Make(r) Space, Making Space: A Media Ecology in Two Parts

Part I. Make(r) Space: Collaborations and Collections

Who are makers, and what are their spaces? What counts as making, to whom, and how might these contested definitions of making be productively juxtaposed with the scholarly approaches on display at the conferences of professional associations? These are the questions with which I was confronted when Jamie Skye Bianco, chair of the Media Interventions working group of the Cultural Studies Association, contacted me about the opportunity to co-organize a pop-up maker space at the 2014 annual meeting, whose theme, “Ecologies: Relations of Culture, Matter, and Power,” seemed to lend itself particularly well to queer and feminist reconceptualizations of what constitutes “culture,” “matter,” and “power,” and of what “relations” between these terms might consist. Indeed, the queer inflections of “relations” stand out to me in thinking about the ongoing process of the maker space’s assembling. What relationships and, more importantly, modes of relating could the maker space foster? And how would academics, the majority of whom may not identify primarily as makers, relate to the body of work on display in the space, which does not inhabit the familiar shapes of panel presentations, roundtables, or seminars? To rephrase a question repeatedly raised in the workshops on cultural production and the Media Interventions sessions at the 2013 meeting of the CSA, “Beyond Disciplinarity: Interventions in Cultural Studies and the Arts,” how might interdisciplinary scholars articulate responses to critical-creative work that does not present itself in the form of critique?

The following is my attempt to open up some of the questions raised in the making of this year’s iteration of Media Interventions, and to reflect in media res on the experimental and tactical praxis of getting things done within institutional constraints. As of this writing, the maker space has yet to happen or is still happening; I therefore write about the event in the present, future, and conditional tenses, cobbling together what will be the space’s pastpresents: interweavings, layerings, and relays across time.¹ Like many do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural producers, I find myself shifting between the roles of archivist, organizer, bricoleur, and participant observer, simultaneously working out the logistics of the maker space in real time, while also optimistically anticipating its afterlives and the many potential worlds that it conjures. Some of these worlds will be documented and mediated in the second part of this piece, which will serve as a more extensive yet still partial archive of the maker space as media ecology, a multimodal collection of artifacts and fragments that is collaboratively curated. In the spirit of the Media Interventions working group, which highlights practitioner perspectives on prefigurative media politics,² I offer the process of making space as one that is as eminently practical as it is improvisatory, as speculative as it is theoretical, and as material as it is imaginary. I argue that the pop-up maker space is prototypical of a set of emergent, queer feminist new materialist practices and projects. Such projects might be versions of what Katie King has called boundary object-oriented feminism, or what Jamie Skye Bianco has called #Q3C: queer creative critical compositionist method.³ Taken together, these queer feminist methods are ways of worlding that gather together things, bodies, and affects in accumulations of complex agencies, a making that is seriously playful and affectionately, if always improperly, practiced.

The idea for the maker space grew out of conversations around a set of interrelated panels, performances, workshops, and seminars at the 2013 conference which stressed theoretical and practical approaches to making and doing in the form of performance, code, zines, and art/activist digital media production, including music, video, and online platforms. I experienced the four days in Chicago as a tour de force, as invigorating as it was exhausting. My first visit to the CSA as a new member and as a participant in one of two Media Interventions panels, I was struck by the palpable urgency with which those at the conference were attempting to create more sustaining and, hopefully, more sustainable forms of knowledge production than the dominant ones circulating in the humanities, many of whose disciplines are caught up in paranoid discourse about their own demise while also experiencing the real effects of shrinking funds. The multimodal experiments on display were accompanied by discussions of disciplinary legibility and the uneven value of different kinds of academic labor in the neoliberal restructurings of the university, discussions to which the precarity of contingent faculty, staff, and graduate student life were not incidental. These conversations were both frustrated and hopeful, and in the months after the conference they extended across social media as well as off it, dispersed in a network with loosely grouped nodes: New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Salt Lake City, and San Diego, among others.

Having volunteered at the Lateral general interest meeting at CSA 2013, in the fall of that year I helped peer review some pieces for the “Queer the Noise” thread with fellow doctoral students Christina Nadler and Megan Turner, and in January of 2014 Jamie Skye Bianco reached out to me with the invitation to co-organize the maker space and help assemble the “Ecologies” thread, which would archive and remediate the work of the participants in this year’s Media Interventions. So began a process that would take almost six months from start to finish, drawing together a group of collaborators whose affiliations with each other register differing degrees of intimacy and familiarity, and whose positions relative to academic, art, and activist worlds are various (and variable). Over the course of that time the participants, Jamie, and I coordinated via dozens of email threads, multiple video chats, phone calls, Google docs, and virtual calendars, in addition to working out details remotely with members of the conference organizing committee, the host committee at the University of Utah, staff at both the University of Utah and our home institutions, and a number of third (or fourth or fifth) parties who would help us ship large quantities of technology and materials as well as rent, borrow, and move necessary equipment. The result will be truly collaborative in the sense that tremendous, if necessarily uneven, forms of labor have converged in articulating or producing space as well as time, not to mention the material artifacts that will populate the space.⁴ Each of the participants will formally present some version of their work at one of two scheduled Media Interventions panels, and will be included in a standing exhibit in the maker space for part of the conference while also contributing to other loosely scheduled activities. In addition to the participants slated for the Media Interventions panel, I put out a general call to the CSA membership inviting participation, and also directly targeted artists, academics, and practitioners in my circle of friends as well as those recommended by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. The responses, when I received them, were generally enthusiastic, but most of those I invited were unable to attend due to lack of funds, impending graduation, or other circumstances that made transporting artwork and people long distances unfeasible.

