# Critical Making Sympositum (Thursday)

__PUBLISH__

## Janneke Wesseling (PhD arts Leiden)

criticality in fine art as a given
trajectories: conceptual art, duchamp, greenwald, adorno, artistic research
artistic research / critical making
creative industries as a problematic frame, industry, ict

Forms of criticality in the arts:
* self-criticality - critical to the position of the artist
* engaged criticality - Dan Graham, Hans Haag(?)

More recent forms:
* cross-boundary critical practices
* dialog as important tool

## Lukas (de Waag)

creative commons consortium
book published by the waag
Matt ... : criticality as linguistic practice, making as a non-linguistic practice
critical making as a performative practice(?, didn't expand on this)

## Florian & Zeljko

Zeljko: initiator Mama medialab Zagred (research & activist space)
Few weeks ago, at the Willem de Kooning, with Zeljko and Gabriella Fontana(?): queer sports, taking the binary competition out of sports
Florian: this example is very everyday, activist aspect, practical artistic research
Sports as identity forming system, that is not questioned.

ginger coons, graduated PhD student in critical making in Toronto
outcome of a workshop was thrown away, not important

What is making? What falls in the definition? Wat is excluded and what is included?
Is it important to attach this to physical objects?
This excludes performative practices.
Sometimes the object is completely disgarded in the practice, as the process is the most important.
The funding structures play an important role in practice.
Zeljko: it's difficult to discuss any term, without placing it in a specific context.

Three-sided footbal
A project by Danish artist Asger Jorn
Historical trajectory of queer sports?
- situationist games in the 60s
- cobra
- the imaginist bauhaus (first group using the term "artistic research")
Florian: What is the difference between these examples and queer sports?

Ref.: Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus (1957), Asger Jorn
A manifesto written in the context of the founding of "design school only" Bauhaus
A quote that could be read as a definition of artistic research: 
- artistic research = human science
- which is for us: concerned science (or better according to Florian: engaged science)
- Should be carried out by artists with assistance of scientists

Why critical making is difficult to define? 
Western tradition of understanding what is knowledge, science and art.
Liberal arts (arts = science, technology & art)
- higher arts "Artes Liberales": grammer (now poetics & literature), music, math, astronomy, "arithmetica"
- lower arts "Artes Mechanicae": alchemy, architecture, mining, textile, painting, metal work, sports, dancing, singing, acting, etc
Is "critical" covering the higher arts?
And "making" the lower arts? 

Which synced with the tradition of doing a PhD in the past, where you can have a PhD in literature, but it is less common to do a PhD in visual arts.
[BUT, also in technology contexts, critical and making is already "rooted" in both the higher arts (math) and lower arts (making).]

Sidenote: Dutch art schools -> bauhaus structure, plus idea of workshops ("stations"?)

### Q&A

Klaas: the data science is also been moved from higher arts to lower arts. 
Ginger: where is the thinking in this diagram? Critique has been done through language. Here, thinking is been done through making? 
Florian: poetics > a science of making (Aristotle). Western divide between mind and body. Critical Making is a project that questions this divide. And Queer Sports is a great example.
? : is there such thing as queer documentation? 
Zeljko: a project in France, granted recently. A zine as a newsletter. Sometimes leaving traces is the most interesting critical outcome.
Florian: Femke with Constant and OSP is making documentation as a central part of their practice, and see it as a critical and experimental practice in itself. The open source field is a great example of where documentation is questioned and researched. **(!)**
Shailoh: slippages of terms in critical making. How do you deal with that?


