To accompany talk for MITH, 2009

1. Handout for MITH Digital Dialogue talk, presented to The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities,
University of Maryland, College Park MD, 5 May 2009
Networked Reenactments: experiments in communication across knowledge worlds
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park/Email: katking@umd.edu
Interactive website at: http://wtreen.blogspot.com/ ; an interconnected website: http://queertransdis.blogspot.com/
Some knowledge engineers claim that the 20 disciplines that came into being in
1900 fractured into 8000 specialized topics in science alone ninety years later.
Reenactments were among the experiments in communication across knowledge
worlds that began to take particular form in the nineties. Science-styled television
documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic
historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed,
skilled and displayed by new technologies. These experiments became
epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global
restructuring that tried to solve the tricky mapping problems of having to address
many divergent audiences simultaneously and having to author knowledges as
merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control.
Belonging to communities of practice (Bowker & Star 1999: 286):
"...understanding two sets of relationships: first and analytically, between people and membership, and then
between things and their naturalization by communities of practice."
Membership (Bowker & Star 1999: 295)
"Membership can thus be described individually as the experience of encountering objects and increasingly being in a
naturalized relationship with them.... From the point of view of learning-as-membership and participation, then, the
illegitimate stranger is a source of learning. Someone's illegitimacy appears as a series of interruptions to experience
or a lack of naturalization trajectory. In a way, then, individual membership processes are about the resolution of
interruptions (anomalies) posed by the tension between the ambiguous (outsider, naive, strange) and the naturalized
(at home, taken-for-granted) categories for objects. Collectively, membership can be described as the processes of
managing the tension between naturalized categories on the one hand and the degree of openness to immigration on
the other."
Experiment to examine: various kinds of reenactments in:
Leonardo's Dream Machines. (2003). Written and Directed by Paul Sapin. Produced by Julian Ware of
ITN Factual for Channel 4 Video (UK) & PBS (US).
• Opening up an initially surreal Mona Lisa door into many kinds of reenactment, the documentary looks to Leonardo
da Vinci for experimental, interactive and recontextualizing ways of viewing always interconnecting bits of the world,
ways that open onto devices that enhance and play with those views.
Teams: Crossbow & Glider; engineers, historians, users (pilot & lead carpenter)
Knowledge Specialists: • design and structural engineers, aircraft restorers, skilled carpenters, art and science
historians and a world-record breaking pilot make full-scale and part-scale working models. • Aided in interpretation
by additional art, science, military and church historians, a practicing and teaching artist, and skilled craftspeople in
carpentry, metal work and restoration, as well as a bio-engineer, a cardiac surgeon, and a robotic engineer.
Extensively defined forms of "Reenactment" displayed and used: these contribute to ranging affects and
sensations displayed and available for vicarious experience by viewers as reenactment.
•• "experimental archeology" as contest; • costumed recreations of actors in fictional flashbacks; • "living history"
hobbyist reenactors or historical interpreters
•• material and computer simulation; • computer and film animation – these reframe the first three as similar
simulations for action adventure and trial and error understanding
•• pastpresents in televisual movement across objects as timeshift: "the Ken Burns effect"; • venues in pastpresents:
simulation of LDV's scaffolding on Brunelleschi's dome today; • actors voicing LDV laid over present day venues or
fictional scenes
•• repeating sequences of reenactor battles, of flying papers animations, and of a surreal Mona Lisa door opening
upon reenactments; connect edited sections in montage effects
•• medical, bio-mechanical and aviation development sites and uses. • Rosheim robots reenact LDV robot designs,
and LDV models from nature; layer upon layer of simulation
•• scholarly and fictional narratives, conflated interactively to shift centrality of authoritative knowledges without
deauthorizing, open onto alternative knowledges without valorizing
•• the apparatus of cinematic recreation: the devices, crew and techniques of TV documentary

