Reverse Engineering

80 Washington Square East

August 29, 2023
6:30pm

“Reverse Engineering,” a conversation with Keller Easterling and Workshop for Environmental Technik (WET) coincides with Breach (July 6–September 2, 2023), an exhibition that draws from an online repository of digitized materials by and about the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
Reverse Engineering workshops an ecology of techniques, from the global militarized environments of racial capital, war, and empire to the patchy survival and endurance of others. By definition, reverse engineering is a method of learning how something works. If engineering substantiates a designed condition, its reversal entails a systematic opening—one that is simultaneously a deconstruction and reconstruction that discloses inner processes and implicit bounds.

In practice, the knowledge extracted from this reversal is usually applied to (re)produce models and designs for buttressing the catastrophic systems of contemporary life … but could it offer repair and reparation?