Parametric politics : imperial infrastructures and systemic dispositions

Parametric politics is a politics of design. In the context of ambient media, a parametric politics for us means identifying, testing and, wherever possible, transforming the rules that delimit how we operate within the machinic arrangements of logistical medial apparatuses. Maker movements have embraced the collective ability to appropriate the infrastructures of informatised production; social philosophy has rediscovered craft. The enormous visibility of idioms, both of design thinking and making, is in need of explanation rather than simply of affirmation: it is time to not just celebrate such practices as a renaissance of a new critical manualism and reawakening of a political procedurality, but rather to look at the way they reconfigure the idea of participation, of use, of active being in the world beyond anti-political visions of solutionism and social innovation. We propose a practice of machinic making, of a making that acknowledges the centrality of design as an upstream rather than downstream activity, and a practice that explores the growing significance of machinic modes of communication in the mediation of our life and labour.