You can watch it here:
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ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement (1st Trailer)
About this video: hackerspaces within the DIY movement and the personal journey of members of what are known as hackerspaces: workshop collectives that allow its members to pursue any projects of they desire. ReMade reveals how these hackerspaces are shaping the communities they exist in and how they are fostering exciting new methods of education. The collective work and ideas of the creative people in the DIY movement are opening a new world of inventiveness and creativity…of making that could very well change the way production occurs on a worldwide scale. Yet ReMade doesn’t just focus on telling this modern maker tale but also strives to search deep within humanity’s maker past, to previous eras of vast creative expression and how each time it has occurred technological innovation has thrived. Examples are the Mechanic's institutes of the 1880s that inspired World Fairs, the hobbyists of the 1950's and the homebrew computing clubs of the 1970's. ReMade is not just about this latest maker movement, but how it is intimately linked to the past. How regardless of epoch different makers all share an ambition to make their dreams a reality through their creative prowess. By supporting this documentary, you will help us raise the necessary funds to upgrade our equipment and to improve our travel budget to properly cover the unfolding story of this movement. Thanks for watching. www.electromagnate.com Electromagnate is a small group of hackerspace members who are dedicated to showing the maker and DIY community to the world." |
Hello (please feel free to forward),
Some of you may be aware that we have been teaching a design studio at the University of Melbourne about St Paul's Cathedral Close. It considers the carpark opposite Federation Square and Flinders St Station. This is the second year I am running the studio (from the Cathedral Crypt) with Tim Derham and Richard Falkinger and I would be pleased to invite you to our exhibition which is starting Friday (noon) in the North Transept of St Pauls Cathedral which you can visit at your leisure. It has been a quite a special studio, with many participants, all broadly towards building ambitious thinking about the future of public space in Melbourne. See attached invitation and detail below.We would be happy if you could make it and share your thoughts on this provocative project
Response to Claire Bishop (before reading Kestler)
This is my own response to Claire Bishop’s article The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents, in Artforum, 2006, p179-185.
See her original article and Kestler’s response here:
http://onedaysculpture.org.nz/assets/images/reading/Bishop%20_%20Kester.pdf
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~lkelley/wiki_docs/bishop.pdf
http://www.artforum.com/html/issues/200602/new
I wrote it immediately after a long a slow read and although wish to start by qualifying it by recognising my own degree of naïveté in the field of research, I am struck with how much more intimately I understand what it is to practice in these ways than she, even though I have only been doing it for a few years. Her article has interesting questions to pose to open up theoretical debate, but has almost nothing to say relevant to the practicing itself and her statements about its constitution as a discipline are misleading, if not directly in contrast to the majority of various substantive conceptions of the truth held by the participants in the various projects I have been a part of, including myself.
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My initial take on this is relatively clear. Although it is academically unacceptable, I would start by stating that Bishop is an enemy of the practice I am investigating. She is not an enemy because she invites more critique, but an enemy because she in a hegemonic fashion introduces a must definition to the judgement of works, and reinstates the importance of judgement.
It is my understanding that the question of judgement of worth / value is in itself different to that of critique, and this difficult distinction is in many ways the fundamental question of these practices. These practices, instead of carrying preconceived definitions of judgement and value build foundation in the projects and as such the projects have their own autonomy. This is an autonomy not from the world, but from a privileged and impassionate eye of the disconnected critic, or a lineage of projects in a broad field that would dictate methods more appropriate to the field than the project itself. Indeed, finding the values inherent in a project are often the key aims of these collaborative projects, not in a consensual (also consenting) fashion but in sense of a materialisation, as a performing or practicing of those values through discourse. The values are diversified, expressed and made specific to that place and each person in conversation. A critical reflection of the project does not discuss the smartness of the project to communicate and consider these values for a general audience, but describes the how the project specifically interacted with the material of the site – place in an artful / architectural fashion. This of course invites a ambiguous relationship, as artful / architectural is not a neutral definition in itself, however it is this definition that links the project to the general audience, not the value of the project. Judgement thus needs to set up its own criteria embedded in the project, and be beholden to that alone. This autonomy becomes the value of the work generally.
