If...Elif...Else

Abstract

This session brings together four case studies that identify and explore counter-movements to dominant narratives formulated about, or disseminated through, innovative applications of computing and information technologies during the 1960s and 1970s. Often made public within a rhetoric of widespread optimism, these applications emerged in tandem with new perspectives on knowledge, theory, labor, and expertise among the social and professional groups implicated in their development and use. Studies of expertise and experience in STS and social constructivist approaches to the history of technology provide rich scholarship on responses, resistances, and appropriations of technological innovations. This session expands such approaches through the lens of “counter-narratives”: oppositional responses that use a technical artifact to subvert, detour, resignify authorial claims made about, or though, this artifact. Focused specifically on computing and information technologies, this session’s participants collectively interrogate different modes in which affordances of certain computational tools or techniques became operational in the production of divergent knowledge claims and technological imaginations. The papers address technical persistences underlying professed rejections of calculative rationality in postwar design theory, controversies around computer-generated graphics of scenery vis a vis industrial developments in the British countryside, decentralized facilities as a means of safeguarding production and disempowering labor unions in North American manufacturing, and software systems (and their reconstructions) as narrative structures that reposition actors and redefine their social roles. Participants also reflect on their methods of engaging and interpreting contradictory, sometimes polar-opposite, perspectives. Ultimately, “counternarrative” becomes a vehicle for critically activating recognized, clandestine, or suppressed actions and actors in computing’s multivalent histories.

Individual Presentations

• Post-Rationality: Value Shifts and Technical Persistences in North American Design Theory - Theodora Vardouli, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University

• Computer-Aided Perspectives of Britain’s Modern Industrial Landscape - Moa Karolina Carlsson, University of Edinburgh

• Software as Narrative, City as Syntax - Daniel Cardoso Llach, Carnegie Mellon University

• Manufacturing Networks: Computer Science in Industrial America - Devin Kennedy

Session Organizers

• Moa Karolina Carlsson, University of Edinburgh

• Theodora Vardouli, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University