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Introduction: Materiality

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Laura Forlano
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STS is well known for its unique approaches to the study of materiality, a central
topic for inquiry since the founding of the field. The late 1980s saw the develop-
ment of actor-­network theory (ANT): an approach that provocatively assumed the
analytical equivalence (“symmetry”) of human and nonhuman actors (Callon
1986, 1987; Latour 1996, 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). Microbes, electrons, plants,
animals, test tubes, people, and laboratory equipment therefore all played a role in
scientific discoveries and technological developments. For ANT scholars, agency
is not embedded in a single device, object, or person, but emerges from its distri-
bution among this network of human and nonhuman actors. By the early 21st cen-
tury, STS scholars regularly took such objects, devices, and tools as “matters of
concern” (Latour 2004) by examining how they incorporate mixed agencies and
politics: in other words, examining hybrid ontologies (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013).
A similar focus on materiality appeared in the work of feminist technoscience
around the same time. This strand of research focuses on the ways in which gen-
der and identity are constructed in and through science and technology, while em-
phasizing how knowledge is situated, embodied, and localized in such a way as to
exclude minority voices (Haraway 1988). The recent development of new material-
ism synergizes this approach with ontologies research by paying attention to the
hybrid agencies and ethics of living and nonliving things (Barad 2007; Bennett
2009; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). We are asked to “meet the universe half-
way” by viewing objects like quarks as imbued with both social understandings
and material agencies. New materialism often takes up questions related to human
relations with other beings in order to contribute to questions around climate
change and the environment and has been particularly influential in multispecies
anthropology (Kirksey 2014; Haraway 2008). These core approaches in STS define
the field’s attention to materiality not as a static, obdurate, or objective constraint
upon social life, but as hybrid matter constituted through the arrangements of
people and things, talk, and practice.
Along with text-­based scholarship about materiality in STS, scholars have ex-
plored the topic through research methodologies that offer new ways of thinking
about and engaging publics around complex sociotechnical issues (DiSalvo 2009;
Michael 2012). These projects make representations and visualizations; design
things, prototypes, and experiments; create opportunities for intervention and
participation; and explore the topic through art and performance (Felt et al. 2016;
Latour and Weibel 2005). Examples include Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental

11
 Health Clinic and Feral Robotic Dog project (Bratton and Jeremijenko 2008; Lane
et al. 2006), Trevor Paglen’s critical geography (2009a, 2009b; Paglen and Thomp-
son 2007), Carl DiSalvo’s adversarial design and speculative civics (2012, 2016;
DiSalvo et al. 2016), Natasha Myers and Joseph Dumit’s gaming and visualizations
(Burri and Dumit 2008; Dumit 2014; Myers and Dumit 2011), Matt Ratto and Garnet
Hertz’s critical making (Hertz and Parikka 2012; Ratto 2011), and Hanna Rose
Shell’s films (2012a, 2012b). Within this tradition, the making of digital technolo-
gies and systems is of particular interest to this volume (Vertesi et al. 2016). As evi-
dence for the growing interest in these more inventive and engaged forms of
scholarship within STS, we have also explored design and making at workshops
(Forlano et al. 2012; Loukissas et al. 2013) and in a “Making and Doing” exhibition
at the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference since 2015.
Despite this focus on materiality in STS over the past several decades, emerging
scholarship on the digital and the social in the 1990s initially emphasized the de-
materialized, virtual nature of online human relations, rejecting earlier material-
ist theory. Drawing upon media studies or communication theory, the digital and
material were essentialized and separated into discrete units. Digital essentialism
still haunts many studies of emerging technology today, in part due to the linguis-
tic difficulties of articulating the mutual shaping and interdependence of the ma-
terial and the digital. Still, more recent work on digital systems in STS and related
fields has gravitated toward more complex, even hybrid understandings of digital
materiality (Blanchette 2011; Dourish and Mazmanian 2011; Pink et al. 2016). Such
scholars explore the ways in which the digital can be understood to be material
(Dourish 2017) or explore digital work as practical action. They also reclaim the
material, social, and environmental conditions of digital production, use, and dis-
card through investigations into maintenance (Graham and Thrift 2007), repair
(Jackson 2014), failure and breakdown (Rosner and Ames 2014; Rosner and Fox
2016), and care (Mol 2008).
The chapters in this section serve to advance and deepen our understanding of
digital materiality. Rather than offering generalizations about the properties of
materiality or digitality, the essays explore how digital materialities emerge in
their sites of inquiry. Alexandre Camus and Dominique Vinck, for example, offer
an ethnographic account of the digitization of the extensive concert archives of the
Montreux Jazz Festival over the past 50 years. For the archives, “becoming digital”
is a dynamic and interactive process of digital craftsmanship that requires the
embodied, material labor (physical, cognitive, visual, and aural), time, and effort
of engineers. In this case, the digital materiality of music takes on specific qualities
such as tangibility and fluidity as well as textures such as softness, thickness,
weight, boundaries, spatiality, relations, and networks. As the concerts are digitized—­
rather than becoming immaterial—­they are rematerialized into new forms such as
individual songs, playlists, and setlists. These new material forms are clickable,
taggable, searchable, and indexable; as such, they have new associations with one
another as well as with networks. The authors thus illustrate the ways in which the
digital is distributed into networks that “do and undo the concerts,” thereby saving
the archives and allowing them to circulate. They also demonstrate how the digital
and the material are not discrete categories or properties, but emerge locally in
dynamic relation to each other.
Yanni Loukissas’s interactive visualization and essay, which is presented as an
online “data documentary,” complements this volume. The piece investigates the
“life and death of data” through engagement with the plant collection of Harvard

