A certain breakthrough

From the call for papers on ‘speculative hardware’ we have selected two long articles that might begin to articulate a philosophy of the speculative for hardware and design. As part of the research I also conducted an interview with David Cuartielles (part of the founding collective initiating the Arduino platform) and held an interview and workshop with the artist Martin Howse, these will be published online as a companion to this special section of Digital Creativity. In the two selected articles, relations between matter and media (information, the digital, analogue electronics, physical computing and infrastructure) are foregrounded as a significant concern for media theory and in their proximity to new materialisms. We might extend these concerns to what Jussi Parrika names the ‘real but weird materialities’ of media (2012). Cultural concern with such weird materialities was, perhaps, prompted by the materialist methodologies of media theorist Friedrich Kittler. We used Kittler’s essay ‘There is no Software’ (1992) to structure our call for contributions. This essay was referenced explicitly in our call so that from the outset we could make clear the position that electronic media are speculative and grounded in the material (the body, the earth and in conductive substances). It is from this position that this introductory text discusses the essays included in this special section of Digital Creativity and approaches its subject of a speculative hardware. But what is a speculative hardware? In this introduction I want to explore this question by opening up a tension between the materiality and immateriality of speculative hardware by following the inclusion of work by Howse in the first article by Spencer Roberts, ‘Scratching Your Own Itch’ (Roberts 2016) and by taking a lead from the author of the second article, Jamie Brassett, in the speculative moment of thinking about design, through design and as design. When I say ‘following’ I rather mean to use these two leads as points of departure. The vector I want to trace out of these points, by way of introducing some of the themes in the articles included in this issue, begins with Howse’s (2006) translation of Kittler’s essay ‘Pynchon and Electromysticism’. Thomas Pynchon’s metafiction as well as his sense of electromysticism might be said to permeate Kittler’s own ‘speculative’ hardware—his ‘sheer hardware’. Kittler’s sheer hardware, as I feel Whitelaw (2013) correctly intuits it, is an imaginary media ‘no-software’ material computer (Whitelaw 2013). This is what might be called a thought experiment in matter, one that serves to reveal Parrika’s real but weird media. In this combination of the weird with media, there is an encounter with the strangeness of media materialities, ephemeral energetic fields and temporalities that ‘simply make you feel strange’; and a precipitous sheerness, like standing on the edge of chaos—perhaps this is the sense of the speculative that is implied in Roberts’ reference to coercive powers of the technical object and enabled in Brassett’s opening up of the speculative machine to the thought of Isabelle Stengers—the notion that there might be a new ‘normal’, that what is considered ‘normal’ now, in fact, is simply the chronoclastic and morphological material of speculative becomings—we will have further recourse to this before concluding, suffice to list for now: the powers of a shimmering and energetic field, a glamour; the Digital Creativity, 2016 Vol. 27, No. 2, 132–142, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2015.1119551