These are views of the secret life of technology in, and around, the Transcriptions studio. The life of technology is part of our life: this is the message of such recent theorists of technology as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. Look at our world, they say; do you not see—instead of the tired, false division between technology and people—a continuum of shared agencies and hybridized identities at once machinic and organic, techno and cultural? There are differences, but none in essence. The differences that matter for machines are the ones that have always mattered: power, age, beauty, cruelty, and so on. On this page, therefore, we honor the machines we love, mourn, laugh at, call "old," call "inhuman" (just as we call some people inhuman), call faithful,  . . . . Here are portraits, still lifes, and landscapes of some of the creatures of technology that share the life of the Transcriptions Project.

Dual-Monitor Workstation

Low-Tech Web Page (Whiteboard)

Computers No One Loves Anymore

Fan's View of Computer

Server Row

The Hole in the Speaker

Contemporary Still Life

Guarding the Power

Still Life: Keyboard with Cable

Discarded Server Mourned by No One

Mouse Hole

Little Router

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Donna Haraway

Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)

Haraway Links on VoS

Bruno Latour

Latour, Bruno, Aramis, or The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)

Latour, Bruno, "A Door Must Be Either Open or Shut: A Little Philosophy of Techniques," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 272-81

Latour, Bruno, "On Technical Mediation--Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy," Common Knowledge 3, n. 2 (Fall 1994): 29-64

Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993)

Latour, Bruno, "Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts," in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 225-58

Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour, "A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies," in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 259-64

Latour Links on VoS

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This page created by Alan Liu for the Transcriptions Team, 12/21/99 (revised 12/21/99)