Developing your own hardware
Kristina Andersen, September 2007
Making your own technology can mean voiding the warranty of your iPod by "modifying to alter functionality or capability without the written permission of Apple" [8], to straight up hacking and bending commercial products and on to building circuits from scratch. These techniques are all methods to graduate from user to owner in our everyday relationship with technology. If you cannot open it, you don't own it [9] and if you work with circuits as an artist and maker it becomes especially important to exercise ownership on the technological vehicles of the work.
B087 Lie-detector, Kemo-Electronic GmbH
Since the 50's it has been possible to buy elaborate DIY electronic kits with farfetched uses and over-Xeroxed line drawings - made for father and son bonding sessions. When you first begin to solder and build circuits these are the kits you start out with. You order them from giant illegible catalogues and when they arrive they look as if they have been composed entirely out of reclaimed components from the soviet space programme. Which is why you keep ordering them: The beauty of the matte square green LED that sometimes comes with the KEMO lie detector kit [1]. Where else would you find that?
It is worth noting that almost nobody teaches their daughters to solder. The stupidity of the dog barking circuit kits, paired with a generally patriarchal electronics culture, has so far made electronics a largely non-female pursuit even as other areas like fashion and fabric crafts moves further towards the customised and the self-made. In fact the process of crafting fabrics is remarkably similar to the building of circuits. Like other forms of crafts, making your own technology can be seen as a sculptural process of allowing objects to be formed in your hands and as such it is an almost primal process of discovery and recognition. As an object slowly takes form on the table in front of us, we can begin to develop intuitions about its capabilities and behaviour. Maybe in an extrapolation of Hayes' 'naive physics' [6] we could say that it is through the actual making that we begin to comprehend the objects we are building.
Details of the artists' studio
Making and crafting can also be said to be a form of play as long as one keeps in mind that playing is not necessarily light-hearted or fun; but rather a way of approaching a particular design space and a set of rules and limitations [3]. We are making our home made technological objects to the best of our ability and the limitations we face are our own. Claiming this kind of independence is a way to retain some level of control over the work. This does not mean we do not need help and collaborators. It just means that when it fails, we stand a chance of asking better questions and questioning the advice we receive. In the crafters manifesto Ulla-Maaria Mutanen says that the things we make ourselves have magic powers and hidden meanings that other people can't see [11], and this is true for the hand made circuit as well.
Things are changing in the world of making things. In the wake of the emergence of Interaction Design as a discipline, basic stamps and PIC boards are suddenly on every curriculum and there are enormous amounts of "make your own" tutorials on the web. Instructables, a website where users share step-by-step project instructions, has its origin at the MIT Media Lab as a platform for students to share projects [7], Hack a Day publishes a new hack each day harvested from enthusiasts on the web [5], popular websites like BoingBoing [2] and expensive paper publications like Make magazine from O'Reilly [10] have brought the hobbyist and part time makers out into some sort of mainstream.
Details of the artists' studio
For the artist and the maker DIY is an ongoing process of discovery and failure. You are trying to use your clumsy and limited abilities to create that which did not exist before: unusual behaviours, objects that exist in response to flimsy thoughts and desires. Along the way through the making you encounter the limitations of your hands and your patience, but you find something else as well: the accidental object, the technology that exist merely as a quirk, the successful misconstruction. These are all glimpses of the material speaking back to you, the maker. They are the gifts from working with your hands and making your own. Nick Collins says it in the 16th rule of hardware hacking: "If it sound good and doesn't smoke, don't worry if you don't understand it" [4]. This is perhaps why we do it. By using our crude and clumsy hands to make aspects of computational machinery we are re-inserting ourselves into a process that we are otherwise excluded from. We make technological objects in an attempt to glean understanding, to see if our naïve intuitions still functions in a world of current and solder.
Maybe we can say, we are making technology in order to understand it, and understanding technology in order to make our own.
Notes
[1] B087 Lie-detector, Kemo-Electronic GmbH, viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.kemo-electronic.de/en/bausaetze/b087/index.htm
[2] Boingboing, 2007, Happy Mutants LLC, viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.boingboing.net
[3] Caillois, R.1961, Man, Play, Games, University of Illinois Press. Illinois.
[4] Collins, N. 2006. `Laying of Hands in Handmade Electronic Music' in The Art of Hardware Hacking, Routledge, New York.
[5] Hack A Day, 2006, Hack A Day Beta, viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.hackaday.com
[6] Hayes, P. 1978, The naive physics manifesto Systems in the Micro-Electronic Age, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
[7] Instructables, 2007, Instructables, viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.instructables.com
[8] iPod and iSight Warranty, 2007, Apple's Limited Warranty document for iSight and iPod, Apple Inc., viewed 4 October 2007, http://images.apple.com/legal/warranty/docs/ipodisight.pdf
[9] Jalopy, M. 2005. Owner's Manifesto, Make04, viewed 4 October 2007, http://makezine.com/04/ownyourown
[10] Make Magazine, 2007, O'Reilly Media, Inc. viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.makezine.com
[11] Mutanen, U. 2005, Crafter Manifesto, Make04, viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.makezine.com/04/manifesto
Images
[1] B087 Lie-detector, Kemo-Electronic GmbH, viewed 4 October 2007, http://www.kemo-electronic.de/en/bausaetze/b087/index.htm
[2] Studio details. Photographed by Suno
