, and live coding.

HTML Zine Club Spinner is a collection of interviews with students who took part in artist Nami Kim’s experimental two-week class HTML Zine Club at the Willem de Kooning Academy. In it, she showed how to make a webzine by teaching the basics of HTML & CSS and experimenting with the artistic potential of the two basic coding languages. Like print zines, the webzine is a personal, story-based publication, which can also be made interactive and nonlinear with code. Although the process of learning the two languages may require a lot of patience for people with little to no coding experience, coding by hand does offer a far more in-depth experience. In addition, the two languages also allow for many different aesthetic experiments, helping designers and artists to break free from the common visual constraints of dominant web culture.

“I want to be able to build it by myself so that I know what and how I want it to be.” — Aggie Chang

After the courses in January and June 2023, Kim was curious about what the students thought of the class, their experience with identifying issues and possible solutions on their own, and what they thought of her teaching skills. Through conversations with the students, she was able to reflect on how digital media is taught in the context of art school, how students develop their own visual languages within the creative industry, as well as what they thought of the course in general.

“It's about expanding my memories and feelings." — Garam Park

As our homes become smarter, new technological infrastructure is becoming an integral part of our homes. It is changing the way we behave and interact in one of our most private and sensitive spaces.

Cutting the Cloud is an artistic research and hacking project that explores the multiple dimensions of smart home technology, using a cheap, battery-powered temperature sensor as an example. The project attempts to shed light on the origins and purposes of the sensor. It asks who it is connected to, and how it can ultimately become free.

The insights gained by looking at the temperature sensor from different perspectives have been collected in an interactive website. Through freeing the temperature sensor from the cloud, it became part of the website, influencing how much of the research will be visible in the end.