## Constant (Femke)

Femke will speak about Constant's practice in relation to:
* criticality
* matter
* practice
* (not making)

Constant is running since 1997, we will loop back at the end of the presentation.
Constant's practice: feminisms (activist/theoretical), collective practices, free software

criticality, not Frankfurter Schule, not Asgern Jorn (though sometimes his work crosses)
complex collectivities
collectivities as a non-equalist practice, how to do collectivity through difference

Femke shows the budget, important to be talking about things in context
Constant received a 5 year grant
Constant feels therefor the extreme responsibility to have a radical practice

diffractive practice
ref.: Helen Pritchard with Karen Barad in: Animal Hackers (2018)
a provocation to the divide of making & thinking

worksessions
thinking and making together
intensive undisciplined situations
not collapsing disciplines, but more interested in collaborations and what happens in other dimensions while working together

- combining different subjects/techniques/tools/ to think beyond borders
- Constant as mediating infrastructure

TSGO, How can we observe while being entangled?
NWAA, rethinking networked infrastructures (activist, protocols, feminist server summit)

"There is a smell of hackathons and sprints in this type of work situations, but we can never go on for 24hours, we also need time to eat and sleep."

Etherbox
Documentation is not a goal in itself, but something that can be activated during the session but also shared with others.

Donna Haraway (1997)
- less interested in the critical practice of reflection
- of showing once-again that the emporer has no clothes
- than in finding a way to diffract ... 

## Q&A

Klaas: Why matter is an alternative to making?
Femke: Not a direct answer, but being here is part of that. Making always comes with the idea of the tabula rasa, of the not-there-yet. Constant is more interested in working with matter that is already there ..(?). It makes more sense to focus on matter, criticality and practice.
Florian: Constant's work, in relation to FLOSS, where the Makefile is a crucial tool. A tool to compile source code on your specific system. Isn't that a concept of making that is quite close to Constant? It is not the tabula rasa. 
Femke: Not trying to do away with making, but trying to focus on the things that *matter* for us. ;) There is something in the free in free software that always comes back to freedom and autonomy. And the Makefile has something like that. You cannot do the same presentation on someone else's laptop. Because there is not such a thing as "a copy without a cause". There are many details that talk about the specific materiality of systems. It was a good reminder that at the one hand there is a lot of inspiring stuff in FLOSS (working with authorship/collectivity/more) but there is always a risk of depending on ideas of freedom and autonomy. **(!)**

## Nina (representative of Dyne.org)

4 FLOSS freedoms

* Dyne uses FLOSS, public money for public code
* interdisciplinarity of art and science
* environmentally sustainable

making software for community engagement < > liberation (beyond empowerment)
shaped by environment and systems that we live in (there is no tabula rasa, you cannot imagine a self outside a context)
algorithms, something else is deciding how you see the world (as a thing that is changing the way we think, monoculture of the mind)

the non-customizable features of recent media (fb, and others) makes it even harder to convince kids that things can be done differently

Decode
privacy by design
example: tool to sign petitions in Barcelona, using blockchain's smart contracts
freedom as in, everybody that wants to use a tool
linux as in, floss alternative to windows and mac, using FLOSS freedoms (anarchy on its best)
devone, Dyne's fork of debian without systemd [i didn't catch why systemd was a problem, systemd is taking over more and more things within a GNU/Linux 
system that it's not designed for]
See https://www.fossmint.com/devuan-without-systemd-why-should-you-use-it/
As the story goes, the Linux philosophy includes that programs should be designed to do one thing and do it well. Systemd was designed to run multiple tasks besides booting the computer and because this is not in line with the Linux philosophy (according to some developers,) certain Linux enthusiasts have decided to avoid using it.

## Q&A

Klaas: does the work of Dyne fall under critical making?
Nina: yes, not defined yet
Klaas: Dyne's practice is very code based. Code as a tool to liberate. What is the artist role in the organisation?
Nina: There is an artist in residency, looking at smart contracts ..... Dyne can then tie back and improve. The core practice of Dyne is community based. 
Klaas: Does code come after other things? 

