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FEMINIST TOOLS
Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation .” Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 2007). Meg, Miller, “Behind the Making of the ‘Feminist Whole Earth Catalog , ’” AIGA Eye on Desing (August 16, 2018). Mindy Seu, Cyberfeminist Index . Mindy Seu, “The Pedagogy of Design in the Age of Computation ,” Parsons, December 7, 2018. Mindy Seu, “The Poetry of Tools ,” Arena (August 10, 2017). Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (Macmillan, 2000). Judy Wajcman, “Feminist Theories of Technology,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2009): 143-52. Laurie A. Wilkie, The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife’s Tale (Routledge, 2003). ARCHAEOLOGICAL / ANTHROPOLOGICAL TOOL THEORIES
Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Chloe Nahum-Claudel, “The Anthropology of Traps: Concrete Technologies and Theoretical Interfaces” Journal of Material Culture (2019). Iain Davidson, “Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition,” in April Nowell and Iain Davidson, Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition (University Press of Colorado, 2012): 185-205. Dorothy Fragaszy, “Tool Use by Non-Human Primates ,” CARTA – Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, Tool Use and Technology (University of California Television, October 12, 2018) [video: 18:08]. Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold, eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012): 36-7, Tim Ingold, “‘Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face’: An Appreciation of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech ,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30:4 (1999): 411-53. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (MIT Press, 2018) — esp. xx, 113, 235, 240 . Charles M. Keller and Janet Dixon Keller, Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Candice Odgers, “Digital Technology and the Development of the Human Mind ,” CARTA – Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, Tool Use and Technology(University of California Television, October 12, 2018) <video: 22:01>. Science Magazine, “Signs of Symbolic Behavior Emerged at the Dawn of Our Species ” (March 15, 2018) [video: 3:37]. Nick Seaver, “Computers and Sociocultural Anthropology ,” Savage MInds (May 19, 2014); “Personal Computing: Ordinariness and Materiality ,” Savage Minds (May 28, 2014); “Computing: From Method to Object ,” Savage Minds (May 29, 2014). Dietrich Stout and Theirry Chaminade, “Stone Tools, Language and the Brain in Human Evolution,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 367 (2012): 75-87. Dietrich Stout, “Early Hominin Stone Tools ,” CARTA – Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, Tool Use and Technology (University of California Television, October 12, 2018) <video: 20:57>. OTHER-SPECIES’ TOOL USE
Annalee Newitz, “The Mysterious Tool-Making Culture Shared by Crows and Humans ,” Gizmodo (November 7, 2013). Crickette M. Sanz, Josep Call, and Christopher Boesch, eds., Tool Use in Animals: Cognition and Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Jennifer Ackerman, “Boffins: Technical Wizardry” in The Genius of Birds (Penguin, 2016). Carl Safina, “Where the Wolf Bird Leads Us,” Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (Macmillan, 2015): 191-99. PHILOSOPHY / HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY AND MEDIA STUDIES ON TOOLS
John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Sunday Review (March 18, 1967): 51-3, 70-2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927). Peter Dizikes, “The Overlooked History of African Technology ,” MIT News (October 6, 2014) [on the work of Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga]. Ronald Jager, “Tool and Symbol: The Success of the Double-Bitted Axe in North America,” Technology and Culture 40:4 (October 1999): 833-60. Nina E. Lerman, Arwen Palmer Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, “Versatile Tools: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 38:1 (January 1997): 1-8. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Technology and Innovation in Africa ,” MIT Course, Fall 2014. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, ed., What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (MIT Press, 2017). Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT Press, [1964] 1994). Bethany Nowviskie, “Resistance in the Materials ,” Bethany Nowviskie (January 4, 2013). Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine , Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967): 4-9. Daniel Rothbart, Philosophical Instruments: Minds and Tools at Work (University of Illinois Press, 2007). Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects , trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Univocal, 2017). Grant Wythoff, “Artifactual Interpretation,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2:1 (2015): 23-9. GADGETS
