Machine Paradox
Last updated
Last updated
During the last weeks, I have had the pleasure of experimenting with the Machine Paradox, a workshop that focuses on understanding machines' parts, assembly, functionality, and how the components within the system can be reused and reframed meaning. This approach can give another opportunity to use something that has been left, a value that transcends currency but the cleverness to give an object a second meaning through his life during experimentation and intense class.
During the first week, we were introduced to the concepts of electronics, and machines, and how the program would be structured with examples of past works and references that could give a measurement of what we would pass through. However, the real work started when we had to choose a specific machine, or a device, with no intention of using it in a specific way, like a random arbitrary selection that would guide us through the workshop, but things happened differently.
In the back facilities of the first floor, directed to where people place their bicycles, a huge box was presented with numerous devices from 2D and 3D printers, stoves, extruders, Bluetooth sound devices, and even unused intercoms with video connections. Between the options, each one of our group had to choose a specific object of our preference that would have to be cleaned later, considering the huge amount of dust and stinky slime elements.
My choice was a very old HP Laptop forgotten in the dark spaces of the box, an element impaired, with no possibility of getting back to life considering that it had no screen, buttons were falling off the keyboard, cable connections were going everywhere and the was no charging cable or anything related to that. The cleaning process was fine, the machine was very sensible and when I tried to clean in some specific places, some parts fell apart and the machine got even more destroyed.
After cleaning all the objects, the class split into four different groups and each one had to choose a specific device to disassemble and make a reverse engineering process to understand its parts and functionalities. I can't deny my true and deepest interest in using a 3D printer to enhance my knowledge of additive manufacture, however, a 2D printer seemed interesting considering its complicated relation with users since the idea was manufactured and distributed on a large scale.
It's important to enhance and emphasize the social construction around the meaning that was created around 2D printers since its invention and popularization around the world due through its huge manufacture system. There's a huge community of people that actually hate those types of printers, since they are very delicate and if something happens to the machine while using it, there's a huge chance that you can break a system within and even turn irreparable.
This are some communities online tha hate those types of printers:
https://www.wired.com/story/why-do-printers-still-suck/
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/miovv6/when_did_you_realize_you_fucking_hate_printers/
After choosing the object we had the duty to test its functionalities, understand what was working, and unassemble its parts to reframe its meaning by creating a different kind of machine in the next week. Our group was composed of me David Graniz and Maithili Sathe and at our first step we were very focused and attentive in the same specific task to understand the components so everyone could understand the machine and its nature. disassemble the machine
As expected from the communities and online articles, the printer proved to be difficult to handle, a machine with a meshed architecture that uses too many different assembly tools to get all together in one piece. The machine was working completely fine, however, it couldn't connect by wifi or cable to smartphones and neither notebooks with different operating systems, so we could understand that something was wrong but not completely irreparable, considering the functionality of the buttons, mechanical actions that were supposed to displace ink and roll the paper into the machine.
Along the process of dissembling the machine, I reflected on the book - "How to Grow a Robot" - and how machines have interconnected systems that split and integrate different functionalities to attribute different actions, a similarity to our construction of the body. With this, it was a good exercise as a biofuturist to not create a new machine and speculative technologies but try to understand how a simple machine is structured on a biological scale that integrates its system and elements and how they are related to its first raw material before getting together in one piece.
Then, machines as fully embodied objects are composed of different organ systems with specific functionalities that are powered by organs with specific functions to work together in a composed architecture that integrates tissues, as material formed with a specific form and muscles that contract and react, like LED lights and different sensors in the machine. This way, the machines of our times relate to nature in a way that they aren't necessarily organic but indeed they imitate and explore the connections through the functions and body of the machine as one, a new way to look at electronics.
In sequence steps, we reframe the machine's meaning and try to create an object that blurs the line between mysticism and objects of the occult, considering a very long historical social attribution of objects to old mechanical technologies from a long time ago, as cards, table, cups, and even empty boxes, as a simplicity that carries too much meaning. Then our project was directed to create an OUIJA/Wicca game using the trawler system that displaces ink to guess questions inputted by users.
During the process, we learned more about the Arduino system using FABLAB's Barduino microcontroller, a way to help us hack the machine motor to understand better its directions the voltage applied to make its functions work, and then control the "organ" that makes the trawler move and choose a specific answer from the beyond to the use who is interacting with it.
As a consequence of this process, the group used the knowledge learned during the Fundamentals of Digital Fabrication to create its chassis and sustain the machinery structure hidden inside a body that semiotically could communicate the message about a mystic object using plywood, laser cutting, and black paint spray, a mix of old and new, a printer into a communication portal through The Beyond.
At last, a video was produced by the team to recreate a commercial from the 80s, an infomercial that could give the impression of a real existent product with fun behind its intentions.
Check or forensic report here: https://hackmd.io/lxu5fGeoQ5GsUAL6f1xQPg
