In everyday life, technologies are taken to be tools, merely means to ends. However, technologies are spatially productive: by spatially creating and reorganizing material conditions and relations, social life and institutions, and human operators. This conference explores the spatia-lized/spatializing aspects of technologies as fashioners of life. Humans create technologies with specific intentions in mind. Still, technologies exhibit their own poiesis and function dialectically in contexts in which they alter and are altered. As material forces they retroject meanings back onto humanity, other living beings, and the environment in unexpected and unforeseeable ways. Technologies create new forms of space out of which new forms of phenomena appear. Technologies inform human identities in constructing life in the image of their Being.

Possible Subtopics:

TECHNOLOGICAL SPACINGS: in the history of material cultures; as built space; as the producers of social organization; of everyday life; in the production of knowledge; in the production of news/information; through transportational modalities; through communication devices; in conducting wars; in the arts; through large public works projects such as dams, bridges, highways; in scientific exploration; in small objects of use; in the economics of exchange; through manufacturing processes; of geo-engineering; as portrayed in imaginable worlds; in the geographies of various cultures; GIS/sonar/radar/robots; of control through policing and architectural design; of spying; of children’s playworlds; of educational sites; in the workplace; musical spaces; cinematic environments