Machine Languages

August 31, 2026 Winter 2026

Satellites to Soil

Machines inundate our lives – from the alarm clocks that wake us up, to the coffee makers we use in the morning, the biometric trackers that record our steps and our sleep, and the cameras and drones that surveil us. We communicate with them when we want to and when we don’t, on terms that we can either opt or be coerced into.

Over ten weeks, the teachers and participants of the Machine Language class collectively interrogated how we communicate to, with, and through machines as individuals, members of communities, and larger societies. We broadly defined machines as technologies with which we interact.

How can we make sense of our relationships with technology/machines?

We began our explorations with the underlying concept of sociotechnical relationships: that societies shape technologies and technologies shape societies in an ongoing cycle of influence and exchange. Each participant brought unique experiences from their varied scholarly and professional backgrounds, creative practices, and cultural and geographic locations – including Nigeria, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, throughout the US, and South Korea. We engaged a collection of unique and overlapping lenses informed by our experiences, fears, interests and dreams.

Questions about how information is quantized, collected, and computed overlapped with interrogations about the inherent existence of biases in data used for computation. We asked for whom interfaces were designed and who was left behind in their construction and assembly. Different types of machine hardware — whether a mobile phone, a medical prosthesis, or a life-saving outer-space device — set boundaries for what is possible and provide opportunities for how we might imagine or reconfigure our relationships to those machines. We discussed what we would do differently as users of what exists and as designers of alternatives.

Faced with the magnitude of both physical and non-physical inputs that go into creating technologies, we also asked: How can we understand and scrutinize things that are so much bigger and more complex than us? As a result of our investigations and conversations, we determined that we can meet, respond to, and even create machines on the scales that they exist in our lives. We committed to an approach informed by the sociologist Charles Perrow, who argued that even when sociotechnical systems are potentially complex to an extent beyond our individual understanding, we can still make sense of them and have agency in our interactions. We imagined ways to do so in our personal lives and creative practices, in our communities and on larger scales.

In our individual lives

The first role we can play is that of an observer. We can observe the world and collect data about it. We can observe the sky, the texture of a tree, the seasons, and the weather. As one of the guest speakers, Sands Fish, argued in his talk about outer-space design, the human body itself is a sensor and a keen data aggregator.

In class, we were introduced to the work of Candy Jernigan, who collected and catalogued mundane ephemera from her life. She individually drew, and sometimes mapped, things others might take for granted. Her subjects ranged from the dead bugs in her small town cabin to the vials, bags and pills she found on the streets around her East Village home.

What she collected, as is the case with a lot of data we can collect, ended up sometimes being a snapshot not only of her life but of greater societal issues, the substance struggles of her houseless NYC neighbors. Our personal practices and observations can give us insight into larger systems, relationships, and concerns.

This could not be more evident to us than when we heard from Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, whose creative practice includes interacting and learning from Generative AI.

By adding the word “Black” to a Midjourney prompt (via the “Describe” command) to depict the first computer-generated image she created in 1987, Gaskins exposed the bias inherent in these systems: the generated image with a “Black” child featured much less foliage, run-down surroundings, and cement walls instead of a picket fence, with markings or graffiti on them. Our readings from Ruha Benjamin, Ursula Franklin, and others illuminated the patterns of inherent biases and power in technologies. Making the invisible or hidden obvious emerged as a theme in our discussions, talks from our guest speakers, and participants’ final group projects.

The project of a few participants, who formed the “Machine Toolkit” group, focused on “revealing underlying networks that are all around us.” They wrote a script which they then converted to a browser extension that “tracks ingoing and outgoing data packets” being sent by our computers and phones and attaches sounds to them. Using the extension, when you go on a website, you can tell by listening to the sounds how much data is being transmitted and how often.

While the “Machine Toolkit” group and Dr. Gaskins observed the observations of machines, another participant, Katerie Gladdys, intertwined machine and personal observations in her project. Katerie started from a satellite image of an area in her yard and zoomed in to a human scale pixel that held a zine with “aerial imagery, ground level photography, vegetation inventories, written reflections.” She repurposed “ground truthing,” which is the “process of verifying remote sensing, mapping, or by gathering direct, real-world observations,” to be a “generative process. The pixel doesn’t resolve truth, instead it unfolds into multiple perspectives.”

Katerie’s project makes space for multiplicity – including detailed embodied knowledge, situated observations, and lived experience of a land – in a field of study where solely machine readable data (pixel information) would usually be used. “What does it mean to be seen in two ways?,” she asks, “at once as a pixel and as a body – maybe not reconciling these perspectives but inhabiting the space between them.”

Her project highlights questions that we asked repeatedly: Is there a difference between what we observe in the world and what machines observe and perceive? What is lost in translation between machine and human language?