Running alongside of or, according to the University of Utah’s campus map, directly across from the main conference site and concurrent with its schedule, we hoped the maker space could provide a parallel mode of engagement with the topics of the annual meeting, amplifying aspects of the conference theme yet offering an alternative set of conversations and goings-on. Slated to take place in the University’s Pierre Lassonde Entrepreneur Center, a Civil War-era home with two porches, three small rooms, a kitchen, and a garden, the maker space would shift conference attendees into another place altogether. The standing exhibit of participants’ work would invite viewers to slow down and take in the material at an entirely different pace than that of the rest of the conference, whose back-to-back panels, plenaries, receptions, and business meetings will leave many of us tired, cranky, and socially and mentally overstimulated on top of being stressed out from lack of regular exercise, departure from normal eating habits, jet lag, and a generalized sense of being broke from having spent too much money to be able stay the duration of the proceedings.⁵

Additionally, workshops, performances, and informal and spontaneous acts of DIY “making” in this oddly domestic professional space would encourage attendees to use as many senses and as many parts of the brain as possible, to dialog with others more than they might in a question and answer session or in fleeting chances to “network” between panels, and most importantly, to have fun. We are, of course, hoping for a slightly different kind of fun than the sometimes perverse pleasures of critique or the thrill of listening to a famous scholar deliver a beautiful and devastating keynote. It is a kind of fun that cannot be engineered or produced through “gamification,” a fun that is uneasily recuperated into the logics of “creative industries,” in spite of attempts to do so. Of course, we always risk complicity; any space that claims to be a maker space will run such a risk in light of the corporate branding of The Maker Movement, which promises to churn out entrepreneurs and founders of start-ups with costly events and technology that is always already “innovative,” whatever its applications or production processes. In this sense it is a fitting irony that the locale for the maker space is named after a millionaire alumnus whose success has generated hefty investments for the University of Utah in the form of the Lassonde Institute for young entrepreneurs. A Civil War house situated squarely on the frontier, bursting with entrepreneurial futures and military pasts—how to occupy such a domicile masquerading as museum with queers and feminists, crafters and geeks? How to make space in such a place? The negotiations among these pastpresents and possible futures are complicated to say the least, and by no means finished or even able to be finished, remaining productively open and in the making.

Because the event has yet to happen, I will not make any claims to capture the meanings that will no doubt spring up amongst the work on display, nor will I attempt to predict exactly what forms making will take in the space, although I would venture to guess that they will range from the low-tech to the high-tech and include knitting, crochet, sound walks, musical experimentation, on-the-spot short video production, Lego art, zine-making, coding, circuit bending, dance, yoga, and, in the best-case scenario, the making of friends both temporary and permanent. Such meanings and makings are provisional, dependent upon those present in the space as well as the materials at hand. In this sense, the space is what we make it and what is made of it before, during, and after the fact. Queerly, it has a life or lives of its own, imbricated with the lives of the people, things, and technologies that bring it into being and that continue to attend to it after the space itself has been disassembled, its component parts redistributed.

Part II. Making Space: Media Ecologies

At the time of this writing, the maker space at CSA 2014 has long since been disassembled, its parts stuffed into an old army duffel sporting new duct tape patches from its hard journey to Utah—a bursting sack full of odds and ends that got stuck in the airport in Denver on the return home before arriving in Washington, D.C., a day behind me. According to the scale at the baggage check, the duffel weighed 35 lbs., hefty enough that bystanders who saw me lugging it through Salt Lake City casually asked me if I was running away from home.

In some senses, the maker space in Lassonde House was a kind of home for those of us at the CSA who were seeking an elusive something else from our conference experience: meaningful conversation about our work around a table rather than on one side of it; forms of critique as playful and generous as they are rigorous and toothy; an immersive, sensory, even erotic way to practice intellectual life that could encompass all the pleasures found between the materialities of page, screen, lens, keyboard, mic, yarn, Lego bricks, other bodies. The space for this kind of ludic labor was quite literally unpacked from the luggage of half a dozen artists, activists, and academics, transforming the inside of Lassonde House into a standing exhibit, a theater, a workshop, and an interactive piece of art. The house, which already exhibited the ghosts of its former lives through framed original blueprints and enlarged photographs of grim-faced Civil War officers in uniform on the front porch, underwent further transformations over the course of the conference by hosting an after-hours dance party that spilled onto the front lawn, as well as a performance that unfolded in its small side garden for an intimate audience actively engaged in its production and documentation.

