Do Graphics Processing Units Have Politics? A Performance-based Inquiry
Do Graphics Processing Units Have Politics? A Performance-based Inquiry
Submitter: Ben Gansky, Arizona State University, Bengansky@gmail.com
Abstract:
This project explores political currents of sociotechnical modernity by, as it were, peering through the keyhole of a particular artifact: the graphics processing unit (GPU). By following this object-actor, particularly in its coproductive entanglements with the spheres of machine learning, cryptocurrency, and 3D realtime graphics, we evoke its historical, cultural, infrastructural, epistemic, political economic, ecological, and geopolitical positionality and productivity (cf. Parikka 2012, Dhaliwal 2021, Gaboury 2021, Starosielski 2016, Golumbia 2016, Velkova 2021, Kane 2014, Crawford 2021). These peregrinations are enacted through a live performance, in tandem with realtime manipulation of GAN-mediated and -generated images. The medium of performance foregrounds the affective dimensions of this form of inquiry, most vividly associated with the work of Langdon Winner (e.g. Winner 1977, Winner 1980). This performance is a negotiation of responsibility-taking for engagement with sociotechnical modernity in the face of its overwhelming normative complexity. Together with its substantive focus on GPUs, the project contemplates the affective experience of the researcher and their motivations in undertaking such an investigation. The goal, ultimately, is to rehearse reconfigurations of relations towards states of ‘non-innocence’ (e.g. Haraway 1988, de la Bellacasa 2012).
Areas of STS Scholarship: Method and Practice, Infrastructure, Information, Computing and Media Technology
Authors/Participants: Ben Gansky, Arizona State University
Shawn Lawson, Arizona State University
Colleen Pulawski, Free Machine