Ken Adler, “America’s Two Gadgets: Of Bombs and Polygraphs,” Isis 98:1 (March 2007): 124-37. Reyner Banham, “The Great Gizmo,” in Design by Choice , ed., Penny Sparke (Academy Editions, 1981): 108-14. William Merrin, “The Rise of the Gadget and Hyperludic Me-Dia, ” Cultural Politics 10:1 (2014): 1-20. Frank Nutch, “Gadgets, Gizmos, and Instruments: Science for the Tinkering,” Science, Technology & Human Values 21:2 (1996): 214-28. Anna Wiener, “The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog ,’” New Yorker (November 16, 2018). Anna Wiener, “On Reading Issues of Wired from 1993 to 1995 ,” New Yorker (June 7, 2016). Grant Wythoff, Gadgetry: A History of Techniques (manuscript in preparation). CONVIVIAL TOOLS + SHARING
Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Francheschini, Global Tools: 1973-1974 (Istanbul: Salt, 2015). Godfrey Boyle and Peter Harper, eds., Radical Technology (Pantheon, 1976). Valentina Borremans, Reference Guide to Convivial Tools (1978) [about ]. Michael Given, “The Precarious Conviviality of Watermills ,” Archaeological Dialogue 25:1 (2018): 71-94. Tetsuo Kogawa, “Toward Polymorphous Radio ,” Tactical Media Files (2008) [he mentions conviviality at the very end!]. Tetsuo Kogawa and Anja Kanngieser, “A Micro-History of ‘Convivial’ Radio in Japan ,” parallax 19:2 (2013): 85-94. Kurt Kohnstedt, “Libraries of Things: Creating a Real ‘Sharing Economy’ for the Digital Age ,” 99% Invisible (September 16, 2016). Peter Jones, “Design Dialogues .” Liz Sanders and Peter Jan Stappers, Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design (BIS Publishers, 2013). Jonas Söderholm, “Tool Lending Librarianship,” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 50:4 (2018). Andrea Vetter, “The Matrix of Convivial Technology — Assessing Technologies for Degrowth ,” Journal of Cleaner Production (2017). AFFORDANCES
Jenny L. Davis and James B. Chouinard, “Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 36:4 (2017): 241-8. James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Benjamin D. Nye and Barry G. Silverman, “Affordance ” (January 2012). Martin Oliver, “The Problem with Affordance,” E-Learning 2:4 (2005): 402-12. PROTOTYPING
Nina Belojevic, “Kits for Cultural History ,” MakerLab (September 20, 2014). Alberto Corsín Jiménez, ed., Prototyping Cultures: Art, Science, and Politics in Beta (Routledge, 2017). Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella, “ Ethnography: a Prototype ,” Ethnos 85:5 (2017): 846-866. Christopher M. Kelty, “Prototyping Prototyping ” Special Issue, Limn 1 (2010). Daniela Rosner, Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT Press, 2018). Jentery Sayers, “Kits for Cultural History ,” Hyperrhiz 13 (Fall 2015). Jentery Sayers, “Prototyping the Past ,” Visible Language 49.3 (2015). Jentery Sayers, “Prototyping Pasts + Futures ” (Fall 2017). Lucy Suchman, “Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype,” British Journal of Sociology 53:2 (June 2002): 163-79. LANGUAGE TOOLS
Amaranth Borsuk, “The Upright Script: Words in Space and on the Page ,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 14:2 (Fall 2011). *Kerry Banazek, “Carpentry in Context: What Does It Look Like to Be an Ethical Materialist Composer? ” Enculturation ( April 2018) — esp “Craft as a Generative Metaphor.” Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar, eds., Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality ,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7:1 (2013). Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ann Hamilton, stylus (2010-11). Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36:4 (2018): 57-79. Burt Kimmelman, “Code and Substrate: Reconceiving the Actual in Digital Art and Poetry ,” Humanities 6:3 (2017). Margaret Konkol, “Prototyping Mina Loy’s Alphabet,” Feminist Modernist Studies 1:3 (2018). Briar Levitt, Graphic Means Kinohi Nishikawa, “The Book Reads You: William Melvin Kelley’s Typographic Imagination,” American Literary History 30:4 (Winter 2018). NYU Conference on Race and Technology, Part 1 (May 28, 2019) [video: 1:26:30]. Meg Onli and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Conversation and Workshop with Kameelah Janan Rasheed,” ICA Philadelphia (December 3, 2017) [video: 51:44]. Adrian Raphel, “The Font of Poetry, the Poetry of Font ,” The Paris Review (August 3, 2015). Shalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh, “Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 355-69. RACE AND LANGUAGE-AS-TOOL
