Please join the Environmental Humanities Working Group at our meeting on Tuesday, December 2, 2pm to 3pm, in THH 309K, where we will discuss work in progress from Suiyi Tang (American Studies and Ethnicity): “Common Techniques: Craft Arts, Computation, and Democracy at Midcentury".

We’ll circulate the draft via the working group email list a week before the meeting. To join the Environmental Humanities Working Group email list, follow these instructions.

Abstract: This paper analyzes the techno-aesthetic pedagogy that emerged from the Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa’s Alvarado School Arts Workshop, an experimental arts education program that ran in the San Francisco Unified School District from 1986-92. Influenced by her mentor Buckminster Fuller’s belief that phenomenologies of play effectively mediated one’s understanding of their responsibility to the social whole, Asawa’s Alvarado School implemented myriad mathematically inflected craft exercises that activated what she called a “knowing how” transmissible only through the physical act of doing. Reading the analog computational play initiated by Asawa's craft exercises alongside Fuller’s World Game for resource management and infrastructure design, this paper tracks the emergence of a cybernetics-motivated Cold War educational philosophy that proposed computation both as a mode of social control and speculative thought, where axiomatic-driven procedures rested uneasily next to ludic imperatives of improvisation, confrontations with the incomputable, and the activation of technique as an irreducible vitality in excess of either human organ, phenomenological body-subject, or given sociotechnical arrangement. At stake in Asawa’s games, this paper argues, is the potential destabilization of the U.S. Cold War state’s epistemology of control, a destabilization that emerges against the backdrop of what Asawa conceived as aesthetics — a technical mode of doing that risks pivoting the human subject into a novel order of things. Perpendicular to contemporary attempts to read expressions of social differentiation into Asawa’s aesthetic forms, the paper closes with a speculative reading of the epigenesis articulated by Asawa’s artworks and aesthetic philosophy — an epigenesis, informed by her pedagogical practice, that anticipates what Sylvia Wynter calls a genuine “science of human systems” equipped to confront the autopoetic reinscription of the modern episteme.