User:C3/XPUB2/T6 Assessment
DISASSEMBLE
Obsolescence
Repair
Maintenance
New forms of writing
Working with others
XPUB1
obsolete
SI26 3DS Zine
Exploring web making and webstandards with Doriane Timmermans
After learning that the Nintendo 3DS to this day can connect to the internet and has a working browser Charlie, Eleni, Tessa and I made a 3DS game playable online.
- Made a game for the Nintendo 3DS, learning about its hardware (3D function) and software specificities (The Netfront browser) through trying to use it to navigate modern websites.
- Started as a joke but in the end it happened!
- A lot of testing, a lot of note taking, using the device to connect to websites both newer and older.
- Using these observation as ways to form strategies to make a puzzle game solvable only with the use of the Nintendo 3DS.
Managed to do this solely through trying things out with html+css, without diving deep into emulation.
SI27
The theme was time and representation of time in electronic devices.
- Investigating devices and their materiality to learn how time keeping works
- houwling telecom museum (the body of obsolete technology)
interaction station
I attened a workshop held at the Interaction station, called Repurposing Chromebooks.
Where we learned how to fixed "old" Chromebooks devices that were discarded after Google dropped software support and marked them as obsolete.
I thought that the repair would be similar to the ones I've conducted autonumously and with others up until then, but it turned out to be the weirdest and at the time hardest I did.
After the workshop ended I learned that I could keep the computer. I kept it as a way to go deeper into topics that I was kind of into already, but I was experiencing only from afar.
From repair to maintenance to reuse
I decided to use it as my main device, to test out in practice what does it mean to use a device considered as obsolete in my daily life, both for classes and for my daily needs.
new forms of reading and writing
- reading hardware and software documentation
- writing code
- logs/journals as forms of taking notes of what I was learning
The maintenenance and repair page
(HARDWARE)
Towards the end of the year I started logging on the XPUB wiki my journey across maintenance and repair of devices, noting down elements that were kept out of the official documentation that I was noticing and going through (many forms, like video, articles, manuals) like failures (I once broke a computer [maybe] because I removed the CPU, why was it removable in the first place? :() and scares (like opening someone else's computer for the first time, which feels more scary that opening your own stuff)
XPUB2
At the beginning of the year I wanted to continue sharing my notes publicly about my learnings in different forms, following up with the work I started doing for the maintenance and repair page and continuing with sharing my position as the amateur, embracing different learning methods, looking for a tone that would be playful, which is how I made sense of what I was going through.
After reading and experiencing existing hardware and software documentation, I wanted to separate from it to form my own.
I started noticing many frictions in my understanding, mostly because these documents made use of al lot of technical jargon and assumptions that come from a CS field, while my background is in the Arts.
Maintenance and the XML
Xperimental Magic Lab
Xtra Magical Lab
 Logged my experience and thoughts about maintaining a space on xml.xpub.nl |
cheatsheets
I tried out ways to distributes my notes. Cheatsheets about figuring out ways to share how to make sense of the space of the terminal, using basic commands to play around with making spaces inside of the terminal that make more sense to a person than to a computer.
As I was still writing code, I adopted the form of the cheatsheet as a simple, minimal format to distribute my notes, I made two.
I used this in a workshop I hosted in class during the end of the first trimester, which showed me that the play element was
Drawings
At some point during this winter, I remembered that I had a pretty heavy drawing past. Which is also where the sticker making comes from, which I have done by hand mostly.
As with the XML stickers, drawing slowly started coming back into what I was doing at XPUB.
Bringing myself forward in the cheatsheets, using drawings as a way to convey the playful tone I've been looking for.
What is the terminal? What is a manual? How to convey these things? Does it need to be technical or can it be different? Highlighting different values?
"Obsolete" technologies
Theories and practices
Limitations
The 100th time
Learning - Documentation - Play
The Chromebook
Narration and my personal form of documentation
Concrete examples
Frustrations
Successes
Amateurism
The future
Collecting and publishing stories
A personal account on stubborness
Working with others
Some Other Space
Since the beginning of the second year I started curating events at Some Other Space with Emanuele
In the past months we've hosted exhibitions, performances, concerts, screenings and local events connected to the community of Rotterdam Charlois.
Out of these many events, the Sticker Trade Day was very well received, with many people joining and sharing their personally made stickers.
During that event we've met Jorick, a Graphic Designer who works in Rotterdam and has a print shop. After that occasion I've work towards linking him to the course and I hope that this could be the start of a good relationship, mostly considering that something like the stickers were ordered through flyer alarm, a german online service, while Jorick works locally. It is also nice to interact with people other than faceless platforms.
| jorsign.nl |
 making of the sticker stuck on the Nighjet on our way back from AMRO with eleni |
Interaction Station
To help support Boris's workshop at the Interaction Station, which really helped me as it gave me inspiration and a device to also practice reuse of a device I repaired, with all of the consequences that this brought, I made an inventory of all of the devices at the Interaction Station.
While retracing the steps and methods needed to repair the Chromebook that I am using to this day, I've gone down to the Interaction Station and I asked Boris to try to redo the process to see if I remembered things correctly.
I ended up discovering that all of the remaining Chromebooks there were of a different model than the one I've used, and so the repair process differs from the one I've made.
REASSEMBLE
Repurposing a manual
Dialoguing with official documentation
in progress
Hacking the disassemble and reassemble manual of the Chromebook DELL 11 3120 to talk about how to repair it from Google's poor design choices, that made this and many other models (the ones manifactured before 2021) "break" early, even if most of them work perfectly to this day (their hardware).
Re-using an manual (specifically the disassembly and reassembly one) of the Chromebook I've repaired and that I started to reuse after the Repurposing Chromebooks workshop, by remixing its contents and annotate it with the forms (notes, narration, journaling, play) of documentation that I have developed so far to enter a dialogue with an official document, by inserting information that is complementary to the service manual, but also being critical, retracing some context on these family of devices and the way they are designed, which prevents their reuse after they got labeled as "obsolete".
Pointin at a way onto how to disobey the software obsolescence designed into these devices, addressing the insane specificity that this repair requires, trying to accompany the reader through the process.
Inserting information coming from un-official official documentation.
The content of the manual will have a selection of the original manual, my annotations and drawings and some pages entirely from my side, including the method of repair of the Chromebook documentated by [mr.chromebox]
Playing seriously about repair, maintenance and reuse of the Chomebook I've started using since last year, and the impact that obsolescence brings.
Using documentation as a form maintenance and repair.