Femke: Not wanting to go for solutionism, but at the same time there is a question of scale? And the question of the role of critical software. What do you think holds it back to scale? Does Dowse need to be used in every household?
Nina: Yes. We have created a possible solution, possible design. Priviledged ivory tower that runs critical software, but does not reach communities. It's much about a balance. **Can we make critical making and critical design an applied practice?**
Florian: Femke what do you think about that?
Femke: Worksessions as infrastructure. Scale without letting go of complexities. Can we make infrastructures that allow people to think together? How do we deal with priviledges? How do we deal with that? We're thinking about **impact**. Without having a consensus on the complexity that is at hand. Wheter we call it critical making or diffractive practices, we need practices that can handle complexity. 
Klaas: ?
Femke: Find modes of observing impact. Sometimes we don't even know what something does. And sometimes we don't need to know. The whole spectrum needs to be rethought, and that is why Constant is interested in methodologies.
Nina: Role of activist organisations, 3% of active citizens to make a change. How can we use critical making to do that? Performances, actions. But how can such groups connect to others?
Femke: Intruiged to see how Dyne is rooted in activism, and democracy/public/? are mentioned as roots of Dyne. How do these institutions form Dyne? 
Nina: Democracy as in, small groups making decisions around questions and move on. Moving within current institutions to make a change. 
Femke: Is Dyne an institution?
Nina: no, and Constant?
Femke: Constant is an institution, as it works with archive, history, it is an association with members, which is a legal form already. How to come to terms with institutionality, without using the norms of other institutions.
Klaas: Can we critically make institutions?
Shailoh: Rethinking making as use? How does use already challenge ownership? For example: something is not "mine" i'm "only" borrowing it.
Femke: How do these complex collectivities work out? Related to critical post-humanist work, thinking about other entities that have a stake. Institutions are one of them. As places that work with histories and futures. There is work to do, to revive institutional work, as a potential to develop forms of ongoinness in this world. Another Donna Haraway term. Ongoinness and institutions are closely linked. Archiving, publishing, are all ways that can be oppressive and normative, but they can also support complexities. Practices of ongoinness that stay with complexities. 

Anarchist tendencies vs. institutionalisation

Institution:
  The act of instituting.
  A custom, practice, relationship, or behavioral pattern of importance in the
  life of a community or society: the institutions of marriage and the family.
  Informal One long associated with a specified place, position, or function.

Question this vs. knee jerk reaction against. Interesting contrast in the discussion ...

*m(b)ad* idea: Free software inspired performance where people "dress up" as a socialist, anarchist and capitalist and then talk about how free software works for them. Bask in the subjectivity of each narrative to show that this isn't a one horse race

## Shailoh 

(...) 

Cybernetic summerschool @ West 

inflatable pipeline to show Shell's financial contribution to education
"#mind the pipeline" became the online/offline campaign tool
police: "this is a protest"
shailoh: "no this is art"

hypocracy - what they say is not what they do
whataboutism - 

criticality as a form of cultural capital
you gain the discourse and a higher position in the cultural field
who benefits from being critical?

Thinking of working with inflatables as the practice of "dotteren" 
opening up a new space of desire, working together
the inflatable pipe becoming a media spectacle, blocking space to promote a festival that is sponsored by Shell

Tools for Action - a collective working with inflatables, but not only with inflatables
slogan: "be careful with each other so we can be dangerous together"
occupying space of potential in public space

the maker movement
"making" as a word that comes from common language
it's very vernacular
"How to make almost anything" (90s slogan that is present in the maker movement)
1. adding/multiplying/conjoining (connect, layer of combine materials and operations, welding, hyperlinking, hosting, 3D printing, casting, gluing, weaving, painting, soldering)
2. subtracting/dividing/seperating (remove or seperate materials and data, cutting, parsing, sawing, carving, laser cutting)
3. transforming techniques (blowing glass, baking)
4. measuring techniques (sensors, processing, investigative tools)

to make / to hack

Some troubles with making

## Pia

artist making performances

"embedded proximity"

thinking institutions

"as if" collective imaginations
"not yet" things that could or might happen in the future

a parasite is relational
part and not a part of the host body
being a self and non-self

convention of radical administration(?), in Bristol
organised by Kate Bridge
everyone joined as a organisation/institution

intervention in the material itself
threatment of the problem at the level that the problem is happening 

Ref.: Sarah Ahmed - Queer Phenomenology 

## Q&A

Shailoh: A world already been made. 
Drawing exercises to stretch potentional/actual/past/future.

past                 future

Turning un-used patents into objects, parasitical attitude towards the patents.