In some senses, Lassonde House was an ideal location for the maker space. It is positioned directly across the street from the University Guest House, a hotel and conference center that allowed attendees to participate in conference activities without leaving the University of Utah’s sprawling campus for anything besides food and entertainment. With its hardwood floors and staircase, porches, deep-set windows, and an antique door serving as boardroom table, aesthetically it is much more interesting than traditional conference spaces. The “historic” quality of the house, however, precluded its occupants from calling attention to bigger structures of which the house, and the university itself, are a part.

For example, upon arriving in Utah we were told that one of our participants, Lilly Marsh, could not create a temporary knitted sculpture on the outside of the house as she had planned; some administrative offices are located in the upstairs of the building and the house came to stand in for the public face of the university. Her conceptual sculpture, which would have visually and texturally represented the connection between past and present with huge knitted “roots” emerging from the front of the house, essentially could not be vouched for as part of the university’s vision for itself, despite its ability to be easily removed from the property after the conference. The fact that the house bears the name of a millionaire alumnus and donor to the university plays no small role here. The university’s entrepreneurial future, its hopes for “innovation” and the creation of “opportunity,” is attached to this house in the middle of what was once a militarized frontier caught up in the machinations of nation-building. Aspects of the house’s past remain selectively preserved, displayed and contained on the walls, yet our installation had to be mindful of the hefty investment in the house’s renovations: its shiny floors, air conditioning, alarm systems, and automatic door locks. Meanwhile, the content of the work installed in the space interrogated the connections between infrastructure, technological innovation, and ecological landscapes. How, then, to reconcile inside and outside, micro and macro—how to do what the conference theme called for when the structures of the conference itself prevented it?

Having the maker space in an historic house highlighted how academic conferences can become insular events, their modes of social engagement contingent upon the availability and accessibility of particular kinds of spaces and structures. Those who had no interest in making or playing, or attending a performance or screening, could have gone the entire conference ostensibly without setting foot in Lassonde House, whereas those who happened to wander in could find themselves in the space for ten minutes or an hour or an afternoon. Others, a core group of six to eight volunteers who also had work on display, were attached to the maker space for greater periods of time in order to greet visitors, and also out of the practical necessity of making sure the expensive technology loaned us by our universities was not left unattended.

Thus, time as well as space affected the kinds of interactions it was possible to have during the conference, and the kinds of things it was possible to actually produce in the maker space itself. The packed concurrent scheduling meant that slower activities with longer durations, such as starting a knitting project, building a Lego sculpture, or putting together a zine, often could not easily overlap with the standard twenty-minute presentation or panel session of an hour and a half. Making a friendship bracelet out of rubber bands, printing a postcard, or folding a paper airplane, on the other hand, allowed casual users of the space to drop in and have a conversation over activities that were not intensive in terms of attention or time. Neither of these forms of engagement is preferable to the other; they pose challenges, however, for fully integrating maker spaces into established conference formats. What should we reasonably expect conference attendees to make over the course of a three- or four-day event, besides professional contacts? More importantly, how can professional associations and the universities that host them support those cultural producers who facilitate the creation of spaces like the one at the 2014 conference, such that other forms of the intellectual labor of making and doing become possible?

A media ecologies approach to maker spaces and making spaces puts these tensions on display without attempting to resolve or fix them. As a method for aggregating or tactically assembling collections of media and their relationships, media ecologies draw attention to the socialities and materialities of media beyond static formulations of production, distribution, and consumption. As partial maps or snapshots of social scenes in progress, media ecologies allow us to notice what it is we are doing with different media, from trash to plastic to wire to video to sound to code, and to ask how such media came to be available to us as well as what we expect such media to do in our (mis)use of them. This kind of noticing, a lingering over the intentional if improvisatory assembly of media forms, is political in a world saturated by media that compete for our attention while simultaneously attempting to hide the technologies and material conditions that bring them into being.

The media ecology presented here, compiled in Storify and comprised of digital photography, tweets, and six-second looping video from the mobile app Vine, documents and remediates activities at the maker space from its setup and installation on Wednesday, May 28^th to its disassembly on Saturday, May 31^st. No media ecology is complete; this particular media ecology represents my perspective on the events as an organizer and participant incapable of being in more than one place at once, despite my best attempts. As such it can only begin to touch upon the many kinds of making happening in the space, including the making of social worlds real and imagined. Additionally, the affordances of Storify allow me to tell stories of media ecologies in a very specific way, using only the social media platforms with which it is compatible and organizing elements of the story into a linear, scrolling narrative. This might seem incompatible with the form of the maker space itself, where many things were happening at once and no one could tell the whole story of what was going on. Nevertheless, I’m holding out for different and multiplying media ecologies where new and old forms of making intermingle, where the social and the thingly mediate each other. Stories capacious enough for such ecologies have yet to be invented.

View Storify article [archive link]

[This article was originally published at http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue3/ecologies/rogers. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral3.]