My second issue with the article is the assertive placement of analysis and examples. Bishop almost relegates the reader to an uncritical position that is at the whim of the author’s internal judgements. This is yet another reflection of the previous point. Bishop in her very manipulative assertions does exactly what she critiques uncritical artists from doing: hiding the judgements and values and assuming common understanding and politic of the reader. Bishop’s analysis seems to be going to a predetermined place, which is especially evident in her comments about the role of the work in this realm being necessarily about ‘self-sacrifice’, having an ethics of ‘authorial renunciation’ or minimalisation of them, necessarily ‘anticapitalist’ in tendency, or ‘less nuanced’. These are examples of her summation of the projects in an assertive manner rather than taking on particularities of the projects themselves. Her summation is purposeful rather than critically analytical. Although this may be only one way of approaching a critique of work, she neither lays out this methodology, justifies it (ie in search of or for a reason?) nor tempers it with a more complex understanding (‘nuanced’?) that might identify certain aspects as fitting her analysis and others unfitting. Her judgement is assertively complete is this way, from the outset, and therefore a fundamental contradiction occurs in which she devalues the art of the artists in question in favour of her own de-authoring. These projects, at least the ones I have been involved in, are fundamentally authored, and usually in multiple ways that respond to, support and contradict her assertions. Deller’s work is an example of this, I would read through the lines that the ‘point’ of the work was indeed this uncomfortable play of contradictions that could only be at best experienced, rather than resolved. To use her own words against her: “Untangling this knot – or ignoring it by seeking more concrete ends for art – is slightly to miss the point, since the aesthetic is, according to Rancière, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, characterized precisely by that tension between faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come.” p183
It seems to me that Bishop is exceedingly uncomfortable with what she actually espouses as she throughout hides the values of her arguments, and fails to use the same judgments in any deep way on the projects she espouses.
My third issue with this article is her messy use of ‘ethics’ and morals. Ethics is very difficult and has an involved discourse which I would not even fain to be an expert in. I do however know of a very vigorous debate that puts these terms in an interesting field discourse that is extremely productive (and destructive) – Nietzsche – Genealogy of Morals? Habermas / Rawls? Of these participatory / social art projects this complex question of what is moral-ethical is often openly part of the production of the project and thus, would (if she had have read the construction of value rhetoric in an analysis I am suggesting) in fact add to her argument that these projects are valuable by their ethical-moral dimension. Here I am saying the question of what is moral and what is ethical is included in many participatory projects and often the conversation of what as a substantive context for the project must be first conceived before the work can be judged or indeed understood. Yes; these projects are valuable because they see themselves as ethical-moral in constitution, but now let us, as Bishop suggests look critique them, to remove their ethical-moral discourse is to remove them from their ‘life’ dimension, that she also proposes is so important. (Is this a more appropriate way towards a discourse on aesthetics? Not subsumed by an ethic-moral but considering of it?) Indeed antinomy is an aim, but then a concerted effort to understand and substantially engage with the projects should be the first part of any critique of them as practices that constitute a discipline.
Here is a sound-bite version of my PhD Thesis: in 3 minutes!
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My PhD is in the faculty of art and design and I am looking at architecture and participation.
More specifically what the PhD is interested in is conflict as a productive force in the design process.
Why is this important?
Conflict is something that allows us to have real engagements which are passionate and embracing it allows us to have connections between people that are meaningful.
Participation as a field is relatively undeveloped in architecture, with much more development in disciplines of philosophy and sociology, especially political science, urban design and planning, and also in art practice installation art and performance art.
There are many projects in participation but they are limited in theoretical development or connection to a comprehensive understanding of a broad research field.
What I think that understanding about participation more in architecture allows us to do, is to build much more meaningful spaces and environments that are related to people. And by actually incorporating the conflicts that really do occur in everyday life we can make spaces that people want to be in because it belongs to them and they actually feel like it fits their needs. In a bigger way it develops our ways of thinking about public space as lots of little private spaces that overlap and conflict with one another.
As you can see here, this is a one page example from a case study of one of the office fit-out projects we designed and this is one day when we were designing a petal table in a shared office space. We spent one day, that is, we had a timeline, – one of the key principles I’m learning from these collaboration processes and the community was involved face to face working with one another on a project. That actually gave them contact and it gave the decisions we made legitimacy. We built this 1:1 prototype which meant that you actually test something physically, but is means also that you put something forward which is meaningful, which gets away from the conflicts to see if it actually works. And finally we actually got people at the end of the day to cut them and actually make these, powertools and all, which was a really great celebration of the efficiency, us all seeing the final success we had with one another and real time produces legitimacy of that making process and interaction with had together.
The core tools that you need for this is conversation, good food, coloured pencils, scissors and glue, and maybe big patience and perseverance.
This is a very difficult field, often very messy, and it poses a lot of tricky questions for architecture
Over the next two years I’m going to design another few minor and major case studies, to try to find better ways to work and think in this way and more importantly, to communicate what actually happens.
