ABSTRACT
If our age is anarchic in mood and rife with nebulous scenarios no wonder material culture studies are booming. Embracing a wide range of practices in art and design, these theoretical as well as pragmatic investigations wrestle with the marvelous multi-materialities and wondrous plasticities emerging genie-like from opaque corporations engaged in optimizing their affective resonances. Think of the arcane processes required to manufacture “living technology” (i.e., microbial organisms from scratch), or the computational “superpositioning” of quantum entities that are in two states at the same time, or the lightning-quick “entanglement” of electrons, or the conjuring of hypothetical “zombies” that may or may not inhabit the machinic brain bereft of self. As we sink deeper into a haunted period where “real” assets or concrete objects with lasting power depreciate or vanish, the veil of representational opacity descends. Beyond any ethical constraints imposed by the academy—whether in the science fiction outback of game design, or in the apocalyptic artificial intelligence industries, or in open-ended synthetic biology laboratories —a disturbing question lingers. Are we (or, rather, the adept “they”) just making a lot of equivocal stuff we can’t identify and that is of no discernible use - or even useless - by design? Figuring out what these undecideables are and why and to whom they appeal might be dramatic enough. The author addresses an even more fundamental issue: How should we tackle the massive breakdown in communication between those who are initiates into the production of weird phenomena and those who are merely confounded users or awestruck beholders of spooky effects and elusive methods?
