DIY Methods 2022 Conference Proceedings

As the past years have proven, the methods for conducting and distributing research that we’ve inherited from our disciplinary traditions can be remarkably brittle in the face of rapidly changing social and mobility norms. The ways we work and the ways we meet are questions newly opened for practical and theoretical inquiry; we both need to solve real problems in our daily lives and account for the constitutive effects of these solutions on the character of the knowledge we produce. Methods are not neutral tools, and nor are they fixed ones. As such, the work of inventing, repairing, and hacking methods is a necessary, if often underexplored, part of the wider research process. This conference aims to better interrogate and celebrate such experiments with method. Borrowing from the spirit and circuits of exchange in earlier DIY cultures, it takes the form of a zine ring distributed via postal mail. Participants will craft zines describing methodological experiments and/or how-to guides, which the conference organisers will subsequently mail out to all participants. Feedback on conference proceedings will also proceed through the mail, as well as via an optional Twitter hashtag. The conference itself is thus an experiment with different temporalities and medialities of research exchange. As a practical benefit, this format guarantees that the experience will be free of Zoom fatigue, timezone difficulties, travel expenses, and visa headaches. More generatively, it may also afford slower thinking, richer aesthetic possibilities, more diverse forms of circulation, and perhaps even some amount of delight. The conference format itself is part of the DIY experiment

triptych pinwork // precision

Lotfi Zadeh recognized a dissatisfaction with precise systems, and defined his area of study as, “the issue of unsharpness of class boundaries — that is, the failure of things in the physical world to conform to classical Boolean logic, the true-or-false, black-or-white, zero-or-one mathematics that underpins much of computer science” (Roberts). I am applying feminist media studies to the idea of ‘fuzzy data’ in order to confront our foundations among research landscapes and trouble expressions of data units via remediation through form and material. For this critical creative project, triptych pinwork // precision, I engage participants in the haziness of geographic information and data by juxtaposing the quantum unknowing of pinning data, location, currents. Through three pinworks, I actualize the interpretive gap of placing a pin mark to map information: 1. a completed wall sculpture * A representation generated from wind data from June hurricanes in Orlando using T-pins and sewing needles to chart a composite image. * Prompts questions about imaging forces in motion, presence in threatening space, how do we visualize the wind? What else might we attempt to plot? 2. a collaborative pinning * A campus map, nesting the conference centers, the University, and Orlando. * Console-ing Passions participants, and the UCF community, will co-create: conceptualizing their locations among the spaces they inhabit during the conference. * Prompts to think about how to represent self in space with multiple pins; thinking about where they are; hybrid conference structures. 3. a born-digital custom Google map * This invites the expanded conference community, as well as the public, to respond with geotagged locations and IP addresses. * Interrogates complicit surrendering of private, identifiers of their own digital traces, problematics of location in digital space. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Pin River, these nested portraits will be realized in generative acts, considering the cartesian moments that disregard and dismiss the complexities of information and interpretation. And yet, we experience lines and boundaries and points and countables. This work resists the pinned-down defining we long for, bringing new questions to the surface, whereby our own hands hesitate to drop a pin