Critical technical practice

Critical technical practice is critical theory based approach towards technological design proposed by Phil Agre where critical and cultural theories are brought to bear in the work of designers and engineers. One of the goals of critical technical practice is to increase awareness and critical reflection on the hidden assumptions, ideologies and values underlying technology design.

Pedagogy - Critical Technical Practice

A different fork of Critical Technical Practice from Agre’s root (Agre, 1997) was initiated at the former Centre for Cultural Studies between 2007-2017, Goldsmiths, University of London by Graham Harwood as a way to examine, the live techno-social aspects of contemporary digital culture. This stream of Critical Technical Practice(CTP) at its most broad use can be described as the formation of thought and action that incorporates art as a method of enquiry. This is a compacted intellectual form, that makes the space between the technical, theory and practice ambiguous. A typical digital culture class would make/explore things, attempting to explain the phenomena caught in the lens of a project or proposition.

The methods arose to figure software as both a technical and cultural object. A simple problematic would be. Technical: if the exact same web browser, runs on a series of machines but has different dependencies, operating systems and alike. Is it the same software if it’s functionality changes across different platforms? Social/Cultural: If that series of machines happens to run in different enterprises, cultures, societies, political and economic regimes. How can we think about affect of the software within these different registers? What boundaries/frames of possibility are created when using the software between the two overlapping domains. This simple example points to something of the complexity in asking questions of technical individuals.

In Critical Technical Practice however, we normally make no distinction between the domains of the technical, social/political and cultural as a live machine under enquiry will be plugged into action, reaction, enablement and disablement with all of the domains simultaneously.

An example of a class may clarify this approach. We might propose that the class create a simple (DOS) denial of service attack on a test remote server by learning to code computers for the first time. It is empowering for students to find out how quickly they can code. The class would learn how to do this from T.J. Connor’s book Violent Python. After the group had reached a self satisfied tingle of radicalism the group would be asked to look up the author and would find that Connor is a top grade US Military expert. The group would then look at the books distribution and market penetration and be encouraged to question the affective logics, politics and culture of the book, reflect on why the workshop had been constructed the way it was, and their own learning in different registers of technicality, politics of information and personal critic and empowerment was achieved.

Critical Technical Practice then is not necessarily a reduction of phenomena to literature or a system of logics, but can instead be thought of as knowledge incorporated into a thing that the class created, look at or pointed too, through revealing a certain type of gaze. A prerequisite of Critical Practice is that incorporates this form of gaze is thinking through the formation of oneself as a thinker, actor in the world. Enquiring into one's pre-existence, helps understand the structuring of potential that has informed what one has become, what one could easily recognise, and what one could easily achieve. This is not a summation of limit but an acknowledgement of the hard work needed to escape a pre-existence, as it may relate to the four pillars of repression, class, gender, sexuality and race. The situated knowledge of family and friends, their relation to making things, to popular culture, to oral histories, to struggles with money or law, reading, writing and speaking, all inform this process.

To this end CTP is partially related to a schizoanalysis of Foucault's question “What are we today?” (Foucault 1984: pp. 42ff.) The class is always encouraged to unfold what conditions, constrain, control, resist, govern, determine this moment and not another? What patterns of recognition are we privileging and why does it blind us to others? How does language restrict us at the very moment we are able to say something? How can this engagement be born anew at every instance?

Media at the margins

As a second clarifying example of pedagogy and CTP. We can appropriate Matthew Fuller and Andy Goffey’s book Evil Media for class. The term grey media coined in the book has become a placeholder for forms of machine that alter the conduct/governance of those individuals both technical and biological that are part of their structural operations. Students in this class are encouraged to find an evil/grey media object and present to the class, concentrating on how it is part of the world in which it also participates. This could be anything from a post-it note, antidepressant drug, the corner of a shipping container, a software object to any form or any other media object that it not usually given critical scrutiny.

One grey media machine that illustrates the theme of the work would be Electronic Validation Rules here commented on by Felix Drăgan one of our ex-student at Goldsmiths.

“Validation rules are syntactic and semantic criteria applied to the data in form fields. These rules are used to police data input to ensure its uniformity and compliance with underlying database formats and constraints. In the case of electronic forms the automated validation subroutines are also designed as a defence mechanism against accidental or malicious user action. These circumventions or failures in code execution have the potential of revealing otherwise hidden attributes of encoded data with its relational structure, embedded assertions or judgements.”

This formulation of grey media is explored, in class by proposing that technical objects have a directive side or could be considered desiring in philosophical terms. This can be thought of more widely as a critical understanding of media interaction at different scales. The ability to manipulate the directive side of technical objects through multiple scales of logics can be one place where resides, the kind of evil described in Fuller and Goffey’s book Evil Media, the introduction to which is used as a class primer.

This class explores how the directive side of technical objects can be thought through the design/individuation of the technical individual in a simplified Simondonian sense. The space of a desiring technical individual is unfolded as it, among other things, encourages us to alter our minds, behaviors, and bodies in order to better use them. This self-modification in response to technical objects is often rewarded by allowing us to more clearly tune in to things and receive cleaner channels of information from them. For instance, simply put, the programming and use of computers implies both programming the machine in order to perform calculations, and regulating the conduct of users in manipulating mice and menu systems, ordering input to produce desired results.

The class as a whole is then encouraged to explore how people participate in the flows of power, languages, and logics created in collaboration with technical objects. How the processes of these objects become normalized, and how we become entangled in their interrelations across various scales. As we become familiar with how software operates within computation and culture more generally, it makes sense for us to learn how such logics operate in other spheres such as social process, politics and economy.

People whose work contributes to the critical technical practice agenda include Phil Agre, Paul Dourish, Natalie Jeremijenko, Michael Mateas, Simon Penny, Warren Sack, Garnet Hertz, YoHa, (Matsuko Yokokoji, Graham Harwood) and Phoebe Sengers.

See also

• Critical design
• Critical making

External links

• Toward a Critical Technical Practice by Phil Agre
• Critical Technical Practices page by Phoebe Sengers
• Garnet Hertz
• Simon Penny
• YoHa