PhD Seminar — TEN THESES ON TECHNOLOGY

Following an exhibition of artists, designers and academics at Hamburg Kunstverein in 2021, we published a book called Proof of Stake using the pieces of art and scholarly essays to investigate the basic questions of design: ‘How do objects organise?’ We distilled our thoughts into Ten Theses on Technology. Together these theses delineate the technological condition in which we find ourselves, and how it is that objects can come to claim the technological and thereby organise (and are organised). We define technology as the orienting, unifying (yet also fracturing) and conditioning force of mediation by which everyday life is being continually and deliberately handled. The prevalence of digital, electronic objects has meant technology becoming edgeless, constantly feeling its way elsewhere, tireless, enlisting as it goes, insinuating itself into spaces real and imaginary, natural and artificial. The question then arises: where does mediating technology end? Are there still objects that fail to or avoid meeting the threshold of being technological, or objects that ‘are’ technological in ways that resist the rendering force of digitised, electronic machinery? The objects considered included: medieval land registers, post-it notes, ceramic vessels, plane windows, vending machines, GPS positioning systems, kanban cards, rope barriers, bitcoin, flags and meteorites. Thinking the technology through these objects provoked us to consider the extent and limits of designed life and the possibilities for severance from and autonomy within such a life which, increasingly, to borrow Bernard Stiegler’s phrase, appears to be life being lived by other means.

• All PolyU PhD students and SD staff are welcome. 
• This Zoom meeting accommodates 100 participants at most.
• Event registration is required and on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Successful registrants will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom meeting details before the event.