"SunZilla is a solar-powered generator that provides a clean and easy-to-use alternative for off-grid electricity supply. Its battery storage ensures a reliable and flexible supply even at night or on less sunny days." https://sunzilla.de/

Shailoh: What happens to documentation in a parasitical practice?
Pia: For me it doesn't work in the traditional way, like video's to be replayed in an exhibition setting. But sometimes i cite performances that i did before, which is a way to document for me.

Pia: Working with the moment of saying "i". Quoting performances from the past, qouting others as if i'm them.

Shailoh: The inflatable pipeline without a #tag, was poetic, ambigious. But it didn't work (? is that what she said? yes, she said noone understood the untagged pipe, therefore people were just ignoring it rather than being curious) Language was an important techniques, to make the pipeline speak and make a statement. It hyperlinked to a web campaign. A hashtag as a hyperlanguistic tool.

* critique from outside
* critique from within
* expansive critique
* distributed critique 
* generative occupation 


## Conversation

[a chair sitting exercise]

performativity in language (i swear) and code (being executable) ?


Dani Ploeger (not sure about spelling)
in the context of Critical Making, artist should just do shit, and then think whether it is critical and how it is critical
Art education is mainly goal oriented, whilst we must provoke ourselves to go to places we would not go otherwise.

Pia
making does not have to be muscle in the dirt kind of practice. That it is more than shutting your brain and just making something


# Friday

## West

Marcel Breuer - architect of the ambassy
a blocked corner of the city, because of threats
1959-1991 (cold war), capitalism vs. socialism
2001-2016 (post 9/11), christianity vs. islam

Alphabetum, exhibition in the coffee room
Assemble, collective that made furniture connecting to the building, inviting new audiences to the art gallery

Instituut voor Kunst & Kritiek (IKK)
project by West, thinking through art
Kunstgeschenk, inviting a writer/journalist, that goes into conversation 

## Waag (Lukas)

De Waag used to host guilts

How technology has an effect on society.
Research groups around code, care, make learn, interface 
Which are working as labs: open design, open welab, fablab, smart citizens, commons, sensors
Booklets: open design, users as designers, critical making, and ?

[fairphone, decode - both projects creating products, bigger scale]
[art presentations, labs, making - educational projects, research]

New project: AI for society lab, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, collaboration with Femke Herregraven

## Het Nieuwe Instituut

merge of multiple institutes
"museum" is a policy slot, but there is no fixed collection
discursive programme, in which the HNI started to insert matter
critical making has been embodied
educational programme: engaging many audiences, specially under 18, designing around complex questions
Happening next week Neuhaus programme: how should we reply today to learning questions, like bauhaus did 100 years ago. 
https://neuhaus.hetnieuweinstituut.nl, symposium + following curriculum.
HNI aims to engage with academies, adopting some of the aspects of Neuhaus. 
HNI develops a material critical practice.

## Common patterns of critical making

mind/body
language/matter (language as matter, matter as language)
diffractive instead of reflective (Karen Barad was very present yesterday, in 4 presentations)

critical making is performative
process/outcome
in action
performative action
artefacts perform, the action never stops (materialist ideas)

not making-from-scratch (matter instead of making) - Femke yesterdat
adding/substracting/transforming existing matter
not knowing, not-yet-knowing, finding out as you go (attentive attitude)
wildly different kind of artefacts

pragmatically/politically
collectives, different ways of knowing simultaniously
cultural dimension, sustained in a culture / (intellectual) infrastructure
critical making artefacts exist in an ecology (also possible to generate this ecology)
critical making want to be auditable, open source practice, performative capacity, all parts remain in action

## Frans-Willem Korsten

Works with Renee Turner on critical pedagogies (? was that the name?)