James Baldwin, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare ” in Randall Kenan, ed., The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (Penguin, [1964] 2010). Anna Chung, “How Automated Tools Discriminate Against Black Language ,” OneZero (February 28, 2019). Kima Jones, “Writers of Color Flock to Social Media for a New Way to Use Language ,” NPR (April 10, 2014). Yusef Komunyakaa, with Anna Ross, Ishion Hutchinson, and Michael Collins, “Honor Thy Hands: Carpentry and Poetry ,” The American Reader (n.d.). Devin Malone, “Colored People Time: Quotidian Pasts ,” The Brooklyn Rail (July-August 2019) [an exhibition at Philadelphia’s ICA that examines “how black Americans use language as a tool to navigate a society marked by inequality and racism”]. A.T. McWilliams, “Sorry to Bother You, Black Americans and the Power and Perils of Code-Switching ,” The Guardian (July 24, 2018). COMMUNICATION TOOLS
Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee, “QueerOS: A User’s Manual ,” in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mel Bunce, Kate Wright, and Martin Scott, “‘Our Newsroom in the Cloud’: Slack, Virtual Newsrooms and Journalistic Practice ,” New Media & Society 20:9 (2018): 3381-99. I know I have more than this! TECHNICAL WRITING + MANUALS
Joseph Corn, User Unfriendly: Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Bailey Kelley, “Exploring ‘Home’ in Early Home Computing ,” Residual Media Depot (August 2016). Daniel Liddle, “Technical Writing ,” Purdue University. Carolyn Marvin, “Inventing the Expert” in When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1988): 9-62. Madelyn Tucker Pawlowski and Antonnet Johnson, “Creating Rhetorically Effective Instruction Manuals ,” Writing Commons (2018). Dan Piepenbring, “Power Tools ,” Paris Review (July 15, 2014). Daniela Rosner and Fred Turner, “Theaters of Alternative Industry: Hobbyist Repair Collectives and the Legacy of the 1960s American Counterculture,” in Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel, and Larry Leifer, eds., Design Thinking Research: Building Innovators (Springer, 2015): 59-69. Helene Schumacher, “Inside the World of Instruction Manuals ,” BBC Future (April 5, 2018). SAMPLE MANUALS
A.E.S. Alcock, How to Plan Your Village (Longmans Green, 1953). Mitch Altman, Andie Nordgren, and Jeff Keyzer, “Soldering Is Easy: Here’s How to Do It ” (Mighty Ohm, 2011). AMT, AMT: An Office Manual Craig Baldwin, “RocketKitKongoKit ” (1986) [film: 29min]. *Jackie Batey, Anxious Homes (Damp Flat Productions, 2015). *Louis Borgenicht and Joe Borgenicht, The Baby Owner’s Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance (Quirk Publications, 2003). Anna Callahan, Danville Community Encyclopedia 2003 Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press, 2009). Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos (1992) [more @ Elliott Mackie, “Technological Disobedience: Ernesto Oroza ,” Assemble Papers 7 (n.d.)]. Tony Conrad, “Grading Tips for Teachers ” (2003) [video: 13:49]. Julio Cortázar, “The Instruction Manual,” Cronopios and Famas (New Directions, 1999). Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry, and Harry L. Ford Humphries, Village Housing in the Tropics (1947). Natascha Sadr Haghighian, How to Spell the Fight (Sternberg Press, 2019). *Charles Hayward, Teach Yourself Carpentry (English Universities Press, 1930). Kayfa Ta : “a publishing initiative that uses the popular form of how-to manuals to respond to some of today’s perceived needs.” Steve Martin, “The Sledgehammer: How It Works ,” (New Yorker (July 19, 1998). Peter A. McWilliams, The McWilliams II Word Processor Instruction Manual (Prelude Press, 1983). Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual (Hachette Livre, 1978). S.J. Perelman, “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away ” (1947). William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarisinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). Quietroom, Santa Brand Book . Jean-Jacques, Myriam, Murla, and Michael Quisquater; and Louis, Marie Annick, Anna, Gwenolé, and Soazig Guillou, “How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Protocols to Your Children ,” Proceedings for the Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology (1989): 628-31. Readymade: How to Make [Almost] Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer Heath Robinson, How to Live in a Flat (Duckworth, 1976). Carrie Tiffany, Exploded View (Text Publishing, 2019). The Timelords, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way ) Weegee’s Secrets of Shooting with Photoflash Margaret Werthein, A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space (Institute for Figuring Press, 2005). Christopher Williams, The Production Line of Happiness (Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Press, 2014) [about ]. Edgar Wright and Peter Serafinowicz, “Look All Around You ” [video: 10:08]. Rem Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture [video ] [NAi video ]. SLIDE DECKS + SLIDE ART
