#retrofit

This too, is a mech suit.

Repair is not simply an aesthetic. Its politics anchor repair in the praxis of doing and responding to the world, thereby charting a different temporal course – one that demands being pursued on its own terms. Recent scholarship in repair studies has celebrated the interventions that acts of maintenance make in a world beset by planned obsolescence and short‑term cultures of use and disposal. Taking time to foreground the ongoing work of cleaners, maintainers and repair workers, this literature carves out a space from which to consider the labour of planetary care that repair performs: cleaning the air, the beach, the forest; rewilding the land. While we have much to learn from this discourse, caution must be paid to the ways in which the cultures of extractive capitalism lay siege to otherwise well‑intentioned acts of repair. Wresting care away from neoliberalised accounts of ‘self‑care’ is a fraught and complex task. We cannot allow repair, after its naturalisation as feminised care work or the unskilled work of manual labour, to be stylised, romanticised and commodified. The proliferation of home improvement television programmes, linking the amateur renovator’s dream directly to increasing the ‘resale value’ of houses while ignoring the unliveable reality of disrepair, point to a very real vulnerability in the concept of repair. Repair is always a question of what it means to break, who is breaking, and who is broken. In her recent book, The Ruse of Repair (2021), Patricia Stuelke warns against repair being ‘implicated in short‑circuiting rather than successfully realising attempts to break with the world as it is in order to create equality’. In other words, repair cannot simply appeal to learning to live with breakdown. New questions of disrepair must be asked: breakdown for whom and by whom? What system of knowledge distinguished that as broken and this as repair? Like Britain’s 19th‑century Luddites, who broke machinery in the name of repairing class relations, a form of repair that breaks the carbon logics that are breaking the planet must be realised. In what style, then, do we repair? By learning, first, how to break better. 

Courtesy of JPA Design

lord knows what she's about to do with that thing

In the winter, heat pumps extract heat from the outside air (even when it’s below zero), run it through a compressor, and then pump it indoors. During the balmy days of summer, a heat pump reverses this technology, essentially turning the heater into an air conditioner.