Unmaking: Against General Applicability

Abstract

As belief in the applicability and efficacy of DIY production, open-source, and method sharing has broadened to include institutional hackathons and open-data-fueled and civic 'maker weekends', taking stock and articulating how certain approaches 'work' or 'do not work' within maker culture – and for progressive and expansive creator cultures more generally – continues to be essential. 'Making' is a key concept that frames a host of more specific practices, lending characteristic manual/moral, communal/communicational, aesthetic/ethical, and enacted/ economic inflections and values. Even simple historical, traditional, technological, or digital acts of object and media creation, of art and design, but also of writing and thinking itself, can be recast as 'making'. What is it that happens to the thinking and doing of such activities, when such recasting is desired, chosen, projected, enforced, or assumed?