Hacking as a Way of Knowing – Digital History

At the end of the week I’ll be going to Toronto for what I expect will be one of the most interesting workshops ever. William J. Turkel at Western has organized a hands-on workshop on Hacking as a Way of Knowing to reflect on electronic waste and data about the environment. The short description of the purpose is,

This three-day workshop will explore the theme of E-waste and environmental data. Working in small groups, participants will be given the task of hacking some typical consumer e-waste to create reflective technological assemblages that incorporate ‘nature’ in some form while calling one or more of our basic assumptions into question.

This is not so much about building something, but about thinking about how fabrication (hacking) is a way of thinking through AND in this case we will be thinking through the environment and all the waste around computing. I suspect I’m going to be embarassed by how much I waste.