As discussed above, for the purposes of this article we are concerned with the telepathic sublime in the Contemporary Telepathics collection, a phenomenon about the response of awe, terror, or amazement over technological inventions that augment or replace the power, distance, or effect of existing human capacities. These sentiments tap into an individual’s or culture’s experience of the future — that is, using telepathic devices often feels futuristic.

Perhaps most pragmatically, the archive also collects and tracks digital materials related to an invention through its various stages of development and public promotion or public response. As such, the archive follows discourses over time by tracking cross-references and keyword designations. One design intent for the archive is to reflect how an artefact is positioned according to a function or human motivation. Discourses about telepathic devices (and more broadly, “wearables”), concentrate on how these devices will be used for something — they have a “for-ness” — rather than just being about something (“aboutness”). Fabric distinguishes itself from technology indexes such as the ACM Computing Classification System in this regard, which implicitly focus on “aboutness.”[5] Instead, it sets out to problematize this orientation, strategically tracking how wearables can be understood in terms of their social use. As a result, the effect can sometimes blur optimal pathways for searching, browsing, and information retrieval.

Fabric has multiple entry points that facilitate browsing through categories, images, timelines, and index terms, as well as full-text and keyword search. One of the ways users view the archive is by entering through a specific Collection; each collection is a curated set of documents that have been specifically selected by curators. Each focus on a particular topic, theme, or argument. At the time of writing, the Contemporary Telepathics collection holds 62 artifacts across 14 different media types ranging from 1999 to 2017.

There are also other collections, which reveal different rhetorical motivations and arguments. In one such collection, the goal is to reveal how commercial exoskeletons are developed by military industrial complex producers in close partnership with global Hollywood film franchises (e.g., Iron Man).[6] In this collection, video game play has also been archived to reveal how fictional exoskeletons influence real world innovation, and vice versa. Another collection concentrates on the evolving story of inventor/filmmaker Rob Spence and his journey to create a digital prosthetic eye for himself.[7] His persona, sometimes the subject of a CNN clip, other times a portrayal of himself trying to improve his life after a childhood gun accident, is especially compelling when collected under a single banner. Ultimately, each collection performs a specific task and offers a curatorial argument, set out by the curator (or a number of curators) responsible for its construction.

Collections are dynamic and grow over time with new artifacts added as the arguments evolve, as classification adapts, and as contributors and curators come and go on the project. This design prefigures what Miguel Escobar Varela describes as the transience of archives: “[t]raditional archivists could assert that digital archives are not really built to endure the passage of time and constitute a repository for future historical research”  [Varela 2016]. Addressing this challenge, Takhteyev and DuPont point to the spirit of “remix” in suggesting that collection and preservation are “living, ongoing practice[s]”  [Takhteyev and DuPont 2013, 362]. We embrace this state of flux and try to overcome the challenges wrought by the passage of time by inviting new people to the archiving team, who then create new archival practices and advocate for new ideas. Varela argues that digital archives should be considered performance in part because “[o]ften the archives are not impersonal, but highly modified by the interests of the participants”  [Varela 2016]. As such, since its inception in 2012, the archive includes contributions by more than thirty people, even before it was opened for public display.

Viewed as a timeline (see Figure 2), comparisons between different media and sometimes heteroclite artifacts are possible. The earliest artifact in the collection is a scene from the film The Matrix (1999), depicting the character Neo learning about telekinesis.[8] This film clip was included when one of the authors discovered a blog article that directly referred to the film when describing a technological innovation. This serendipitous discovery offers a powerful rhetorical explanation about how a technology might eventually evolve — a forecast. Therefore, multimedia representations such as films form an important part of the discourse and analytical terrain.

Taken together, the artifacts displayed in the collection enable a visitor to track the telepathic sublime, which is a keyword. One recent item in the collection is a 2016 article that discusses the same university group who used monkeys wearing brain interfaces back in 2000 [Olewitz 2016]. It reports on implanting a monkey with a chip to move wheelchairs through the powers of telekinesis. In the 2016 article, the final sentence concludes, “[w]e hope to begin trying this on humans soon” — pointing to a vision of the future, and exhibiting the mythic “hope” of telepathic sublime, which is never questioned, but simply assumed [Olewitz 2016]. In tracking the telepathic sublime through the metadata schema and collected artifacts, the classificatory approach focuses attention on particular technologies’ “for-ness,” rather than as static and inert technologies. Indeed, since it is often the case that the machinery of telepathic devices becomes obsolete so quickly, tracking motive or intent becomes a foundational critical practice.

Moving from monkey to “human,” the “Mind Control Your TV” artifact (Figure 3) illustrates the unique archival practices necessary to document the technology as well as the complex rhetorical motivators bound up in this collection, and how they evolve over time.[9] The item, a video clip, promotes the idea of using a wireless wearable technology to select television shows to watch, simply through the power of thought [Alred et al. 2015]. In the video, human participants (or maybe actors) wear a headset that reads brainwave fluctuations, which, with suitable control and training of the mind, allows one to telepathically change TV channels. The video is a 4-minute segment from a BBC blog, which discusses how the BBC collaborated with the company “This Place” to create the technology prototype for TV viewers [Alred et al. 2015]. As such, the video combines executives and developers passionately celebrating their innovative mind-control technology and BBC insiders reacting with shock and awe over how television will evolve in the future. To open the clip, Head of Business Development, BBC Digital, Cyrus Saihan says:

What we have developed here is a very experimental proof-of-concept that hopefully gives an idea as to how audiences of the future might be able to control devices, such as TVs, just using their brainwaves. So, seeing colleagues using it first-hand has been an interesting experience.  [Alred et al. 2015]

