Nano-Garage(s), Nano-Basements

Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll

Introduction

NanoGarage(s)
Transpatent Tale: English
Transpatent Tale: Español

In her introduction to Tactical Media, Rita Raley underscores the peculiar temporal ambitions of new media, its commitment to "'temporary consensual zones,'" the "Next Five Minutes." Her accompanying thesis: new media privileges disruption (the tactical) over revolution (the strategic), resulting in a "politics [that] are a metapolitics."¹ "Nano-Garage(s)" works from the premise that poetic play (signifyin'), as low-fi interruption, has the potential to integrate the circuits, to (respectfully) challenge Raley's distinction. Presented in video format (the better to minimize one's carbon footprints!), "Nano-Garage(s)" generated a flurry of requests for both citations and contact information (folks ready and willing to operate as Ellisonian "thinker-tinkers."² In the spirit of that fulsome suspension of disbelief, let the "persuasive gaming" refresh-and-reload:

By 2015, the first cheap rapid prototyping fabricator hardware flows into
the streets and quickly creates global networks of nano-Garage(s) that
make up the prototypical layers of future matter hacking tactics. All the usual
suspects start to push towards the development of an Open-matter(s) Group,
that sets the stage for the first true nano-fab engine technologies,
complete with uncooked nano-blocks. While the singularity of the dream
of A.I. does not coincide with the wide area distribution
of nano-fab engines, nano-Garage(s) around the world (especially in
the Southern Cone) rapidly take advantage of new methods of
lobal and horizontal production to shift away from the locked-down
economies of the past. In this volatile environment, a "science of the oppressed"
emerges paradoxically as a strategy for mapping the tactical advances being
sideloaded by the nano-Garage(s) movement(s) of post-Neoliberalism.

Notes

¹ Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 30.

² Recall: "In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I've wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. [...] Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a 'thinker-tinker'" (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man [New York: Vintage, 1990 (1947)] 7).