2. The epistemological melodrama here: pastpresents. • The contest is not between two present day teams but
across time with LDV. Pastpresents, one word, pasts and presents literally mutually construct each other before our
eyes in multiple and concrete forms of reenactment; impossible to keep some singular and differential past and
present apart. • Sense of the documentary: today such interactive pastpresents are necessary for important forms
of knowledge making as well as for entertaining knowledge transmission; makings and transmissions themselves
cannot be kept singularly and differentially apart: examples of new technical knowledges coming into being today as
part of interactive relationships with LDV objects crossing time.
It's an experiment – "Experiment" in this context does not mean something original and novel: it's not
"experimental" art, or special effects experientially intense in some computer environments. These experiments –
epistemological melodramas – play with sensation and affect in multiple modes in the very traditions of
melodrama, but not with the purpose of shifting thresholds of intensity or creating disjunctures from pasts.
Connection and continuity are important here. The better these experiments work, the more possible it is that they
can be taken for granted and added to workable infrastructure, material and conceptual, already in place. Nor does
"experimental" mean good, or better, or successful or progressive. What it does mean is trial and error learning and
making taking place in multiple layers and units of interaction and articulation.
Experiments in communication across knowledge worlds: Experiments • that play with sensation and affect in
multiple modes in the very traditions of melodrama • of trial and error learning and making taking place in multiple
layers and units of interaction and articulation.
Scoping and scaling action, that is, dynamic and layered times, places, and conceptual and material
abstractions: think Google Map in hybrid view: satellite or terrain view marked up with names
from street view, with the traffic view button pushed: all dynamically scaled and scoped amid a
pastiche of timeframes, be it the "real time" of traffic flows in color, the montage effects of time
and place and national security served up as satellite or, differently, as street view; and the longer
more fundamental features offered as terrain. Use moving around in Google hybrid view literally
and figuratively as an example for experiencing a set of cognitive sensations.
Intensive definitions of "reenactment": excite different affects and sensations taken together
with a range of judgments by specialists of various sorts with specific interested ways of understanding: scholars,
curators, historians, television producers, authors, journalists, hobbyists, craftspeople and more. "Intensive"
definitions mark out specific communities of practice amid knowledge economies and culture crafts, publics, and
industries. Specialists may be strongly declarative in explanation of technical taxonomies, carefully differentiating
various forms they would not use the term reenactment to name, specific to their forms of expertise and evaluation.
Transmission skills especially honed in the nineties when having to address many divergent audiences
simultaneously and having to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited
control were circumstances that become more and more intrusive for various communities of practice. Such science-
styled documentary television as Leonardo's Dream Machines are themselves reenactments of these very shifts in
authorship and audience as they wade among and exemplify products of knowledge, culture and entertainment
industries as these altered in the nineties. Grain of detail is carefully limited and dynamically interconnected, via
reenactment, to a range of possible interactive contexts, each salient and available to various sets of some of those
viewing. Viewers engage in journeys among knowledges we discover already exist but are not yet finished.
Imagine Social Domains altering in the nineties as if in Google Map hybrid view:
• "knowledge work," knowledge and information systems as economies themselves and as forces in various
economies. • "culture crafts, publics and industries," include public culture sewn up with economic development
amid shifts in cultural value displayed in varying proportions among old and new technologies of entertainment.
• "academic capitalism," recombinations of national interests, global economies and ideological shifts that develop
across the Anglophone academies, evident in various forms of privatized education and technology transfer and
favored by both neo-liberals and neo-conservatives.
Some references:
• Bateson, G. (2000 [1972]). Steps to An Ecology of Mind. Chicago.
• Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge: MIT.
• Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman. Chicago.
• Klein, J. T. (2004). “Disciplinary origins and differences.” Fenner Conference on the Environment, Canberra, 24-25
May. Available online at: http://www.science.org.au/events/fenner/klein.htm
• Latour, B. (1993 [1991]). We Have Never Been Modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard.
• Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and
Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
• Vann, Katie, and Geoffrey Bowker. "Instrumentalizing the Truth of Practice." Social Epistemology 15, no. 3

3. (2001): 247-62.