What can making mean? 
Or how can we sensibly, productively make under critical conditions?

Background in humanities, positionings in other fields: 
- art/literature boundaries of law
- 70s: collectives, wild gardenings, https://ecokathedraal.nl
- activism: fighting for a school in the centre of the city. Nobody is coming out of such a trajectory without skars.
- source of social democracy in the 19th century and its long breath, under poverty and despair. Collective suffering in 19th suffering. Consumer society destroyed this memory. 
- VTV in Utrecht in the city, thread of end of economy now, possible activism ahead
- humanities as decoration or as co-makers, crossovers NWO, humanities as domain of reflection

How can we make under critical conditions?

critically committed pedagogies with Renee Turner
think of an act in their circle that they would do
oke to read critical texts, but thinking of an act was difficult for students

Assessing the conditions to make with

Dutch citizen conditions: 
- intensive care (tubes, infrastructure)
- addicted (consumption, car, money)
- held hostage (house is not made by them, hostage in their own houses)

Spaces for self-building, will that make a difference? 
Different models of self-organization? 
How do we make these collectives? 

How much forms of making did we thrown overboard?

an example: Dutch Waterschap (Polderboards)
need of setting a task, a deeply felt need (not a desire)
new ground, that is not there yet, but that needs to be developped 
if we want to sustain ourselves

but we need to take people out of current intensive care conditions
in order to change a situation
in order to see what is needed 

Polderboards need legal support
that their work is recognized
autonomous in the sense of, being based in political authority

making new grounds
has to involve making new laws

self-sufficiency
* electricity
* water
* money (example of a coop bank in 1864, Noord-Brabant Christian Bond, Boerenleenbank (1898))

coop-bank became as nasty as the others
? > ? 
Ra > Rabobank

union, offering concrete alternatives
only through making we can make people critical to those conditions

## Ginger

educator, research, designer
interested in the place of the user 
former member of critical making lab in Toronto, faculty of information

critical making lab, research lab, run by Matt Ratto 
faculty that has the second most number of women (after nursing, before education)

Ref.: article from 2011 by Matt Ratto, information society, laying out critical making in a bit more depth
- as a pedagogical practice and research practice
- engaging in hands-on making
- studying the underlying functioning of a complex system

having problems with the word making

- divides critical thinking / embodies practices of knowing

There is a lot of Dewey, knowing with your hands

- it's more about makers, rather then making (?)

In the university, there was a preception that the critical research lab was a service bureau
sidenote to the gym at the wdka, it's very hard to book! 

critical making as a belief that it will create future skills 
markable technical skills

the technical skillset is not what was required to have the educator job
technical skillset was not the aimed outcome of the critical making lab

discussion around the objects that were produced, to show it to others
the thing is not the focus, it is about the process

anecdote: 1st year master of critical making in toronto
moral objects by Bruno Latour, speed bump as sleeping police men
someone made a small model of a trafic light, 
showed how it is not about the object or end result
process of understanding a system through making it, which is a personal process

Ginger sees 3 versions of the word "critical making"
John Meda (?) (independently defined), Matt Rato, ?

critical making as a research methodology
often viewed as un-scientific

Ref.: 2014 special issue, Journal: information society, critical making as research methodology, there is a table inside of this issue

## Q&A

Frans: What are the conditions to critical make in?
ginger: discursive making is not necessarily the object