The video reports on future promises as much as it does on current developments. While This Place wants to sell its technological abilities (e.g., writing software code, re-engineering of consumer devices, etc.), the BBC wants to appear future-focused and on the cusp of emergent ideas. On the whole, the technology itself is clunky, with awkward brain-computer interaction (BCI) headsets and slow interactions as the television receives the signal. However, the point of the video is not to market a product, rather, the point is to position the BBC as forecasting a future for its consumers. The video is compelling to watch because the participants are awestruck when describing their desire to achieve telekinetics. The visual rhetorical markers from participants, such as excited expressions, gleeful remarks, and the sense that one has witnessed magic, aligns well with the heritage of telepathic invention disclosures. One person in the video says: “[t]his is telekinesis… I am literally controlling it with my mind,” as if he witnessed phenomena deemed extraordinary [Alred et al. 2015].

Like most web content, the BBC broadcasted this video on multiple media outlets (which the archive tracks), and included a complementary blog story that was written to further explain the original video [Saihan 2015].[10] Saihan writes:

A subject popular in works of fiction is the ability to control things just by using your mind. The idea of being able to simply think about something and then magically make it happen has fascinated people for many years. Whether it’s using ‘the Force’ in Star Wars, spoon bending on stage or The Matrix, controlling objects simply with your brain has a unique appeal and could open up a whole world of possibilities. So when we learnt that new technologies were now available in the market that allowed you to control electronic devices by measuring the brain’s electrical activity, we wanted to experiment with the technology to see what types of audience experiences this might result in.  [Saihan 2015]

This sublime language glorifies and romanticizes telekinesis, but it also argues for the utility of telekinesis, a fantasy-turned-utility rhetoric. Rhetorical allusions to Star Wars and The Matrix ground the fantasy within a familiar context (blockbuster film franchises), but they also make the argument open-ended and seemingly otherworldly — “a whole world of possibilities,” writes Saihan. Strikingly, this combination makes telekinesis sound reasonable. Audiences are swayed not only with the shock and awe of seeing this invention work, they are also swayed by the familiarity of film culture contextualizing it. Fabric of Digital Life archives these kinds of allusions as cross-references to films through specially-designed metadata that makes such connections and allusions clear.

The Fabric archive uses its metadata scheme tactically. Highlighting our interest in rhetorical framings, one goal of the archive is to make salient each artifact’s persuasive intent. For example: what is the artifact for? What is it doing in terms of changing attitudes? Is there an audience shaped by the genre? Or, returning to a point made earlier, how might the artifact inform the digital as a cultural condition [Carassai and Takehana 2011]?

Similarly, Melanie Feinberg has argued that classification as communication frees system designers from charges of bias [Feinberg 2008]. In Fabric, each artifact is designated a classification with one persuasive intent: academic, advertisement, art, entertainment, or information. Therefore, by its very nature, Fabric is designed to preserve bias, feature it, and display its connection to scientific advancement.

Another goal of the archive is to track how a technology and its persuasive intent emerges over time. News of a single piece of technology may go through several stages, each with an intentional and rhetorical shift according to the genre and content producer. For example, a brain interface may transform from its representation in an academic conference paper (academic), to a news broadcast celebrating an innovative R&D discovery (information), to a commercial product (advertisement), and finally, to a novel that interrogates its dystopic implications (art). According to Diana Taylor, this process of tracking across media and temporal stages is “what makes an object archival” in the sense that “it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis”  [Taylor 2003, 19]. In this hypothetical example, these shifts in media would be captured in Fabric by each artifact’s metadata: shifting classification from academic, information, advertisement, to art.

Similarly, Fabric tracks how technology is carried near, on, or in a body, which is recorded in the metadata schema. The metadata category “location on the body” lets a user select a body part in order to find associated technologies, ideas, or products. For example, one can select wrist to reveal all wrist-worn wearables, and then compare how artifacts and their representations change over time. In the Contemporary Telepathics collection, nearly all items are associated with brain, but several are also indexed with another body part. For example, inventor Kevin Warwick achieves telekinesis with an arm implant, and so the artifacts describing his work also include arm in their metadata. To help facilitate high-level comparisons, Fabric also includes a body analytics visualization.[11] In this way, Fabric enables multi-dimensional and multi-temporal exploration.

One of the more experimental metadata categories of the archive is the “augmenting” field. It is meant to serve as an experiential classification. All artifacts are archived according to an action associated with human activities, which may be physical (e.g., moving, placing, killing), cognitive (e.g., thinking, choosing) or existential (e.g., living, adoring, reminiscing).[12] Manifesting the archive’s experimental and unorthodox approach, the grammatical structure is always a gerund, as gerunds better suggest activity and “for-ness” (see Table 1).

In requiring archivists to capture the ways that wearables augment a body, the archivist must imagine what the technology is augmenting for a seemingly, essentialized, pre-technologic human. This formulation deliberately requires the archivist to cast a narrative about the implied subject of an artifact, that is: if technology were not available, how would the implied action be performed? Or, what would it be replaced with, if at all? For example, surveillance technologies augment watching, eldercare devices augment caring (or perhaps ignoring), and military exoskeletons might augment killing or protecting. Interestingly, new archivists often misidentify this category by choosing technologic activities (e.g., “heart-monitoring” instead of “living” or “healing”). Resolving this mistake requires a tacit exploration of posthuman identity through the acts prescribed by these technologies. The archivist must therefore ask, “can we imagine activities without machines?” The archival goal is to explore how personal technologies augment constructions of human identity and human action, and to understand how they adapt to a technological world.