Rosemary Lee: Resilience as a Critical Approach to Technology

Thought-provoking essay from Rosemary Lee up on Makery.

This essay considers how approaching the theme of resilience from a critical perspective on technology offers insight into technology’s capacity to respond to the complexity of the world. This perspective addresses the fact that technology tends to reveal certain intricacies of the world, for example, by providing solutions to one problem while opening a host of difficult-to-foresee side-effects, ethical dilemmas, and unintended consequences. And while critical perspectives on technology may offer crucial insights into and objections to various aspects that arise in that regard, discourse surrounding technology shows a tendency to streamline highly complex issues into black-and-white contrasts. This inclination towards oversimplification does not do justice to either understanding the intricacies that technologies typically entail, nor to the intention of assessing the potential faults that may arise from the use of a given technology. Proposing the theme of resilience as a lens through which to approach technology in a critical light seeks to address the unpredictable, complex, and heterogeneous contexts to which critically focused art, design, and technology respond.

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