Dis/Assembling

One idea the extended lab model is designed to convey is that a lab is not only an assemblage of assemblages, but also, as a punctualized “whole,” a lab functions as one piece in several larger assemblages. It is worth emphasizing, though, that assembly (and disassembly, which is never really separable from assembly) is an ongoing process in lab life. Any working lab is constantly in the middle of becoming something slightly different than what it is at any given moment. A working lab is also full of things that are in a nebulous state, somewhere between being broken and rebuilt. The protean state of the lab is one of the reasons why techniques such as experiment and inscription are so crucial to its success for, without methods for proceeding and for creating a record of what occurs in the lab on a daily basis, the constant transformations that occur risk collapsing the lab into chaos. Assemblies are often provisional, subject to failure, and never really complete. Even after they make their way out into the world, objects that emerge from labs are still subject to further revisions, modifications, patches and upgrades.

Assembly often begins with disassembly, particularly in the form of reverse engineering, where taking something apart is necessary in order to begin making something new. Especially within the confines of a lab, the technique of disassembly can be managed and even hampered by policy and regulatory obstacles as well as technical ones.

In Canada and the U.S., a Technical Protection Measure (TPM) is a kind of device that is intended to govern how a person interacts with copyrighted content within a work; it can be as simple and physical as a security screw that requires an unusual type of screwdriver head to open, or it can be an elaborate form of software. The sense of unease that individuals experience when facing a TPM can be enough disincentive to hamper the well-established and necessary lab practice of reverse engineering; but increasingly, legislative battles are occurring within states and provinces over laws that would establish something like a user’s “right to repair.”28 Industry lobbies representing many sectors, from farm equipment to home entertainment and telephones, are launching aggressive legal campaigns to keep consumers from being able to repair their devices. This battle over the right to repair not only affects third party businesses and individual hobbyists but also laboratories inside of litigation-averse institutions such as universities. The whole question relates also to the broader approaches of eco-design and the circular economy as pointed out in the context of recent European Union plans to legislate a comprehensive right to repair.29

Though the final products can give the appearance of objectivity and solidity, assembly techniques circle relentlessly back to the cultural. Constructions such as best practices, protocols, and standards, which strive to provide guidelines for how assembly should function in order for others to be able to make use of assembled objects, are the result of prolonged, often difficult and fractious ongoing collective conversations. As such, they are also subject to constant revision. Further, there are often competing standards, for reasons that have to do with political and geographical differences, or, in some cases, sheer obstinacy. The appearance of new collaborators in a given community, or the availability of new tools and techniques invented or borrowed from another discipline, can shift assembly practices substantially. If those new collaborators make use of new channels of technique dissemination, especially those in a networked digital milieu like social networks and video hubs, the transformations produced by documented assembly and disassembly in even a small lab can be far reaching and rapid.

In other words, what often appears to be an objective and straightforward task of assembly or disassembly is always freighted down with the questions of style that are relevant to a given expert community. At the Residual Media Depot at Concordia in Montreal, which is currently studying the practice of modifying video game consoles and the culture around it, these matters take tangible form in the items in the Depot’s research collection. The collection, which includes the largest collection of unmodified consoles in a Canadian university, and the largest university collection of modified consoles in the world, holds several different examples of the same video game console, modified in different ways at different times and places. This is most visible in cases where different hardware has been used to produce the same effect, for example, in the case of Sega Genesis model 2 consoles modified with different versions of the Mega Amp circuit to improve their sound quality. These circuit boards come from all over the world, and reflect different tastes and priorities in many ways, including the choice of components, circuit design, where the board is placed internally, and even the degree of technical facility with which it has been installed. Which raw materials to use and where to purchase them, how to make a good solder connection, whether or not to use hot melt glue as material support for joints, whether to cut through the original plastic or remove components, and many other factors are all matters for discussion and debate within the hardware modding community, as a quick look at YouTube or other online forums demonstrates. These questions of style in turn become a scaffolding for the establishing of cultural capital, shaming, and prestige with the community (complete with online “how to” and “how not to” videos). If a new figure comes on the scene with more technical expertise, then the opinion of the entire community about what constitutes best practice for assembly and disassembly can shift dramatically.