Another one of the projects, from the “Proposing New Futures” group – made up of Maggie Needham, Ian Lee, Pedro Kramer and Leona Cheung – interrogated AI as a translation/mediation layer between two participants communicating in different languages. They found that the machine’s translations often felt more “formal” or “gentle” than their original intentions. AI didn’t just translate, it also “subtly reshaped tone and meaning.”

The group’s exploration of AI as a mediation/translation layer led to their conception of a speculative technology: “A low energy AI system that compresses, alters, and partially reconstructs messages in order to conserve energy and bandwidth. Rather than functioning as a tool for accurate translation, the system operates through controlled degradation, words may be delayed, tones subtly shifted, fragments of speech lost entirely.” The group did not imagine ways to “fix” the weaknesses they discovered in current AI approaches. They imagined future iterations with deliberate, obvious flaws that re-framed our expectations and use. In class we spoke repeatedly about glitches and friction. This group proposed technological hiccups that could be meaningful and poetic. “What initially appears as a limitation reveals itself as a different communication paradigm – one shaped by ambiguity, interpretation and relational effort (in understanding the other).”

Questions around the expectations we bring to our usage of technologies also arose in other participants’ projects. As a comment on our emerging relationships with AI chatbots, Angie Pham built Useless ChatGPT. The chatbot fits its title; it is intentionally informationally unhelpful. The interface and interactions contain Easter eggs, like the inclusion of a pixelated related notable technologist in a pose from a stereotypical tech demo and the reveal of the definition of “ask” (which is about as helpful as the chatbot gets).

Interacting with Angie’s chatbot brings attention to our expectations and relationships with emerging AI tools. Attention and intention were the focus of multiple web-based tools created in the same session. In another example, Shikha Sharma encourages us, as users, to slow down and acknowledge our interactions and technological relationships through answering a series of questions in a style reminiscent of intention-focused, daily journaling activities.

Creating Everyday Objects

While we may interact with machines in our everyday lives, we rarely know how they work. A way we can understand and interact with machines is by building them, for ourselves or for a small group of people, at a smaller scale than a big manufacturer who produces in the millions or billions. We can create “at the scale of 1 or 3 or 100,” which is what our guest speakers, Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy, specialize in.

When describing their Pocket Fiche project, they talked about how to get people to understand technologies that “operate at a nano-scale that we can’t perceive.” While discussing their approaches to their creative practice, they posed the question: “How do you start to translate and get people to understand the bones of our computers as physical material?”

One of their projects, Power Ground Water, weaves the story behind a single transistor all the way through to how transistors are used to build logic gates, which are the backbone of all of our computers. They use logic gates to build a simple calculator that does actual computation: adding two binary numbers. Taylor talked about seeing her dad fiddling with the wires of the VCR and feeling like it was a level of power and magic to which she didn’t have access. But when she got her first computer, similar to Candy Jernigan’s everyday documentation, Taylor began to label every single cable for the computer, meticulously, color-coding them all. She had to “take it apart and really get to know it and discover what its boundaries are.” Even when it’s slow, even when it’s time consuming, Taylor described taking things apart as a way of making sense of the world… and a way to imagine how we put things back together.

In our communities

Machines don’t just have the capacity to impact our individual lives; they operate on much grander scales. They are entangled with our communities, our nation-states, and our planets.

One of our guest speakers, Dr. Jennifer Richter, introduced us to strategies communities have practiced for engaging with nuclear sites and waste. On every scale, even at a scale as large as energy infrastructures like nuclear power, we have rights and options. Dr. Richter, when talking about nuclear plants in communities, posed questions like: “What rights do and should host communities have? When do they have the right to even offer consent as a community? When do they have the right to withdraw that consent? And then what is the accountability for federal and state agencies, and especially for developers of new technologies, new nuclear technologies?” Dr. Richter’s talk built upon our ongoing discussions about informed consent, grounded in an earlier session with another guest speaker, Dr. Liz Dietz, who shared their background in bioethics and led a discussion about informed consent’s origins and possibilities for how we think about our interactions with data and technologies.

While Richter described these questions within the history and context of nuclear technologies, similar questions arose in multiple class discussions regarding data centers and their environmental impacts. The questions we asked are both old and new, and we attempted to make sense of our options by looking at precedents for community-scale acquisition of agency. We read Kath Weston’s work about citizen radiation information gathering after the Fukushima disaster, and we discussed concepts such as technostruggle, civic technoscience, and critical technical practices as frameworks through which communities have and do gain agency in the face of seemingly overwhelming systems and events. We looked at Safecast, Witness, and Fractracker as examples of how communities can interact with things much larger than themselves.

Community agency was also a major theme in a talk by another guest speaker, Leonard Bruce. Bruce discussed his work aggregating and digitizing archival research grounded in his Gila River Indian Community. He stressed the importance of knowledge that is searchable and doesn’t require institutional permission for access. This knowledge allows community members more agency around their stories, which he further explores in Indigemodels, where he created 3D models and prints inspired by O’odham history. He noted that the prints are shared as blank objects, unpainted to allow his community members to impart their own creativity and co-create communal historical storytelling.

