Because we didn’t have a chance to talk about our critical making readings, I wanted to use this post to raise a couple of questions about Sayers’ “I Don’t Know All the Circuitry.” To what extent does her thinking about what conceptual matter is, and her critique of the sense of mastery that leads her to advocate for artists who see technological making as an indeterminacy, extend beyond “maker culture”/technological making and apply to any kind of creative endeavor?
On the one hand, there are several moments throughout the introduction that imply that what Sayers is doing when she is defining conceptual matter – what is produced when a maker works through technological failure, the place where making becomes creative and critical – is defining what it is to make at all, technologically or otherwise. Her broad and theoretical definitions leave room for, if they don’t outright declare, that ambition: “[conceptual matter] represents the inability to unmoor materials from how we interpret materials” (4). She goes on: “conceptual matter may be considered an ‘invisible’ space between parts: a ‘gap’ that may invite a patch…conceptual matter is a gerund: designing, shaping, sculpting, stitching, or inscribing lines” (4). She uses the language of technology – gaps demand patches – but describes conceptual matter as feature also of other media, media where the verb might not be coding but instead stitching, designing, sculpting; she backs this up by finding examples of the indeterminacy she’s advocating in sculpture and in race theory. Conceptual matter is the idea that creativity is about negotiation with a medium, and that art happens when the medium fails/surprises you and you work through it to do something new with that medium; this idea applies equally well beyond technology – i.e., novels are about an author working through what words can (and can’t) do, paintings are about the medium of paint itself – and it is not a particularly new way of thinking about certain modes of creation.
At the same time, some of her comments about conceptual matter patently don’t apply to other (less mechanical?) forms of making, or fit uneasily: can (or maybe, should) writing be described as a “boundary-making” process (4)? Is sculpture best described as a form engaged in figuring out the relations between parts? Conceptual matter also seems to equally describe for Sayers what happens when we engage with technology on a daily level, as “readers” of technology, not just as makers – does textual reading or artistic viewing also happen “in the middle,” does it also “refuse to impose a chain of events on what came before it or what may come after?” (4).
What are the stakes of collapsing creative endeavors into a field simply called “making”? What are the generic boundaries that the maker movement draws around itself, why does it define itself as making rather than coding, or engineering? Using the word “making” seems to imply a rejection of the constraints of just one medium, or just one method; its name – saying you’re “the maker” of X – also has an unfortunate resonance with its God complex, its impulses to mastery, its vision as the ability to make as the ability to control. Are we adopting their investments if we recast all creativity as making? What happens to categories like “the aesthetic” or “art” in a paradigm of making?