Event Title
The Wearable and Tangible Worlds of DH Exhibition
Location
VAB-222
Start Date
4-11-2017 8:15 AM
End Date
4-11-2017 12:15 PM
Description
At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where "charrette" was used in order to signal a session that was collaborative and participatory with the goal of shaping and extending how we engage with concepts around wearable technologies. We are now proposing for HASTAC 2017 an exhibition of work on the same topics. In addition to having several of the groups/people who attended the 2016 event on hand to show work that has emerged in the last year, we plan to make an open call for participation in this exhibition. We anticipate a maximum of 10 projects for this exhibition and interaction session.
Building on the enthusiasm for recent Debates in Digital Humanities anthologies such as Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (which addresses the role of "making things" in the Humanities) and Bodies of Information (which addresses topics of feminist concern in DH), the works in this curated exhibition will collectively suggest that one of the possible worlds of DH is material, embodied, and grounded in feminist approaches that are attentive to issues of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, class and their intersections. With this exhibition we will highlight innovative new work that thinks differently about the media in which we do "big data" visualizations, the kinds of biohacking and modding we want to see in the world, and the ways that media making and archeologies encourage us to recognize that the past, present, and futures of tangible computing are material and can be ethical.
Further, we anticipate that the exhibition can function as a space in which some of the questions and contradictions of DH are articulated and contested. For instance, the projects will likely hold in tension the practices of hack and yack, often cited as one of the fundamental dichotomies in Digital Humanities. Sayers, et. al. suggest that physical computing intervenes in the opposition of these practices, making explicit the fuzziness of boundaries between mind/hand, hand/machine, maker/user ("Between Bits and Atoms" 4). We also suspect that many of the projects will be built upon technologies such as those addressed by many of the thought pieces in the GO:DH working group in Minimal Computing. These technologies facilitate novice engagements and rapid prototyping, and can be actualized with minimal financial and spatial resources, allowing for a greater variety of maker-participants. We anticipate that the projects will further bring together hardware and soft-wear, analog and digital, computing and craft, in the join between computing practices and the textile-based practices of sewing, knitting, and so forth. This assemblage has the potential to make explicit the ways that feminism and women's labor might be cooked into our practices of DH making. As Wernimont notes, "a cooked in feminism is visible in the way that nutmeg is in a cookie — if you're looking, you'll find it" ("Whence Feminsim?"). We hope the encounter with tangible and wearable objects will help the exhibition's audience look for it.
The Wearable and Tangible Worlds of DH Exhibition
VAB-222
At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where "charrette" was used in order to signal a session that was collaborative and participatory with the goal of shaping and extending how we engage with concepts around wearable technologies.