Frans: Critical Making as defining a different attitude towards things happening in the world. The object is helping me to define another attitude.
ginger: In your examples, new understanding is needed in the context of crisises in the world. In my understanding it is mostly about understanding systems. There is something cybernetic about it.
Frans: People are living in their own houses. What am i making, through these conditions, with a mortage that allows me to live in this house. 
ginger: Even though if i'm trying to make my own bio-reactor, the research process that i undertake to do that, is different from me going through a critical making process. Critical Making is not about understanding the thing that is in front of you, but something that is behind. Which is a different behavior then making a bio-gaz reactor. What is the role of metaphor? 
Frans: Any type of language is metaphor. Provoking to think. 
ginger: material turn in the social science, understanding the world through language. metaphor/allegory/

Klaas: perhaps not needed to speak about what critical making is, but what critical making does? There is a lot of work that surrounds it. 
ginger: it is the instrimentality of wanting to make a bio-gaz.
Florian: what you're refusing is solutionism, right? critical making should not be seen as a solutionist practice.
ginger: i would agree with that. though i would not want to take this word. but instrumentality.

Frans: using metaphor of living together. thinking about having a house as a making process. it opens up the process again. 
(Klaas: bringing it back to the compost bio-reactor .. is the problem that you know where you want to go?)
ginger: capital view on making, thinking of a marxist remark. instrumental outcome. one of the values of the toronto school critical making approach, is that there is an instructional side on it. a stickiness that i struggle with. the rule of the productive object. 

Frans: that's perhaps what is different here, i'm much interested in changing life
ginger: do we need critical making to change my life? i can change my life without it. 

Shailoh: is insight enough? if you have insight in a system and you see that we're fucked, what do you do? what if you have insight, but you cannot act? 
Ramon: how do you delineate(?) an act of thought to an act of action. Awareness of the entire system, when this is not possible, it is already in a process of reduction. Which is not opening up making, but closing off what making actually is. How do you deal with the presumed stability of those points? Making as a stable process? Which then can lead to action?

ginger: composting is not critical making for me, as for me it is a way of understanding systems, where reverse engineering fails. Which is a research perspective, instead of producing perspective.

Ramon: it's nothing new, Matt's frame is not new
ginger: critical making is nothing new indeed, 

Frans: marxist trajectories of what is matter and thought. deconstructivism. there are power and forces that manipulate our thoughts and feelings. Making would be a better way to create alternatives to the situation we are in today. 


## Ramon Amaro

in this situation of this symposium, 
a moment that is generative, productive, materialise contingency
interventions are important in this discussion

embassy as an encounter of power
acts of encounters

Ramon describes how he went to this embassy to renew his passport
describing bodily experiences within the building

coherent invisibility
the abstraction of power

we're not so much concerned with the act of participating
but more how it can enact new forms of participating

looking at it as an ontological problem
Ref.: "...... the money of the real"
the re-ification of the black body as a commodity

alienation as a means of production
mental process and physical process
economical-social relationship
techniques of the self (Foucault)
liberate the difference that lies in the self
interact in two forms
- how do we build communities, build new relations
- 

this building was build to be exclusive

ontological scandal of difference 
in the field of machine learning (Ramon's background)
practice of the artificial
applied performance of knowledge production
relations of difference, social entanglement
angst for the artificial, they are more then themselves

encounter as a moment to freeze the self in time
passport bringing the nation state in a material form

operation of re-inforcement
trying to establish a relationship (making)

priorly existing operative mechanism that transforms who we are

what if the debates around algorithms changed to discussions around the angst this lives around it?

the moment we enter the door
we create a relation with imperialism
creating an angst, or ease, 
bringing alive the pre-existing feelings with this space
which then katalyses (? how to spell that) action 

two concepts
- alienation (marxist concept) 
Before the economical and social is the mental? and physical?
Alienation can become a katalysor of change.

us being at the embassy
from a place of violence
to a place of social, cultural?, convivial

reverse engineering objects that make logics possible
(microphone to amplify a voice and create hierchy)
(podium because Ramon takes the stage and the rest is passive audience)

How can these techniques become part of the work, to reshape the logics. 
Instead of being an object of angst. 

