Unmaking: 5 Anxieties

As part of the proceedings of the 2016 transmediale (TM) festival, the Critical Media Lab was invited to stage one of the festival’s many “conversation pieces”. The thematic of TM this year revolved around conversation and dialogue, and so Critical Media Lab researchers Moritz Greiner-Petter, Johannes Bruder, Shintaro Miyazaki, Felix Gerloff and Jamie Allen, along with collaborative partners Matthias Tarasiewicz and Sophie Wagner from the Vienna-based Research Institute for Arts and Technology, and researcher Tom Jenkins from the Public Design Workshop at Georgia Tech’s Digital Media program teamed up to frame a discussion session on maker and hacker culture.

For the session, entitled Unmaking: 5 Anxieties, we discussed the disappearance of the physical traction and perfidious engagement with materials in creative practice, the ignoring of material resource chains, the homogenisation and functionalization of once-radical grassroots sub-cultures and communities, and the ignoring of difference in the “maker movement.” The discussion was prompted by a set of ‘concept cards’, designed by Moritz Greiner-Petter. The form of this project apes other formats for ‘creative’ divination and process, like Oblique Strategies, IDEO’s method cards or Critical Making Cards.

Read a write-up of the event here.