In architecture we often think the point is to be experts that solve conflicts when in fact we should be trying to facilitate people doing it themselves.
A
“For the masses”
I’ve always had a deep ideological problem with this term, it assumes a type of feeding process to a starving swarm of beings who can’t fend for themselves, because they have become too massive, too amorphous and abstract to care about their own selves.
I’m suspicious because it sounds like a blame game, a virtual projection of what’s happening on the ground.
Why gathering here?
When I first think of gathering in a particular site, I think of Louis Mumford’s famous duo of city seeding. Container and Magnet. 1961. We gathered IN this place to make this city because it could hold us, it was the container to store our produce and supplies, but also our families and memories. I think of the medieval walled city as a holding pen, inside is safe, outside is not. Yes; this is a romanticised idea of home that is politically problematic, but it serves as a good metaphor. The other is the Magnet. We gathered AT this place out of habit and attraction. It had good sunlight, fresh water, opportunity for survival and exchange, we made pilgrimages to the same place each year to commemorate or communicate. A simple example could be the shrine. Here we came to meditate, to think, to make an offering. I think these metaphors for gathering are useful. We still, I see, gather IN and AT places.
This ‘place’ stuff is something deeply psychological or spiritual. Territory is fundamentally part of who we are, it makes and is made by our identity. In design theory there has been a lot of talk about nomads and monads, but in the end of the day there is a certain identification that occurs where it be a spot or a route, a world is made specific, it is socialised and personalised, it is marked. From a philosophical standpoint this explains our fascination with the concept, but doesn’t quite cut it as an everyday reason.
OK, close your eyes….
Think of one of your favourite places or a particular moment in your life. It can be everyday.
My thesis is that most of you probably thought of a location in which had a personal story or stories. I think it is highly likely that placemaking in many ways is about making stories. It would seem to me that if you want a place to be more meaningful, you have to increase the opportunity for stories to be made there. I think that we like having things we can identify with around us, and as such we go to, and (go back to) places in which we have (and can make) stories IN and AT.
We are slugs, creatures that leave a trace in the world, and the more creative (enterprising) amongst us get others to pay us to do it! We make our mark in the world to identify it with us and to identify ourselves in it. Socio-spatial communion. For me this is a missing depth to be explored in the concept of ‘community’.
Perhaps under this concept of placemaking – the communion of the spatial and the social – we could see the piazza – plaza as a social mark writ large. As gathering places for many people, they are bulwarks against a tide of loss of space to leave a mark, and their size conjures a masse of empowerment that could resist the scale of systematisation and synthesis that is occurring in our mega cities. Big plazas and piazzas are bulwarks for democracy. They can contain and attract both meaningful creation, and resistance.
I think Melbourne needs more meaningful squares IN the city, especially AT the places that matter.
Planning (especially in Melbourne) has been fraught for over a decade. Residents now have neither the possibility nor inclination to meaningfully leave a mark, to participate in how the city is made. Public consultation today is relegated to objections and or advertising – placation. The American Planning Association whose catch cry is currently “making great communities happen” is a strong advocate of public participation. A key principle of a vital democracy is ‘meaningful’ participation.
Indeed, over time I see a radical disempowerment of public participation in making public space has occurred in Melbourne.
Can these sites be determined (designed) artificially?
“Docklands” anyone?
The common retort is ‘it still needs time’, but many sense that something fundamentally went awry that we are still struggling to ‘fix’ it.
Yes; I think they can, but the process in which these sites are determined needs to be fundamentally open to individuals and communities to leave a traces. If it is to be a place – a location that is meaningful – then people need to be involved in the making of stories there.
Monuments and icons do this to some extent as they imbue collective meaning or leave interpretation for it in abstraction, but I don’t think we need a city of spikey faceted things or just high level political or popular memories. What about the personal and everyday? What about the little people. What about ‘me’, I and ‘us’?
The work of Gilbert locally is a good example of the desire that still exists for places that mean something to people to be created. Developers know it. Big architects know it. Council knows it. Whether or not they are addressing a capability that exists on the ground, I’d prefer to leave that to our discussion.
If our cities are just made up of the big voices, and always others’ say, then we will one by one feel alienated by it.
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There were some good questions around places:
- Role of the artist?
- Private space / University as space of possibility?
- Comfort?
– Design intention – and Greece just claim to places
Contention and argument are not welcome
and hence we have only one way of making places – the neutral, comfortable, place for everyone way – These are places that mean nothing, and hence, become meaningless.
