Criptastic Hack Meeting

From Hackers & Designers
Criptastic Hack Meeting
Name Criptastic Hack Meeting
Location Het Wilde Weg
Date 2024/07/18
Time 10:00—17:00
PeopleOrganisations H&D, Anja Groten, Pernilla Manjula Philips, Heerko van der Kooij
Type HDSC2024
Web Yes
Print No

27 CriptasticHack.png

Criptastic Hack Meeting: Riding / Snorkeling / Surfing and Burrowing into Time Undercurrents

As a continuation of the 'Criptastic Hack meetings' developed together with MELT (Ren Britton, Iz Paehr), H&D members Pernilla, Heerko and Anja are proposing a session in which we will be reimaginging the concept of time through the hacking and repurposing / reprogramming e-ink wrist bands.

Inspired by the anarchist history of clock makers as well as a lineage of crip [1] technoscience, the approach to the session is equally practical as imaginative-fictional, resists tech-solutionism, and aims to generate continued energies around making and practicing Anti-Ableist technologies [2].

We invite participants to ride the unruly/unexpected/fantastic undercurrents of crip time [3] with us and create other collective imaginaries for interfacing with crip time that counter the universalist assumption that all bodies and minds experience time and space similarly. Compulsory techno-capitalist paradimns [4] of time-efficiency, consistent and seamless labor performance and presumed abled-bodyness pattern time structures that are inaccessible for many people [5] [6]. Ren Britton writes: "My bodymind is expected to move quickly, to keep up with turbo capitalist computational clock time that counts to the millisecond." [6]

With this workshop we use a hacking approach to actively counter the notion of universal time and turn toward practices that tune into crip time. Crip time shows that there are other ways of being in time: slow, in attunement with pain or symptoms, with JOMO (joy of missing out), in resistance towards capitalisms temporal demands.

We will imagine and build clocks that work against gregorian clock time and instead propose 'crip time', a way of considering the body as something that is constantly changing, that may go through and stay in states of illness, exhaustion and disability. Such clocks attune to different individual and collective temporalities.

The workshop caters to tech savvy people as well as folks new to coding. There will be some hacking with the (e-paper) watchy watches and some analog prototyping for those who prefer.

This is the pad Heerko made with the more technical steps. But we will probably skip the setting up watchy with Arduino because it takes too long. We willl prepare 3 computers on which the sketches can be uploaded https://etherpad.hackersanddesigners.nl/p/criptasticworkshopprep

  • duration: +- 6 hours
  • number of participants: 15
  • materials / tools: We already have two wartchy's, can order a few (3) more and people can work in smaller groups https://github.com/sqfmi/Watchy
  • Mode of production: Paper prototyping, Taking apart and restyling watches and clocks, Working with the Open Source E-Paper Watch: displaying an image on the watchface, uploading a small website on the esp32, bonus: slow animation
  • what do participants need to prepare: if you have, you could bring redundant / broken clocks & watches


[1] http://meltionary.com/antiableisttech/

[2] “Crip” is a political reclaiming of the derogatory label “cripple.”

[3] The phrase ‘crip time’ comes from feminist, queer, and disability scholar Alison Kafer and refers to the imperative for a new way of understanding time in a way that acknowledges different lived realities. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana University Press, 2013.

[4] Christine Miserandino, Spoon Theory https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory

[5] Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism's Temporal Bullying https://www.bemiscenter.org/exhibitions/sick-time-sleepy-time-crip-time-against-capitalisms-temporal-bullying

[6] Trans Temporalities https://euppublishingblog.com/2017/04/27/trans-temporalities/

[7] In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11cw801

[8] Ren Loren Britton, On Rehearsing Access. Making space for non-normative time with Access Riders. https://futuress.org/stories/rehearsing-access/

[9] Ellen Samuels "Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time"

[10] https://overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven/map