Retroduction

Albert Figurt and Nick Montfort

See also Experimenting / Failing / Testing

It can sometimes be distracting to play “the game of firsts” and look for the earliest instance of some digital media development. However, there are indeed particular historical moments when people join technological capability with cultural opportunity to create new forms, genres, and practices. Interestingly, though, such techno-cultural combinations are almost always possible before these innovations are actually realized. So, what if someone had thought to initiate one of these practices earlier—what if the opportunity had been seized at some previous point in history?

To speculatively explore this question, we have introduced a digital media laboratory technique at the MIT Trope Tank. We call it retroduction. To characterize this technique we will initially describe retroduction as a species of retrocomputing, specifically part of the branch of it that involves media making (or what is conventionally called “production”). We have replaced the “pro” with a “retro” to indicate that this practice is turned toward the past.

Retroduction is distinct from cultural remix practices that include the prequel, sequel, remake, reboot, demake, and premake, in that we are not mainly concerned with the relationship to preexisting media elements or media franchises. Our concern, when we undertake a retroduction, is with the conditions of media production as the combination of technology and culture.

Once a technology and its cultural use is somehow established, there’s space for just one, or at most a few, main trajectories to become prominent, and the roads not taken are hard to discern. Retroductions can remind us that different technical and cultural connections might have been made.1 As we explore media history through retroduction, we might learn that we are mistaken about some peculiar enabling technological capabilities, or that computing technology was coupled with culture in ways not originally evident.

To distinguish retroduction from other current approaches, we reverse the idea of technostalgia.2 Instead of expanding or building on past superseded formats, we explore unexpanded past technologies that did not find their cultural expression. We’re also not caught in contemporary hauntology,3 investigating today’s ghosts of cultural and media memory. Rather, we’re hunting for latencies in past technologies. Finally, we’re not hooked on retrofuturism, but are oriented simultaneously backwards (toward the history and archeology of media) and sideways (as we direct the digital media train onto a different track). We’re not retromaniacs,4 we’re actually retroactors, retroactivators, and active retroagents.

One concrete example of a possible retroduction: The text adventure (parser-based interactive fiction) made its first appearance as Adventure (1976). How much earlier could something like it have been developed? Several cultural and technical factors mean that the window for retroduction is not sizable here. Just to name one factor: Dungeons & Dragons, which significantly influenced this work, was only published in 1974.

But what about a newer practice, screencast cinema, the making of movies where all the events occur on a computer screen? When we take into account early net art experiments and video art pieces, we find interesting, if tentative, cinematic antecedents. However, it was Unfriended (2014), a feature film, that ultimately popularized this practice on a mainstream level.

Yet, screen capture technology was commercially available beginning in April 1994 (precisely 20 years earlier), specifically on Windows computers running Lotus ScreenCam. We have undertaken a retroduction that uses a late-1990s Windows system, seeking to explore how things might have been different if a screencast movie had been made much earlier. Such an artistic creation/archeological investigation concretely address the effect of many technical differences.5 These include an earlier World Wide Web with different standards and protocols, Windows 95 as opposed to OS X, and CU-SeeMe versus Skype.

By doing a retroduction, we become something other than steampunk authors writing about a speculative alternative past. While we must acknowledge that we turn to the past still embedded in and aware of the present, and thus with a view that is colored by our experience, a retroduction compels us to face the realities and uncertainties of those media technologies that enable our project.6

Note that a particular retroduction (for instance, in screencast cinema) does not need to include every aspect of computing experience (Web browsing, videoconferencing, etc.) to have some value. Also, a researcher can opt for a purely technical retroduction in order to simply document some past practice that was feasible but had no expression. Alternatively, a researcher/artist could couple this approach with one that has creative features, in order to produce a stimulating retrospective/retrospeculative artwork. The latter is probably the most fun—and fruitful—option.

Albert Figurt is an Italian video-artisan, multi-instrumentalist and independent new media scholar; as part of Amsterdam’s Institute of Network Cultures and honorary member of the related VideoVortex community, he’s happily obsessed with the socio-anthropological and perceptual side effects of online video.

Nick Montfort is a poet, artist, and professor of digital media at MIT. He lives in New York City; his lab/studio The Trope Tank has locations there and at MIT.