aaaa aaaa, Animated Google Docs , assembly depth [prezi], screenscape [prezi], sk [prezi]. William Bottini . David Byrne, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (Steidl / Pace / MacGill, 2003). Justin Caffier, “Why Is PowerPoint Having a Comedy Moment? ” Vulture (November 1, 2018). Katherine Chandler, “Death by Powerpoint .” Ben Coonley . Seth Cosmini, “Hysterically Real. ” Democratix, “Tony Cokes: Evil.12.(edit.b): Fear, Spectra & Fake Emotions ,” Art & Education (January 18, 2018). Simon Denny, TEDx Vaduz . Die Antwoord . Linda Dong, Keynote Motion Graphic Experiment (2015). Daniel Eatock, “Transition ” [video: 1:42]. Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Good Squad (Knopf, 2010). Brian Eno, “Music for Installations ,” British Library (May 4, 2018) [video: 8:29]. The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation (1993). Agatha Gothe-Snape , Melbourne Now (2014) [video: 2:15]. Andy Greenberg, “The Underground Art of PowerPoint ,” Forbes (May 11, 2010). Tatsuo Horiuchi’s Excel paintings . Andrew Lampert . Theo Van Leeuwen, Emilia Ejonov, and Kay L. O’Halloran, “David Byrne Really Does Love Powerpoint’: Art as Research on Semiotics and Semiotic Technology,” Social Semiotics 23:3 (2013): 409-23. Tan Lin, “Bibliographic Sound Track ” (2014) [video: 1:23:40]. Military PowerPoint Karaoke + “Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex ,” Archive.org (n.d.) [video: 1:35:48]. Robert Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26:3 (2000): 414-34. “Powerless Powerpoint ,” BBC Sounds (September 8, 2017). “PowerPoint Art ,” Presentation Load (December 10, 2013). “Powerpoint Message Is the Medium ,” Wired (December 10, 2004). “PowerPoint to the People ” (2004). Seth Price, slide presentation . Marijke De Roover . Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque . David Stark and Verena Paravel, “PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration ,” Theory, Culture & Society (2008). “PowerPoint , “ SNL (March 9, 2019) [video: 4:42]. Emma Taggart, “How to Create Your Own Masterpiece on a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet ,” My Modern Met (May 25, 2018). Edward R. Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within (Tufte, 2003). Amalia Ulman, “Annals of Private History ” (2016) [video: 14:07]; “Buyer, Walker, Rover ” (2013) [video: 11:52]; Chris Vargas, MOTHA – Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art , slideshow . Maya Weeks, “On marine debris… ” (2016) [video: 19:03]. Robert Wiesenberger, “METAHAVEN: Somewhere Near You, Soon ” 032c (n.d.). Tom Wildenhain, “On the Turing Completeness of PowerPoint ” (2017) [video: 5:33]. Yes Men, GATT.org . The TED section: TED Staff, “10 Tips on How to Make Slides That Communicate Your Idea, From TED’s In-House Expert ”’ TEDBlog (2014); Benjamin Wallace, “Those Fabulous Confabs ,” New York Magazine (February 24, 2012); Benjamin Bratton, “What’s Wrong with TED Talks? ” TEDxSanDiego (2013) [video: 11:50]. SENSING + MEASUREMENT
James Corner and Alex S. MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Yale University Press, 1996). Lauren Fritts, “Knolling: The Art of Material Culture,” Art Education 72:1 (2019). Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Pascal Glissmann and Selena Kimball’s Observational Practices Lab and their Object America Project . Stefan Helmreich and Caroline A. Jones, “Science / Art / Culture Through an Oceanic Lens ,” Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (2018). Geoff Manaugh, “Covert Cartographies ,” BLDGBLOG (December 12, 2016). Nicholas Shapiro and Eben Kirksey, “Chemo-Ethnography: An Introduction ,” Cultural Anthropology 32:4 (2017). Hannah Perner Wilson . PENCILS
TEXTILES
Anni Albers, “Design Anonymous and Timeless ,” Magazine of Art 40:2 (February 1947): 51-3. Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, “Cloth, Gender, Continuity, and Change: Fabricating Unity in Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 108:4 (2006): 862-77. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Introduction: Textile Politics” in Fray: Art + Textile + Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017): 1-36. Francesca Capone, Language is Image, Paper, Cloth, & Code (Information is Material, 2018) + Francesca Capone Website . Drawing Center, “Thread Lines ” Drawing Papers 118 (Drawing Center, 2014). Briony Fer, “Anni Albers: Weaving Magic ,” Tate Etc 44 (October 10, 2018). K. Kris Hirst, “Spindle Whorls ,” ThoughtCo. (August 19, 2018). Excerpts from Ebru Kurbak, ed., Stitching Worlds: Exploring Textiles and Electronics (Revolver, 2018). Virginia Postrel, “Losing the Thread ,” Aeon (June 5, 2015). Daniela Rosner, Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT Press, 2018). Jane Schneider, “The Anthropology of Cloth,” Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987): 409-48. T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Work of Anette Rose + excerpt from Anette Rose, Enzyklopädie Der Handhabungen (Kerber, 2011).
