Studio began with students choosing an object to unpack by tracing its genealogy.

From a Powerbook to Beaded American Flag Purses to Botox, our goal was to realize a thought experiment devised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the very dawn of industrialization. In Émile, his book on the ideal education of a child, Rousseau wrote of "a problem which another child would never heed [that] would torment Émile half a year." Émile and his instructor go to an elegant dinner hosted by wealthy people where the two are dazzled by the many guests, servants, dishes, and elegant china. In Émile's ear the instructor whispers "How many hands do you suppose the things on this table passed through before they got here?"

The virus, or the Trojan horse, is successfully implanted in the child's mind and the result is a crisis:

With this first project, the NetLab built on the model of Natalie Jeremijenko's "How Stuff Is Made," an online visual encyclopedia of photoessays produced by engineering and design students to document how objects are manufactured, investigating both the labor conditions of that manufacture and its environmental impact.

Using research skills as well as specifically architectural tools such as the axonometric drawing, we aimed for an awareness of the object as it is embedded in the matrix of its production, a genealogical vision that would embody the history that Walter Benjamin reminds us is always there, no matter how suppressed:

As objects—and their constituent parts—become more and more part of a global network of supply and consumption, tracing the origins of an object will serve as an introduction to the network analysis during the second part of studio.

More than just uncovering the origins of an object, our goal is to engage it, to take part in Bruno Latour's call to "make things public," foregrounding the role of objects as autonomous agents in networks:

Things are controversial assemblages of entangled issues, and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions. The entanglements of things and politics engage activists, artists, politicians, and intellectuals. To assemble this parliament, rhetoric is not enough and nor is eloquence; it requires the use of all the technologies—especially information technology—and the possibility for the arts to re-present anew what are the common stakes.

Just how urgent this task may be became evident with the International Telecommunications Union's publication of the Internet of Things in 2005, a study predicting the end of human dominance of the Internet as thing to thing communication obviates the need for us as intermediaries in the lives of objects.
This formerly "inanimate" Other can now communicate back (about its location, condition, needs), either willfully or not. Things, in this vision, are no longer merely objects, mere commodities, fetishes valued by humans. They exceed anything that Rousseau or Marx could have ever imagined, becoming active, sentient nodes of communication: dust is smart, glass is smart, phones are smart. Our age-old animist dreams of a world imbued with spirits lies around the corner.