Jussi Parikka
I would like to start with a hesitation about digging as a method: surely it is only a material activity with little epistemological value? It seems after all, an activity for hands and large machines and less for the cognitive production of knowledge. It leads to thinking about undergrounds instead of epistemologies, masculine connotations instead of methodological subtlety. What is the knowledge that comes out from digging, besides perhaps some sort of tacit understanding of the earth and its qualities? Despite the first reaction, the term brings to mind images of archaeology, excavation, material labour and depth. It starts to become even epistemologically interesting. Digging penetrates surfaces, opens up visibilities and distributes a new sense of the infrastructural underground that underpins the surface of what we take for granted as a subject of everyday experience. Exhumation and uncovering are closely related, but it is important to understand that considering digging as an active verb in the methodological sense of action both relates to situations of engaging with constructed material reality that can articulate new knowledge and can also function as a collective activity. This activity gathers participants around that shared object or material process, emphasizing how academic research is linked to creative-practice methods in art and design that can become collaborative design-workshops (Ratto 2011).
Digging opens up to what conditions experience. Digging can be understood as a cultural technique (Siegert 2015) that exposes distinctions often taken as fundamental (inside/outside, woman/man, up/down, sacred/profane) but which are also produced by a plethora of techniques. Digging exposes the (under)ground of the objects of academic and creative analysis. Digging becomes an operation that hovers between media theory, critical design and collective speculative work. But please do not be mistaken: it is not merely a word of metaphorical value, but refers to an activity increasingly central to media studies, critical studies of technology and science, art and design methods as well as an attitude that one finds in some of the humanities labs that are the new sites of not merely thinking but also of (experimental) making (see, for example, Drucker 2009; Ratto 2011).
As a method, digging opens up historically constructed material reality. It does not merely expose ‘ruins’ but the multiple historical realities where material infrastructures have been layered, revealing different ‘distinctive temporalities and evolutionary paths’ (Mattern 2015: 14). In this sense, digging opens the different temporalities that are all the time layered in infrastructures of cities, in media technological objects and in everyday situations. It includes the literal sense of going under the surface to discover the infrastructures and material components. This sort of a focus stems, in part, from the mobilization of ‘archaeology’ as a field that runs through modern episteme of knowledge from Immanuel Kant to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Friedrich Kittler (Ebeling 2012). It resonates with media archaeological methods that emphasize the productive nature of excavations both in the sense of using archives to uncover earlier forgotten paths of media history (Parikka 2012; Zielinski 2006) and as site-specific work on abandoned technologies and infrastructures, sharing a ground with methods of contemporary archaeology (Guins 2014; Piccini 2015; Reinhard 2015; Parikka 2015). Both senses of the word are effective and embedded in an understanding of material reality irreducible to textual interpretation.
Figure 3.4.1 DIY culture, electronic art and design focused Dorkbot group’s visit to Norton Sales, an aerospace surplus supplier in North Hollywood, California. The aim was to find and buy something and ‘make something interesting with it’. Photo: Garnet Hertz. Used with permission.
Digging for the remains of media culture is not restricted to textual traces; besides a historical methodology, media archaeology is increasingly operated as a situated practice. For example, Berlin Humboldt University’s Institute of Media Studies hosts the Media Archaeological Fundus which is a space for such pedagogy of learning epistemology hands-on. It is not merely a collection but an active meeting place for theoretical concepts and old media technologies that demonstrate media as material artefacts. Here epistemological knowledge is an activity: taking an oscilloscope from the 1950s, a radio from the 1940s, an optical toy from the nineteenth century or an educational computer from the 1970s to open it up, investigate, look at its insides, engage in media theory hands-on. It is digging but not merely with a shovel, nor only by way of solitary contemplation.
