The word scale is tricky. It invites many definitions, orientations and connections to ourselves, our surroundings and our tools. However, to think of scale as solely technical is reductive and omits the relations, feelings and beliefs that come with such measurements and images. In this book, eight authors come together to challenge our conventions and understanding of scale as grounded in the human.

A Short Incomplete History of Technologies That Scale is a joint publication by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, and transmediale in Berlin. The publication reflects back on the shared theme of transmediale’s 2023 festival edition a model, a map, a fiction and of Aksioma’s programme Tactics&Practice #14: Scale and came together from a common desire to think collectively about how measurements and maps create both politics and feelings in the world. It is an investigation undertaken in collaboration with the authors that opens up our understanding of the word scale.

The book explores how scale reconfigures relations, politics, and affects, through the writing of Asia Bazdyrieva, Anthony Downey, Chris Lee in conversation with FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo), Jussi Parikka, Laura Tripaldi and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal.

The authors expand our understanding of scale to the more-than-human, trace its movements and frictions through histories, and question the way scale generates political power. Demonstrating how we can think with scale, they introduce us to scalar thinking, its urgency in our socio-technical present and its potential for making new maps, new representations and new kinds of measurements.