Tardigraph workshop @Critical Times
Workshop/input at Critical times: Ecologies of relation
With Martino Morandi, organised by Christoph Brunner/Erasmus University, April 2024
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"Inconvenience is another way of pointing to the experience of nonsovereign relationality. It does not always produce a sense of injury but does always signify the pressure of what to do with coexistence." (On the inconvenience of other people, Lauren Berlant)
Following Berlant's prompt, this input combines an exploration of the world of hardware virtualization with a hands-on session of disobedient diagramming, asking how infrastructures are made while we move with them. Virtualization is the computational technology which underpins the infrastructure of the Cloud. With its technological base, time-sharing, it allows the parallel use of computational resources by acting at the temporal scale of computer micro-processors. Software emulation divides hardware resources into multiple digitally separated environments which can then be provided as a service. In turn, this allows for the efficientist organization of computation and labour that finds in the Cloud its current paradigm. It has become increasingly clear that virtualization and time-sharing are not just technical paradigms, but social and relational ones. We are wondering then how the current dependency on Cloud infrastructures and their particular approach to time-management affects our ability to experience nonsovereign relationality.
We propose to approach these questions together with the help of Tardigraph, a script to generate live editable Graphviz diagrams in a browser. It is motivated by a fascination for how the real-time collective drawing/writing of diagrams both influences and is in friction with common understandings of relations as kinship. Tardigraph invites us to playfully resist the way these relations are translated into the network imaginaries of AT&T and instead consider how things might not be 'the same as', but rather 'not alike', or 'sort of like' something else.
Proposed reading:
“The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” In On the Inconvenience of Other People. London: Duke University Press, 2022.
Hu, Tung-Hui. “Time Sharing and Virtualization.” In A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2016.