ASSEMBLE, DESASSEMBLE, REASSEMBLE: HAPTO-DIFFRACTIVE INVESTIGATION ON THE PRINTER
Research-creation PhD thesis defended by Mathilde Roussel Supervisors: Roberto Barbanti and Gwenola Wagon
The digital revolution has allowed us to dematerialize an immense volume of documents. However, every year, the number of printers sold around the world continues to increase. Due to its standardization and obsolescence, the printer is a highly problematic technological object. How can we learn to detect the ideological biases embedded within this type of machine? How can we describe the type of relationship we have with this type of object?
Using a research-creation methodology, this thesis proposes to broaden the imagination that generally accompanies printers to think of a new type of relationship with this object. This research draws on feminist epistemologies deployed by thinkers Karen Barad, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Donna Haraway and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa who propose forms of situated and embodied knowledge production. These different theories accompanied this investigation through a haptic approach to reality and a diffractive attention to the world around us.
Through seven artistic operations — a divinatory reading, a mechanical archaeology, a performance of gestures, a figuration of our violence, a construction of a printer, a manufacturing of inks and an emancipatory song — this research offers different ways to get to know printers . Each of these research operations is an opportunity to understand a little better the relationship we have with this technological object and to consider the contours of a new mode of investigation: the hapto-diffractive investigation.
