Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant

In a recent Stanford lecture, author Ken Liu expressed sharp concerns about Western modernity as an alien cultural overlay, promulgated via techno-capitalism, that decoheres life experiences of peoples around the globe.  As a form of creative resistance Liu advocates the exercise of a “technology and literary aesthetic” he calls Silkpunk, which “meld[s] past-reinterpretation with future-hopecrafting” to envision alternative modernities that might have evolved elsewhere, given more time in peace.  In the work of Liu and like-minded writers, Silkpunk is science fiction that reregisters what we presume technology can do across the diversity of magical fantasies global humanity once had.  Silkpunk imagines powerful and effective tools peculiar to indigenous cultures, and in so doing helps us feel the contingency and obtrusion of our actual technological regime.  My project now asks: Must Silkpunk be fictional, and can nonfiction Silkpunk still be art?  My aim will be to silkpunk computer technology by creating resistive digital memory (RRAM) devices (dōgu) based on the memristor effect in natural indigo, which take the form of traditional East Asian textiles and are fashioned primarily via corresponding craft processes.  In Japanese, dōgu signifies tools meant for delimited use within traditional practices such as tea ceremony, suggesting that RRAM textile dōgu could be understood as implements for rituals of memory.  My project will encompass historical research on Japanese-Korean cultural interactions and harms enacted by Japan upon Korean people, to inform the development of testaments or speculative historical fictions suitable for implanting in East-Asian-Silkpunk memory ritual textiles.