## Anja Groten

research from design background
and specifically from the context of H&D

Hackers and Designers, currently 7 members
by creating collaborative environments for learning and unlearning

developing critical standpoints, through the act of making together
confronting dogma's, enchantments, reframe the discourse of "innovation"

(Anja's slides are sitting within the portal pages of different local networks)

reflection on the workshop format
design as a mode of deciding what qualifies, and chooses for certain tools
in its essence an excluding practice
guided by intentions
lead to an interest in collaborative making, to counteract individualized design practices

dominance of the workshop format
premise, promise of the workshops
can workshops actually create critical practices?
can it confront contraints of design?

compitence that is shared with the group of participants
hackathon-like workshop, presupposes a highly productive space "prototyping". only sucessfull when a product is created
events to conclude a workshop
over-structuring (exercises, documentation, etc) and creating a highly controlled environment and disallows contingency

Constand and Varia work situations:
without a paradigm of concensus
disagreement should be welcomed
discussion disrupt the workshop, but connect all the participants present

situated knowledges, unlocatable and inresponsible knowledge claims (Haraway)
the aspect of the unknown in relation of technology design
maker, person that can be hold encountable

user/makers 
ref.: ..... ?

habitual modes of making

encounter (meeting of adversaries)

collaborative making through a suspicious lens

collaborative making as social prototypes **(!)**
"social technological literacy" term by ... ?
reconnecting materiality and ??? 

Being limited to once own's perspective to technology ... 
sharing processes, misunderstandings, 
Donna Schön(?)

by presenting the making process to other
the making process is disrupted
this can be a surprise effect 
executing a skill - action/reflection

reflection happens while something is being produced
the thing that is being made is shaped and reshaped

workshops might enforce collaboration
but also publically presents a making process
it can disrupt design processes 

the likelihood of an outcome, is forced by conditions of the workshop

the workshop as sites where differences between makers may unfold
they could disrupt an individualized design process

## Critical Makers reader

Loes Bogers
part of visual methodologies collective
research in feminist artifical intelligence

INC reader
"the factory is noting but an applied school and the school nothing but a factory" Villem Flusser (The Factory, 1999)
a school where we learn to manage our robots

1. epistemology & critique
2. labour: sociality & community
3. (un)learning (with) technology
4. spaces and institutions
5. materiality & posthuman making

social hierarchies & legacies

## Conversation

(ginger)
expanded notion of critical making (after Matt Ratto)
deconstruction of artefacts in order to understand existing systems
pedagogical and research practice

(frans willem)
generative world building
the already performative making
nothing is as given, living in a house is already an existing situation

critical making in engagements of legal procedures

critical making on two different planes
- engaged collectives, around a shared concern
- individual moment, generatively engaging with the angst that comes with encounters with the violent preceding logics of material formations, the figuring encounter with systems that freeze and cut beings into taxonomies (user, citizen, threat, early adopter, refugee)

workshop comes with its own issues, need critical approach
and should be open to not-yet-knowing, to contingencies, to difference, and acknowledges postions

### pia

i am i 
i doubted if i was a parasite
i was an invited guest
i think i was a good guest

### ramon

connect to the word "angst"
and discuss how your connection to the word angst connects to the other connections to the word
releasing identity to something that is malable, dynamic

### anja

wifi networks brought to the room
local networks

### thalia

german bread as a result of gentrification
food, bringing food
feeding each other without speaking
relation to queer sports
food as a first thing defining culture
sports and foods as example to think critically about making

## Conversation

concept of affordances
a chair affords sitting on
objects carry norms and instructions in them

critical making
material practices

this was an experimental conference
a possible outcome of this conference: 
fine artists saying: i don't see myself being represented in the conference

do we still call it crtical making at the end of the research project?
there will be a second symposium next year (probably at HNI in Rotterdam)