Similar operations related to hands-on humanities analysis are visible in other labs, such as the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, Colorado as well as the vast range of labs in the humanities and critical design that have emerged over the past years, demonstrating a new situated and collective way of engaging with knowledge creation. Indeed, digging becomes a term that mediates between media theory and critical design, archaeology and garbology (Rathje 2001; Gabrys 2013) as well as resonating with the non-academic institutional methodologies in hacklabs and hackspaces. Opening up becomes an exercise where technological skills meet up with socially concerned awareness of the implications of black-boxed technologies. The interest in critical making in the humanities has spurred practices that combine technical skills from software to hardware with an ethos of reverse engineering; the focus is more on the process of dismantling and remaking (‘all making is remaking’, as Natalie Jeremijenko argues) than producing specific objects (Hertz and Jeremijenko 2015). The hands-on approach is said to expose the object/ material thing as something that ensures an awareness of the friction, the world pushing back (Hertz and Ratto 2015). This needs to be also related to the issue of wider infrastructures that remain unidentifiable in terms of solitary objects. Recent research on infrastructures (Mattern 2015; Parks and Starosielski 2015) has effectively demonstrated the relevancy of digging and how media studies can borrow methods from, for example, archaeology. And it has also been a context in which instead of merely production or consumption, issues of distribution are relevant, as Lisa Parks has noted (cited in Mattern 2013).
Digging is not merely a deconstruction of designed objects, but an awareness of the potentials of the subsurface layers as powerful realities in themselves. This mediation between invisible and visible is epistemologically significant and in situated practices becomes a shared matter of concern (Latour 2008) among the participants. Digging can be seen as a collective experience of sharing expertise and as mobilizing the speculative sense of ‘what if?’: what if the technological artefact could work otherwise, what if it would work this way, what if it could be made to work in alternative social assemblages?
Hence, there is more to the colloquial version of ‘to dig’ referring to affective relationship: to intensively like something, have an affinity with, to be in close relationship with a thing or a person. Indeed, a lot of the digging that scholars and artists are engaged in is also embedded in an affective investment that often is prescribed as part of the maker and hacker culture (Ratto 2011, referring to Papert and Franz 1988). This sort of a stance relates to the pedagogies of constructionism; epistemic objects are always triggering and triggered by affective relations and environments, such as when co-working. This social bond is an important part of the material activity, and is one driver of how such methodological issues become part of the consideration of the social settings in which media research functions as process-focused. We also need to be aware of the gender implications in some of these contexts; so, for example, the masculine bias of maker culture and tinkering culture have been flagged as an issue (Chachra 2015).
In this context, digging becomes a hands-on approach to what seems the most ephemeral: the digital and technical media culture that is at the same time avoiding the sensory and yet can be approached by way of its physical location, characteristics and even technical features. The relation to such engineering practices as reverse engineering might at times be close, even if the idea of digging is also about more than just the reversal of the engineering process. By escaping such determinism, the artistic and hacktivist versions often include an idea of subversion as part of the activity of digging, hacking, opening up. The collective workshops that are starting to define a methodological – even if most often still outside academic settings – attitude to digital culture indicate an important trend: cryptoparties, hackathons, game jams and other sorts of activities that run over one night or multiple days (and sometimes nights) define a fan-styled enthusiasm that attaches curiosity, dedication and often a critical attitude to working with machines, whether in terms of coding, hardware hacking or the social and legal issues around digital culture from surveillance to economy (for example, copyright). Instead of mere Do-It-Yourself (DIY)-ethos, there are suggestions of more socially oriented hack and other activities of DIWO – Do-It-With-Others (Garrett and Catlow 2012).
Figure 3.4.2 Do-It-With-Others: Toy Hacking Workshop instructor and participant disassembling and modifying a battery-powered police car toy in Irvine, California. Organized by Garnet Hertz. Photo: Peter Huynh. Used with permission.
Collective digging, making and remaking in technological culture can participate in a redefinition of social ties; of who is considered an amateur, who an expert ‘allowed’ to engage with the inner workings of machines; issues of credibility and actionable knowledge that are starting to define a field of civic technoscience (Wylie, Jalbert, Dosemagen and Ratto, 2014). The material activity of digging reveals an epistemological side that furthermore testifies to the possibilities of collective work that starts at a grassroots level and quickly becomes one part of a bundle of terms and activities: digging, deconstructing, (re)designing, challenging, activating, sharing, co-working, engaging and redefining.
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