Developing a critical technical audiovisual performance practice engaging with 'the web' as both medium and subject matter.

Charlotte Roe | MA by Research (Music), University of Huddersfield

Context: Critical Technical Practice

Page contents: Introduction Definition Origins Methodology Relevance to my practice

Introduction

I first discovered this concept, early on in my research, mentioned in Live Coding: A User’s Manual, at a time when I was still thinking of my practice being situated either fully or partially in the practice of live coding. The term, referenced multiple times throughout the book, is introduced in the beginning sections as a key concept informing the wider cultural context of the practice. “The second part is more speculative and conceptual in its register, allowing space for discussion of the many ways live coding reflects and informs wider cultural and political concerns. In this sense we identify live coding as a critical technical and aesthetic practice, able to activate sensemaking across interdisciplinary fields.” (Blackwell et al., 2022, p.8)

At this time, I already had a sense that there was a type of art, made working with technology, that served to somehow rebel against that technology, perhaps by skewering its typical or intended use. I admired developers and digital artists who made their own tools, many of whom I discovered through the live coding scene (see Context: Live Coding for examples), because, as I saw it, their practices seemed to reject the passive convenience offered by computers, and sought to engage with them as tools of play and invention. This is not to imply that this is an outlook unique to live coders, or artists, or any particular group. Hacking and open source development are widespread across many practices in computing, and have been since the early years of the field (Buozis, 2023; Tozzi, 2017). One of those practices, net art, being equally influential to this body of work (see Context: Net Art).

I intended to develop a practice that engaged with computing in this active, creative, and open way. And particularly because, unlike some of the influences I have mentioned, I wanted to build a practice that was both made with technology, and was about technology; the term ‘critical technical practice’ struck me as a potential existing framework for doing this, so I sought to trace its origins to get a complete understanding of it.

Definition of 'Critical Technical Practice

A critical technical practice is any kind of creative practice, whether writing, art, music, software development, where the practitioner, having gained a significant level of understanding or skill with a certain technology, then makes work with and/or about that technology that serves to engage critically with it.

And to ‘engage critically’ is to explore and comment on the social, political, and cultural context in which that technology operates.

Origins of the term

“A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity -- one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique.” (Agre, 1997)

This quote is taken from the 1997 essay in which the term was first defined by Philip E Agre.

Agre, an AI researcher turned humanities professor, is an interesting figure in the context of technological criticism. As described in a 2021 Washington Post article (Albergotti, 2021), he was active from the mid 90s to the late 00s, publishing writings analysing the social and political implications of various computational technologies. As stated in the article, Agre stopped publishing writings around 2009, but the body of work he did publish has proved to be relevant to the landscape of modern technology.

Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI is a mostly biographical narrative in which Agre recounts his experiences as a graduate student at MIT in the late 80s, researching AI. He describes the field of AI research as being very self-contained, focussed exclusively on ‘technical formalisation’, and as a result dismissive of fields outside itself, particularly anything within the arts and humanities.

As Agre explains, this is not meant as a condemnation of the field, or anyone working within it, but as something simply worth noting as a natural consequence the ways the field was conceived of, the types of people who were brought into it, and the narrowness of the perspectives they brought with them. Using himself as a typical example, Agre explains how he gained early access to college as a ‘maths prodigy’, studying Mathematics then Computer Science through his undergraduate degree without being required to ‘...take many humanities courses, or learn to write in a professional register’ (Agre, 1997, pg. 186). Agre goes on to cite his lack of exposure to any kind of critical theory or discursive academic skills as being a major reason he struggled to settle on a thesis topic for his PhD. He found, in the first instance, a difficulty in finding something ‘new’ to investigate in the field of AI, a problem that did not already have a number of proposed solutions. But also, he found it difficult to look into non-technical fields in any meaningful way because of a rigidness of thought cultivated by an engineer’s education:

“As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism.” (Agre, 1997, p. 186)

To be clear, Agre’s claim is not that this was a struggle unique to him, but that it was characteristic of almost every practitioner in the field at the time. Agre claimed that AI projects have their own internal logic wherein the problem is defined by the solution and the solution is evaluated on whether it ‘works’. This can be extrapolated to many computational endeavours, the origins of Computer Science in general do not massively precede the field of AI, and both are built of a commitment to ‘technical formalisation’ over ‘behaviourism’. Agre’s proposed solution is critical-technical practice; studying other fields and ways of thinking, and using critical and discursive practices, as well as technical ones, to work through problems.

The Washington Post article referenced earlier argues that many of the predictions/warnings made by Agre during the time he was publishing have been seen to have come to pass over the last decade or so. The main example of this is from a 1994 paper ‘Surveillance and Capture: Two Modes of Privacy’, in which Agre describes computer aided information capture as one ‘cultural model of privacy’ (Agre, 1994, pg. 740). This is in contrast to ‘surveillance’, argued by Agre, to be a more culturally understood model with more historical representation (police surveillance, state surveillance etc). The ‘capture’ model, rather than being associated with government and the legal system, was, at the time, a new privacy issue associated with computing and its implementation into the workplace and industry; the technical formalisation of the actions of workers and consumers in a business, and the capturing and storing of those actions as information or data.

That Agre was able to identify an aspect of commercial software development (data capture) as being so fundamental to the philosophy of computing so early on, and have the foresight to frame it as the privacy issue it would unambiguously go on to become, demonstrates a critical practice that was an effective one, accurate in its analysis.

Much has been written (Albergotti, 2021; Benjamin, 2019; Doctorow, 2023; Liu, 2020; McNeil, 2020; Muldoon, 2022; Tanner, 2020; Taplin, 2017; Tarnoff, 2022) about the problems that have arisen from the rise, in recent decades, of the megalithic tech companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple etc) that now hold so much sway over our lives. Some of these problems (platformisation, data harvesting) I discuss in further detail in this writing. An often cited cause of the destructive effects these technocratic companies have had on our cultures and societies is a lack of critical engagement with fields outside of engineering (Barrowman, 2018; Benjamin, 2019; Lucille Alice Suchman, 2007), and a dismissal of the idea that politics or culture or art or psychology or anything beyond ‘does the code work and does it make money?’ should be of any concern to those putting these products into the world. Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI describes exactly that mindset, why it is dangerous, and why critical technical practice is the antidote.

If the slogan of the developers during the early years of Facebook was ‘move fast and break things’, maybe the slogan of those of us engaged with critical technical practice could be ‘move slow and think about what you might break’.

Relevance to my practice

Understanding this notion of critical-technical practice, as put forth by Agre, prompted me to consider, firstly, the broad notion of an artistic practice that utilises technology as being a kind of critical-technical practice. This is certainly the context in which it is discussed in Live Coding: A User’s Manual.

In formulating an idea of what my own critical technical practice might be, I had to answer two questions: ‘What is the practice?’ and ‘What is the technology?’

I am interested in the web, as a technology, as a social space, as a cultural entity, and as a ‘thing’ people are capable of forming complex relationships with. It affects our work, our social lives, our mental health, our engagement with the media, our memories and our identities. Even preceding this MA research, it has been my intention and my practice to make art work about the internet. I also work as a web developer, I am comfortable with the tools and technologies of web development, and simply because of my job, I presumably understand them at a deeper level than the average person. Working as a web developer has also, naturally, situated me to think critically about the web and its role in culture (see Context: The Web for more on this).

It was coming across the notion of critical technical practice that got me to connect these two things. If I want to make work about the web, and I know quite well how to make websites, then how about making websites my medium?