Despite repeated debunking, profitable anthropomorphic mythologies of technology as autonomous objects of emergent hyper-rationalist agency continue to recur as the result of contempt for the act of maintenance. In this talk, I will share my current efforts to develop a theory of "calibration labor" to define technology by its continuous demands for alignment, adjustment, and correction in the form of obscured labors of maintenance.
Through the computer mouse we reach into our machines and towards other dimensions of space and possibility. Where are we going? What are we looking for? What can the computer mouse and its functions tell us about the climate of our networked desires?
Economies of the Computer Mouse (a.k.a. the Mouse Across Space and Time): What can the computer mouse tell us about the world? This lecture will explore human engagement with objects by looking at the production and design of the mouse as an instance of the electronic and computer peripheral industries. I will report on research conducted to understand the computer mouse as an informational medium - the economic, cultural, political and historical information it holds and the information that a future mouse could hold.
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How has the mouse created new kinds of distance between computers and humans? Through a historical account of the computer mouse, this talk will discuss the implications of this distance; what being "close to the metal" might mean in 2019 and how women throughout the history of computing have always been the closest.