One participant, Fabiola Ching, explored similar notions around her own community, conducting archival research on Black lesbian history in Washington, DC, particularly in the antebellum and postbellum period. She too emphasized access, free from institutional barriers and paywalls. Fabiola explores an archiving practice driven by the community in pursuit of truth and memory rather than “just data,” that can be scraped and extracted. She proposed ways to mitigate extraction such as an offline website, burnt onto a CD. Another participant, Victor Torres, addressed similar questions when imagining his proposal for a hyper-local, community-secure, sustainable, open source technology to be used for event invitations.

Humanity

We realized that, as we attempt to understand and engage with technologies, in some ways we become the machines. Guest speaker Sands Fish is a designer for space exploration. In his talk, he explained the structures surrounding space design, including where there is great human-machine integration. Space is not an environment we can exist in without heavy augmentation. We become cyborgs.

Sands introduced us to the original conception of the cyborg, coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline when they described the alterations needed for humans to exist in an extraterrestrial capacity. While most outer-space design approaches attempt to make those environments habitable for humans, Clynes and Kline argued that humans should instead alter their bodies, biologically and technologically, to meet the extremes of space.

Investigations about cyborgs also emerged from our reading of Sara Hendren’s writing about disability and the built environment. Hendren’s texts and projects were parts of a collection of works we discussed that each engaged with topics of machine modifications, spatial configurations, and cyborgian relationships. Hendren introduced us to ideas of the “misfit body,” perceptions related to prostheses, and how zip ties could sometimes prove to be more useful contraptions for everyday needs than highly engineered solutions. Informed by Hendren’s and others’ work, we explored and discussed and challenged ourselves to define what a cyborg is or could be, and what values those definitions embed. Our definitions ranged from the everyday to the extraordinary.

Which of course lends itself to the world of fiction, of worlds beyond even the outer space astronauts or cyborgs in our midst have explored. One participant, Robyn Sanford, in her final presentation shared an Alternative-Reality Game (ARG). The proposal augmented a physical installation with QR codes embedded into the wallpaper. Interaction with those codes would allow a visitor to explore the story of the world she built, where all communication is now through emojis, calling participants to interrogate their relationship with technology, communication and connection.

Through Robyn’s and other participants’ projects, we see the importance of imagination in moving forward—in what we can and might do next. As new technologies emerge, they are often marketed as inevitable and any questioning of their trajectories is perceived as an enemy of progress. However, as Ruha Benjamin argues, this type of belief system dampens imagination as well as critical and creative assessment. An exercise we did in class asked participants to identify a technological trend and consider the future if it goes wrong but also if it goes right. The exercise implored us to practice optimism and imagination.

The Thing from the Future is a card game originally created by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson, and it was turned into a web-based tool by the Innovation Studio at NC State University Libraries. In another future-facing exercise that supports rapid prototyping of ideas, class participants each interacted with the web tool, to “deal” a scenario to which they responded. They each took the parameters describing a narrative future (an “arc”), a type of object, and a “terrain” (a focus) and then described - through text, images, and/or references, a speculative technological object that represented a future they wanted to see. They then each described and discussed their imagined object with the group. Some participants, such as the “Potential Futures” group and Miarri Phillips, integrated the method into the generation of their final project proposals.

Miarri Phillips proposed an interdisciplinary creative practice inspired by black feminist thinking, including the work of Octavia Butler. One of Miarri’s proposed outcomes would be an immersive installation that would include integrated technologies, physical and media objects, that provide a sense of home as a place for engaged communities to envision potential futures. Her exhibit proposal included her responses to prompts she discovered through the Thing from the Future exercise, and her proposed technological uses would support generative conversations about not just surviving, but creating desired future worlds.

We can take our futures in directions that feel good. In this pursuit we can utilize Audre Lorde’s notions, posited in “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, wherein she explores the erotic as a deeply spiritual, embodied plane of knowledge suppressed by patriarchy. Attunement to this knowledge is a source of power against oppressive systems. Lorde tells us, “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

While we’ve mentioned a lot of things in this blog post, there’s also quite a bit of information that we’ve left out because our two sessions and ten weeks of classes included an incredible amount. We covered a huge span of planned ground together, and every session was more fruitful because of the questions, perspectives, references, and experiences that our participants brought to every conversation. Earlier in the post, we mentioned Katerie’s project that spanned a view of her surrounding landscape from satellite imagery to her personal data collection. Another participant, Calder King, focused his work on citizen engagement with botany and how participation in taking the time to really look at plants can transform ourselves, our communities, and our surroundings. We end this blog post with this participant project reference because it’s very much in the spirit of where we began. When beginning with questions about how we can make sense of our relationships through technology/machines, a great place to start is to take the time to look, then engage with others to understand and imagine what could happen next. We thank our participants for joining us and contributing so much — through their attention, engagement, projects, and generosity of spirits — to this journey.