Our inaugural text, To undo nature; on refusal as return, brought us a refusal infused with generosity – and unease. Placing us firmly in the context of the ongoing pandemic, we were invited to be-with and sit-with our undoings. This month, B Covington Sam-Sumana moves our focus from ourselves to ‘our furnitures’ (and back) in a tripartite poem-essay, Next, Unleash the Data Furnitures. Covington Sam-Sumana moves with us, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, in line after line, between the multiscalar relations and tensions that exist – and have existed, for some time – between technology and flesh. Modern design and its multitude of forms are read through the luxurious excess of gathered language and embedded media, all of which tease out their ideas of refusal. For now, at the beginning of 2021, we are “finally in a position to accept and enumerate, in the appropriate and accountable moderation, the functional and phenomenological bedrock offered to us by the vestigial legacies of mid-century modernist techno-utopianism.” Let us, as Covington Sam-Sumana compels us, now find “strange powers and ways to transform [our] embodied awareness.”

I

Neo-pragmatist Sami Pihlström
stated that culture is continuously reconstituted
through our social action and linguistic encounter with
the symbolic world.⁠1

These social and linguistic
Encounters with a ‘world’ imply

1.a direct connection between the decisions of dividual agents and community biologies and
2.terrains of the social, linguistic, and symbolic existing across the spectrum of the microorganic and the macroorganic.

There is the conception of culture as a phenomenon and a feature of any community biology,
Whether specifically anthropocentric, generally zoological, or other.

Media collapses distances between individuals
And artefacts of culture
In the form of narratives, information, and interfaces
As media technologies themselves advance
So do the bandwidth of artefacts capable of being transduced.
We move from using media and culture to
Relay simple symbols
Toward relaying more complex, multimodal symbols.

Given an argument
That the ‘cultural reconstitutions’ of Pihlström
Operate not only in the direction of the dividual to the communal but
Also antedirectionally,
Then it is deducible that our symbols have the capacity to
Transform us at the level of the behavioural
And therein at the level of
The epigenetic and the ontogenetic:
Influencing our
Decisions, productions, and re-productions.
Undermining the Apollonian ergonome
What then becomes warranted are the
Presence of machinics
Which unceasingly recast
Bone,
By denaturing it into cartilage
So as to yield
Foul slurries of plasma.

Upon reinjection Into the body, This is plasma which serves As carrying matrix for Foreign innoculates accumulated along the way To recurse into new bone and different marrows. Giving fresh blood. ... As Octavia Butler says And Rae Hsu echoes in Yellowsoup⁠2 “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”⁠3

... Dualism between body and apparatus
As characterized in definitions
Of interface like those given by design historian John Harwood.
Define “interface” by the stricture,
“Site at which the human body interacts with a complex mechanical apparatus”.⁠4

Most curious here
Is the categorical lossiness
Incurred by this kind of definition.
It befits an ergonome which
Often would be obsolete
If not progressed into the throes of the charge toward its obsolescence
By the time prototype has reached the
Final stages of its production cycle.

Within a standard industrial ecology
Use of such product begets
Emission byproducts and materials of
Discard
Categorizable as waste product
Or refuse:
Yields characteristic of
Plasma’s decanting from bone.

II
The heat of a loud, messy, wet voice
Declares

“I’m sorry to tell you
Unfortunately, due to
The lossy character of your mechanical apparatus’ interaction with the
Formalized vision of human body external to you,
Your ability to observe, recognize, and metabolize the signals which allow
For your participation in the
Hominid-blob-metaverse (to-date having leveraged swathes of youth culture and national ministries Of science and IT toward its materialization)
That ability is about as effective
As constructing the ad spot for a three-in-a-row candy crush knockoff infoscam with the care and Budget of a screen adaptation of Shakespearean Othello stage play.
Wasteful!
The Republic of South Korea’s
National government
Planned at 2020’s end
‘To spend over W400b [in the] XR industry in 2021’⁠5 within a time when its Domestic media policy configurations
Impact directly the tonality
Of the global culture stack
In its totality.
Meaning, as well
The commercial, geophysical, and sociopolitical
To unpredictable scalar exponent.”

That’s one thing of many
An obstetrician performing
An Ultrasound on humanity
During the opening of 2021
Might consider saying!

And in response,
They may be asked
By one lone voice in the crowd,
“Obstetrician,
But what can assure
That the birth is a healthy birth?”
While a cacophony may even
Thunder from the back of the room,
“But why are we even talking about
‘Scalar terror’ when it’s
An unnecessary conversation? We.
Don’t even know what that is.”

And these concerns are valid ones.
Of course!
Particularly the second.
Because why fear the
Ability for individuals
To become swollen into
Vessels for the Chaotic;
Unchained from the orders of time
And under a condition of ambiguity as to whether they are
Inflammation
Or
Organic plasmic outgrowth.

In 2021 this swelling happens in manners sometimes
Decoupled from choice
To Individuals who
Collectively think
And collectively
Subdivide time
And modulate collective
Apollonian ergonomics
In accordance with
Micromedia formatting’s arbitrary dictations
And consequential memetics.
What horror even can come from that?

As well the obstetrician might
After sitting silently for a moment
Think to share with us
The fact that we offload our cognition
Into the environment around us,
Harvesting it on
A need-to-know basis.⁠6
We have, on average,
More than proven our ill-preparedness
To manage transversal appropriately between
Micro and macro organic,
Loci of conscious control.

What we can see is that the lossy frictions
Stimulated between these scalar modalities are,
At the turn of this millennium’s third decade,
Plainly abhorrent.

A cultural pathology
The obstetrician might think to
Diagnose would be on the basis of humanity’s impaired faculty to
Properly preserve and process the
Haemorrhages of wild plasmic data refuse
That humanity produces.
And it wouldn’t be because resources are lacking
But rather because they are not evenly distributed
And easily accessible for all high bandwidth producers of data.

