The repurposing, integration, and appropriation of precedent instruments and technologies are amongst the most primal and fundamental properties of human innovation. These tendencies are so instinctive that we are all guilty of “informally” repurposing even our most mundane belongings so that they might be able to meet our immediate needs at any given time. Developing this type of anthropological awareness of the way we all use and rediscover uses for the tools that are readily available to us, goes a long way in helping to understand how a chair can be used as a step stool, or a coat hanger can be employed as an antenna or even how a building that was designed as a Mill can be occupied as a school. 

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This dissonance between a tool’s intended purpose and its employed use seems almost too customary to be acknowledgeable, but the disparity becomes even more striking in considering the potential for more highly sophisticated pieces of technology to be reappropriated in ways that allow them to be useful in completely different types of applications. That is to more generally say that the potential for highly specialized instruments to be repurposed or recycled in any off-hand way is often markedly more limited, than our less prescriptive, “lower-tech” devices. While many of our most basic technologies have proven to be both limitless and timeless in their abilities to be reused and reinvented, the propulsive nature of techno-science today has leveled a modern era of human innovation that is best described as “disruptively” evolutionary. That is, often after a particular device has evolved into its next-generation, its predecessor is not only outdated or obsolete but often unusable in any other capacity as well.

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The accompanying images are included in an attempt to illustrate the asymmetric potential for reappropriation latent within both the “high-tech” or “digital” (in this instance old computer parts are used to fashion hand tools) and the analog (in these models, an old hack saw, a metal wheel a milled shelf, magnets and copper wire are assembled to represent a mechanical motor). The analogy is meant to call attention to how the employment of simple, analog devices in completely un-intentioned ways can be used to yield surprisingly sophisticated results, while the use of more specialized equipment is often neither effective in accomplishing analog, mechanical processes, nor other forms of technical application. The illustration goes further to suggest that not only is the capacity for reuse in more specialized equipment increasingly limited, but the materials used to build them are so expertly tailored that the tools’ component parts become nearly unusable in any other type of application as well. Understanding the discrepant potential for re-application amongst empirical technologies and technoscience can go a long way in helping to meaningfully locate both new and old technologies in socially and economically appropriate ways while providing formidable inspiration for appropriate design and construction practices. 

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The technological optimism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could not be destroyed or even shaken by such catastrophic events as the sinking of the Titanic, the Hindenburg, or even the devastation wrought by two World Wars. Even the era’s satires of technology were optimistic and affectionate. In the 1880s, the French illustrator Albert Robida produced what has now turned out to be stunningly accurate visions of what the technology of the future would come to look like. Robida’s fantastical illustrations, depicted often as tongue-in-cheek episodes of absurd dreams and time-travel journeys, were amazingly prophetic in their depiction of the chemical warfare, flat-screen TV’s, and test-tube babies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compare these images on the other hand with the mechanical visions of Rube Goldberg-- the famous inventor of bizarre and convoluted thought experiments represented in notoriously gratuitous and redundant contraptions. Goldberg’s work is a tribute to the importance of empirical system construction and represents thought-provoking ways of executing simple procedures in unnecessarily complicated ways. While Rube Goldberg contraptions are usually benign and very tightly coupled in their choreography, the greater implications of Goldberg’s constructions may be mildly sobering in their critique of the formal devices we often use so regularly. That is, Goldberg’s apparatuses represent, our culture’s compulsion to devise overly complicated ways of performing typically very simple procedures. Electronic calendars for instance, electric knives and even mechanical pens and pencils are just a few modest examples of sophisticated and overly complicated iterations of traditionally very simple instruments. The apparatuses included on the opposite page are illustrations of devices that are both simple in their construction and in their performances but represent the limits of sophisticated material and engineering to accomplish relatively unremarkable ends. The contraptions describe important distinctions in the way the “user” interfaces with different types of devices as well, while offering an equally as satirical counter-illustration of the less fantastical realities of Robida’s predictions.