12 Forlano
University’s Arnold Arboretum, which includes 71,250 accessions between 1872
and 2012. This project draws on social and cultural research as well as the making
of a longitudinal digital visualization in order to inquire into the social, material,
and institutional histories of data. It also questions how to study the institutions
that create, maintain, and share large digital collections. The visual and literal di-
mensions of this piece inspire us to examine data differently, developing notions
of “hybrid materialities.” Specifically, Loukissas highlights the tension between
the virtual, ancillary, freely accessible, open, and transparent qualities that are
often attributed to digital data on the one hand, and their materiality, centrality,
locality, and situated significance on the other.
David Ribes considers the methodological implications of studying digital ma-
teriality by drawing on four intellectual traditions: ethnomethodology, actor-­
network theory, the anthropology of classification, and historical ontology and
epistemology. Specifically, he asks, “How do we approach studies of things, ob-
jects, stuff, and materials, their agencies and interrelations, in action and across
time?” Drawing on empirical cases from two large ethnographic studies, the Mul-
ticenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) and Long-­Term Ecological Research (LTER),
Ribes argues that researchers must “discover” the digital and the material through
fieldwork. In these cases, blood and water samples as well as related datasets ex-
hibit tremendous flexibility, allowing them to be understood as either digital or
material in nature depending on the specific context. As a result, Ribes argues that
interpretations about the nature of materiality must be read through multiple,
sometimes competing, theoretical traditions.
Nerea Calvillo deploys digital visualizations as an inventive research method
(Lury and Wakeford 2012) for “thinking with the environment.” Across two
projects—­In the Air and Pollen In the Air—­Calvillo describes the process of hands-­on
collaborative making of visualizations as a means of investigating the materiality
of invisible gases and the politics around public air quality datasets. The visualiza-
tions are speculative in that they bring to life new imaginaries and worlds that en-
gage with environmental issues. The resulting airscapes—­aerial maps that present
“air as a landscape that can be inhabited”—­are a form of ethnographic engagement
with the air. Calvillo’s visualizations do not merely represent scientific data about
air, but also reimagine the relations between humans and gaseous nonhumans
through embodied, affective experiences. Most significantly, these projects recon-
figure the politics around “air as a harm” to humans in favor of a feminist, multi-
species encounter predicated on collective values and environmental justice.
As a group, then, these essays offer a perspective upon digital encounters that
embraces the material without essentializing its properties. This requires engag-
ing with digital materiality as hybrid, shifting, and situated; an emic category to be
analyzed in context; and a property to be played with and ultimately troubled.

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