SALVAGED LEGACIES:
OBSOLESCENCE IN PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE
Project Description
Salvaged Legacies: Obsolescence in Practice and Experience (SLOPE) addresses two societal concerns of today – the increasing fragility of aging legacy technologies that serve public welfare and the increasing pressures on aging workers to maintain relevant technical skills into later career stages. These are in fact interlocking problems that result from patterns of obsolescence where skills and knowledge associated with legacy practices are devalued over time leading to both infrastructural precarity and precarity for aging workers. The SLOPE project aims to address these two key issues by exploring obsolescence as a dynamic interrelationship between aging systems and aging people. Through a combination of qualitative interviews, oral history archives, design interventions, and participatory workshops, SLOPE aims to salvage essential legacies of generational knowledge in computing and re-evaluate how obsolescence is performed, practiced, and experienced.
Funded by VELUX Fonden
Hardwired Temporalities
Project Description
The temporal dimensions of software – how it ages, decays, obsolesces – have been examined extensively through the forensic, archeological, and genealogical methods developed in media studies. Yet there has been little consideration for how coders and software developers read code as a historical object or make sense of its historicity. As a formal construct, software is treated as immaterial and therefore impervious to decay, sometimes even imagined to be able to forever extend the life of hardware as it obsolesces. But in other, almost ritualized, moments, its materiality is called out. Just as for media scholars, historical contingencies seem to best reveal the material nature of the digital in ways that newer systems do not. The more “historical” code is, the more it shifts from being “lines of code” to a “body of code” that has been traversed by many coders, touched by many hands, and becomes both feminized and pathologized for its unruliness. This paper discusses how software as an aged body of code is talked about by practioners working with code. What affective attachments are formed to code, how is old code valued or devalued? And what does this tell us about the broader disciplinary regime in which code as well as coding subject(ivities) are made and hierarchies that value some forms of software work over other are sustained?
In volume: Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time
Beyond Repair
Project Description
We still know little about how technologies end, slip beyond repair, or are removed and dismantled—nor how the losses they entail are negotiated. This book begins from such endings, in ultimas res, to explore the practices and processes through which technologies come to an end or shift into a status beyond repair. In a time marked by both planetary‑scale collapse and mundane discontinuations of platforms, the book provides a diverse and empirically rich set of cases to understand how we break relations with technologies or narrate their endings. Drawing on feminist technoscience, feminist scholarship on time, and cultural studies, the book develops an approach to technological endings as chrononormative practices shaped by social and cultural expectations about which technological, social, and cultural futures remain “in time” and which do not.
Editors: Marisa Leavitt Cohn & Julia Velkova
Publisher: Open Humanities Press “Technographies Series”