“Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of deterministic thinking, space and time remain frozen abstractions. Place and occasion constitute each other’s realization in human terms.”
—Aldo van Eyck (1961)
——Aldo van Eyck (1961)
1. Introduction
An instrument is a tool which allows us to quantify or represent a dimension according to a system of measurement. For example, a metre stick indicates length, a clock, time, and a speedometer combines the two to tell us how fast we are driving in kilometres per hour. A map is a diagram of places, aligned to north by a compass, while a GPS tells us how to arrive at such places in an optimal manner.
A Corporeal Instrumentality Project consists of a series of speculative design artifacts and interventions seeking to instrumentalize the human body into alternative methods for reckoning space, time, and other dimensions. These are not products manufactured in the traditional paradigm, but decentralized prototypes united by the process of hacking and DIY. Such projects are hosted on this online repository, an open-contributor wiki, in the form of step-by-step tutorials, downloadable resources, and other diverse forms of documentation.
This website also hosts a manifesto articulating the Project’s theoretical foundations while encouraging readers to share their own like-minded creations. Along the Situationist critique, the overarching meta-project celebrates the creativity and curiosity of Makers as a driving force for interventionism at an individual scale, while leveraging the collective, grassroots impulse of Maker Culture to challenge endemic structuralisms in how Modern society has quantified the world around us.
2. Semiotics: Structuralism vs. Post-Structuralism
Semiotics is the study of the systems of meaning. Its signature tripartite "sign-signifier-signified" model is a cornerstone of structuralist thinking, and dates back to the end of the 19th century. Per the classic example, the signifier "tree" (as a spoken sound or written word) evokes the signified concept of "tree" (as a tangible entity), and the relationship between the two is the sign. Whereas Charles Sanders Peirce argued that signs derive their meaning from their likeness to the referent (the real object being described), Ferdinand de Saussure argued that signs actually derive their meaning from how they are different from other signs within the same system of signs (for example, a "stool" is a "stool" insofar as it is not a "bench" or a "chair").
With the advent of post-structuralism in the latter half of the 20th century, theorists began to pose challenges towards the validity of such deterministic models of thinking. For example, Jacques Derrida espoused a technique he termed "deconstruction" which entails the close reading of a text to identify small contradictions and incongruities of interpretation. Through laying bare the radical instability of meaning, deconstruction reveals the inadequacy and artificiality of structuralist semiotics as a system for codifying the complexity of human logics. It is in this post-structuralist paradigm that A Corporeal Instrumentality Project operates.
3. Instrumental Semiotics: Cardinality and Corporeality
An instrument partakes in a system of meaning. Conventional instruments invoke cardinalized semiotics which are rationally-predetermined and thus rigid by definition. The intended outcome of this Project is to deconstruct such cardinalized systems by creating transitions towards corporealized semiotics, which are radically non-linear and foster experiential, open-ended ways of knowing through "performance."
Cardinality refers to an alignment between the instrument and a greater structure of dimensioning which is shared among members of a given culture. This entails a process of indexing the salient features of the instrument into their corresponding systems. For example, any given map can be oriented to a common system of geographic/magnetic north because it has a compass rose drawn on it, displaying the four cardinal directions. A map is typically drawn according to consistent intervals of measurement, indicated by a scale. A map may also contain lines of latitude and longitude (or other grid systems) which are labelled, and this allows the reader to situate the map in space among its neighbours. Without these indices, a map loses its meaning. Likewise, the face of a clock can only tell time because it has been set to a time zone; “12” on the clock signifies “noon” or “midnight” in this time zone, and all the hours, minutes, and seconds in between have been quantified a priori. (Amusingly, there exists no semiotic distinction between am. and p.m. on a twelve-hour clock, which is why it is impossible to tell noon from midnight from such a clock alone.)
By substituting cardinal systems with the human body as a corporeal frame of reference, we can eke out a little room to break from these rigid structures—idiomatically, to take things off the rails, to wander between the lines. What does north mean to the body? What does noon mean to the body? Severed from the pervasive structure of Modernism, our instruments cease to function in absolute terms, and are reborn in relativity. They become attuned to ourselves, empowering us to embody our own intuitive dimensionalities.
4. Interventionism in Situationism and Maker Culture
Interventionism entails a politically-performative act of altering an existing artifact towards a different intent. It is one of the hallmarks of the Situationist movement, which comes to us from the writings of Guy Debord in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Debord wrote about methods for regrounding (situating) the self, held captive within the society of the spectacle, through the creation of situations which had the power to shatter these illusions. These methods include the dérive (variously known as random-walking or psychogeography), where you navigate an urban environment driven purely by instinct and intuition; and the detournement, which is an intervention on the iconography and imagery of the dominant power, subverting them to express messages counter to their original meaning (as sometimes seen with graffiti). As a critical manifesto, Situationism asserts the individual as an autonomous agent acting independently within the confines of the immersive hegemony of modernity.
In the context of Maker Culture, interventionism is similar to “hacking.” Maker Culture itself is a 21st-century ideology which enshrines the individual amateur as a Maker with access to the skills and tools for making things. It has roots in the 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement, where socialist polemicists like John Ruskin and William Morris advocated for the inalienable value of handicrafts in an era where rampant industrialization had resulted in poor-quality manufactured goods, deplorable factory conditions, and privatization of the means of production. In the contemporary world, Maker Culture seeks to empower Makers through access to tools (e.g. tool libraries), communal workspaces (e.g. makerspaces), software (e.g. open-source), and knowledge (e.g. wikis, how-to guides). In addition to traditional crafts, Makers often work with rapid prototyping (e.g. 3D printing), physical computing, programming, and other technologically-driven areas. The movement is spearheaded by Maker Magazine and Maker Faires/festivals around the world.
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