To reclaim technical objects is to also reclaim our own modes of relating to them, which isn’t an easy task thanks to our tech overlords and their century long splitting of the world into designers and users of technologies. The stabilization of the designer-user dichotomy helped normalize the narrative of technical objects as being introduced to culture from the outside, like the Promethean gift offered from those above, ready for adoption. More than a rejection of this narrative on the basis of critique, we need counter-narratives that we can affirmatively endorse, embrace, and live with/as.

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During this workshop, we will collectively inhabit one such counter-narrative, its central figure being the Technological Nomad who models a relationship with the technical object analogous to that which nomadic communities have had with the land. Through a critical-phenomenology exercise, we will each embody the figure of the technological nomad by locating ourselves on the terrain, recognizing the different walls that entrap us, and collectively identify cracks on these walls so that we can help each other begin to move again, to rediscover the nomads we’ve always been.

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