i. Design Experiment

Design Experiment: Study of Multiplicities and Affordances Discovered through Diverse Engineering of Found Technologies

Concepts like privacy, enclosure, family are all questioned and not defined. Normal everyday activities like the act of sleeping are attempted to be re-imagined. Reyner Banham’s A Home is Not a House questions the need for the outer shell of a house if all the systems that are needed to be in a home can be combined to create a “standard of living package,” and placed around a campfire with a thin plastic shell to protect from the weather. 118 By invalidating the normative image that is associated with dwelling, he begins to re-think what is really means to live and what is needed to sustain the previous answer. Is a bed needed for the act of sleeping? Is a stove or for that matter a four walled kitchen needed for cooking? Is a wall needed around 2-8 people for them to live in a home? What Banham is alluding to is understanding existing in and around spaces as those spaces afford. As James Gibson writes “Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment? To change what it affords him. He has made more available what benefits him and less pressing what injures him.” 119

The Capitalocene is the result of the manipulation of the environment to change what it can afford those who view it as an object, but in the speculative reality of this thesis, the scavengers are de-centered. This means that instead of manipulating the environment to create artificial affordances, the scavengers diverse engineer the sophisticated technology of the Anthropocene to understand new affordances. These new readings of affordances would create new ways of existing and creating those would not be restrained by normative narratives. This design experiment was done as a part of this thesis to explore affordances through diverse engineering. Kitbashing recognizable objects and potraying them out of scale helped in creating, with exaggerated strangeness, what the manifestation of a scavenger’s standard-of-living package would look like when all activities of daily life were to be reimagined around the affordances of technology they find. The wires afforded imagining holding something up, the pods at their bases (sleep-catchers) afforded slumping over them, and the calculator openings at the base of the sleeping field afforded things(limbs) to be inserted. The contraption all together afforded the act of sleeping or resting, maybe not in the current human oikos, but in no-place. 120 The dwelling/ camp/ home/ tribe does not necessarily have an enclosure, or prescribed sleep-catchers for people—private, public, family, neighbor, friend, acquaintance are not concepts that are described. Maybe relationships can be afforded by the space as well.

James Gibson mentions “It is a mistake to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products.” 121 Normative determinism comfortably delineates culture and nature so it could continue to manipulate nature to create new affordances for cultures that preserve its blinded reality from the actual planetary reality. De-centering practices would result in a blurring between the two and the scavengers in the speculative reality would exist in a blend—Donna Haraway’s proposal of natureculture through the affordances read in the technologies they find. 122

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118. Reyner Banham,”A Home is Not a House,” Art in America. 1965, volume 2, New York:70-79 119. James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances.” In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 120. In a talk called “Planetary Utopias” Angela Davis, in conversation with Gayatri Spivak and Nikita Dhawan, chooses to call utopias “no-place” after the words direct translation from its Greek source “ou-topos.” She makes this distinction to call attention to the tension between the hope associated with utopias and the transformations necessary to achieve those hopes. I choose to use this term here, not to replace oikos with utopia, but to highlight similar tensions between the perceived and the actual reality of the term oikos or ecology in the Anthropocene 121. Gibson, 73. 122. Donna Jeanne Haraway. When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009).