Platform capitalists have building-worthy numbers of servers
And libraries have data preservation heuristics
Like the NDSA’s Levels of Digital Preservation
To guide them.
But while individual subjects may have contracts with platform capitalists
Or consumer-grade curated media server solutions
To harbour their wild plasmic data
There are yet few good solutions to negotiate preservation
In ways that are emotionally guided,
Implicitly encrypted, and ergonomically
Evergreen in ways which mean
They would be technologically evergreen, too.

This is something important when dealing with individual subjects whose reach
Can rival that of any large corporation
But who are time-poor.
They may not have even an hour (boo-hoo) to do so much as
Organize the constellation of
Digital materials allowing them to project themselves
Into social space with total
Agency and authority.

To that, I question:
How might some hypothetical
Organ-interface of archive and
Organization allow the
Plasmic data refuse of high-bandwidth industrial entities
To be preserved, these entities existing variably and fluidly between the scale of the macro-Organizational, micro-organizational, and the domestic
So as to produce high-efficiency internal economies, energy
Independent of the individualistic anarcholibertarian
Agonisms of decentralization?

III
During the post Second World War period, the handiwork of midcentury modern cultural agents composited a techno-utopian aesthetic agenda disharmonious and anterior to their general intentions to develop a multi-sensory and popular language for the industrial modernism of the coming Information Age.

The alliance of such an agenda with techno-utopianism was one not wholly accountable to the malignancies which technologies of Automation and industrialization are capable of incurring.

The fervour for “revolutionary artifacts allowing for adaptations to the new, technological environments of the postwar period” ⁠7 came with optimism regarding the cybernetic, shared with us by Michigan State University’s Justus Nieland in 2020’s Happiness By Design, within the context of an extended analysis on the filmic works of the midcentury modern Eames design team. Looking retroactively at selected works of Ray and Charles Eames, we see, in particular, works of furniture able to help us parse this vector of techno-utopianism. Its design expression manifest in the respects of micro-organizational and domestic scale agents.

Attention toward their famed Solar Do-Nothing Machine provides precisely this: gesture, first, as Nieland mentions, toward a “utopian environment to come”⁠8 by making an attempt, primarily, to “train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily”⁠9 , and, subsequently, an expression of postwar techno utopianism’s obfuscation of Aryan geomaterialist grounding.

Plainly speaking, the object offers a glorification for the artifaciæ of the Eameses’ design prowess, the resultant representation of operational genius demonstrated through the object. The midcentury modern styled design agenda offered—to the period following fascism’s supposed popular defeat and anterior to its aim of multi-sensory and popular language for industrial modernism—a materialist programme declaring its victory as the natural and obvious consequence of inherent liberal ideological superiority.

This is most immediately obvious in the Solar Do-Nothing Machine’s inexorable Aryanist-Classist anti-Black overtone, wherein the exercise of skin tanning is bundled together with the generation of electrical power in such manner which agonizes the ergonomics of leisure: it is a machine designed for the user to be physically laid back, relying upon the duration of the user’s tanning session to generate the movement of its fans, positioning the user’s physical blackening as the meter for its follies.

In its stead as a device for which multi-functionality is an ambient condition (in a fashion similar to the smartphone, the Swiss Army knife, or the video gaming console), the Solar Do-Nothing Machine is most relevant when it comes to unpacking the industrial modernist tendency to produce novelty through the means of obfuscation. It enables one to overlook, particularly as a result of its formal categorization as a toy, that the machine asks and agonizes the user to assume a bodily position adjacent to that of Fibonacci’s golden angle in order to receive maximum benefit from the machine.

This agonism is an invisible, ambient condition, reliant largely on the embodied knowledge of the user to access its functionality as an object of furniture rather than simply its presentation as toy. The value of this ambient condition lies precisely upon that detail of the device’s information architecture. In some sense, the data of this condition is stored, encoded, and accessible as an embodied awareness. And that accessibility—the knowledge to lie back, without prompt, at an angle—perhaps this represents the end goal of a system wherein our furnitures go more totally about their work as palaces of memory for the many plasmas of wild data we incur throughout our lives. Doing less to accelerate our consumptions and productions in terms of speed, as Virilio or Calvino suggested during the previous millennium, and more to do with the assurance that our physical and immaterial ergonomic sense cultures well. More to do with assuring our ability to move liquidly between scales of organic agency. We end up with exoskeletons exogenous to our bodies. We look toward furnitures offloading our cognition, offloading our waste, agonizing the plurality of our experiences and their consequent processes of production.

From the start of 2021, we are finally in position to accept and enumerate, in the appropriate and accountable moderation, the functional and phenomenological bedrock offered to us by the vestigial legacies of mid-century modernist techno-utopianism. In the stead of fresh Formica and polyurethane, one might take materials in some unrecyclable or inert condition to exploit them in the interest of the productive reinforcement of legacy virtual experiences, such as the manner evident with Ray and Charles Eames’ Solar Do-Nothing Machine.

To grant the user strange powers and ways to transform and expand their embodied awareness⁠10 is the potential latent to XR technologies not yet realized to proper scale at 2021’s start. Designers await the heightening of render speeds eagerly, but for its democratization? Wait, we can no longer do. We should have this transformation into a slow speed yet agile, multi-scalar species. Let go of the high cost and embrace the high bandwidth, for slow shall we wisely be… Let us refuse their neglect and unleash the data furnitures.

B Covington Sam-Sumana is an investigator of system sonics, transience, narratology, and metabolism. Known firstly for their musical composition, their interrogations have spawned installation works, video, text, and visual art.