My third quarter at Evergreen…I find myself still bewildered by the space I have to express what William Deresiewicz, in his book Excellent Sheep, calls my “passionate weirdness.” After spending six years at a traditional university, as well as half my lifetime trying to survive in our inherited consumer-driven, monetary-measured culture-context, I find myself…delightfully uncomfortable. My delight comes from the sole knowledge of knowing that I am finally saying yes to my passions rather than saying no out of fear of them. The discomfort comes from doing something new; at one point it was easier to be afraid than to be passionate. The scales began to tip a few years ago, resulting in my return to school. Suzanne Church, an ethnographic journalist, and heroine of our program’s main text, Makers, assures me “There’s nothing here that isn’t as it should be.”

In a world filled with too much stuff, what idea is worth turning into more stuff? This is the question we were asked to ponder in Making Meaning Matter, an ethnographic journey through the world of 3D printing. My project was to make a magnetic field viewer with which I intended to make visible a magnetic field. The idea practically revealed itself to me, layer by layer; I simply followed the path. I was working in an unfamiliar software program that interfaced with an unfamiliar hardware platform, attempting to produce an object that had its basis in a scientific inquiry. I am not a scientist. Furthermore, I was working with materials and ideas that I had never worked with before: the vector equilibrium, the torus, magnetism, and ferrofluid. Don Johnson, a professor of Somatics, would have described me as an alien in a new world, wondering “what kind of connections might be imagined as taking place between these various atoms?”

Regardless, I was on fire to learn how to make it. And as I observed my classmates during the Cultural Studies of Technology portion of our labs, we all became material alchemists, mixing in equal parts trepidation and wonder while we explored a technology that allowed each of us to turn a simple plastic into something meaningful. We summoned our inner Prospera, from Julie Taymor’s iteration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

We acted out new realms of inquiry, materially as well as cognitively. We brought to life our projects through 3D printing, melting plastic into the thin air of the 3D printer chamber, from the baseless fabric of the 3D design software. We printed towers of flutes and pens, gorgeous palaces rendered from yurts and the streets of our beloved downtown, solemn temples of our own Buddha-inspired and pleasure-driven bodies, great globes in which to make visible the invisible, as well as cubes in which to see the infinite loop of Antione’s necklace. We also brought to life our minds. We know these insubstantial things will eventually dissolve, which imbued in them the substantial meaning that we gave them. Left behind are only the rafts on which our projects floated from the spiritual-virtual world into this one. We documented our experiences, as well as our observations of our classmates, through a blog, knowing “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” and that these meanings, too, will fade if not preserved. Lambros Malafouris in How Things Shape the Mind,where he proposes that as we shape things, so do those things shape us, would have praised us for “externaliz[ing]…the very process of externalization” before our little program was rounded with a sleep.

I grouped Malafouris’ theory with another idea given us by David Loy as he joined us on our second week meditation retreat: the Buddhist term dukkha, where one’s “fictitious…sense-of-self is experienced as a sense of lack,” as uncomfortable, where we constantly reflect out into the world our own dissatisfactions as we are incapable of resolving them internally. The intersection of these ideas led me to my overarching question for this program: do we make things so that we can, in reality, learn how to deal with, manage, manipulate, respond to, and resolve those things inside us that we can’t interrogate within our physical sensorium? If I can make something in reality that is alive, responsive, intuitive, and vulnerable, and inspires the people that interact with it, will I then have the means to create that for myself, in myself?

What business did I have investigating such personal questions in an educational institution? In The Maker Movement Manifesto, Mark Hatch discovers people every day who are grappling with what it means for them to be human while they free-fall head first off the high dive of their former lives and deep into his TechShops. One such maker introduced himself, “My name’s Perrin, and I’m remaking myself.” Through my educational journey at Evergreen, I’m remaking myself too. Johnson might have said of our fall that we were “liberating the body from its weight so that it can follow its intellectual yearnings with flexibility and sensitivity.”

I imagine that Perrin and I are not the only yearning-learners. As a metaphor for this program we used the story of David Loy’s Indra’s Postmodern Net which “symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos.” Within this cosmos, each thing “is both a mirror, reflecting all, and an image, reflected by all.” In the teaching/learning environment at Evergreen, everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. If I’m being more alive, responsive, intuitive and vulnerable, what might others learn from me? This seemed an invaluable inquiry for me to develop given I share Malafouris’ curiosity of what it mean to be human.

I broke my project. My material magnetic field viewer did not live up to my conceptual idea. And in the process I broke myself. Broke in the way Michael Taussig, in Simryn Gill, would say that a clam shell “knocks part of the self inside into another place so as to begin pearl-making.” The shape of my initial object, the vector equilibrium, taught me to be alive; learning, laughing and living as I tried to recreate inside a virtual world, an object that had already been mastered in this one. The torus, the shape of the invisible magnetic energy field that surrounds all living systems, taught me to be responsive; constantly revolving, reflecting on myself, inside out, and the world, outside in. The clear sphere through which I wanted to see the magnetic field taught me to be intuitive; trusting myself, yet having compassion for my own humanity, and therefore my own struggles to be transparent, authentic. The ferrofluid taught me to be vulnerable; allowing myself to be open to the forces around me, and being willing to undergo the necessary grinding that will eventually lead to my being able to reach out into the world toward that which attracts me. The magnets taught me that I can be inspiring, whether whole or broken; the two pieces of a broken magnet undergo a transformation, reversing their poles and never fitting back together again. However, even in their brokenness, they are still magnetic. They still fulfill their purpose.

As I consider the project I will take on next quarter when I continue in the Making to Ornament program, I am excited to uncover not what I will learn, but how I will learn, and why I will learn.  Having a new culture-context of how and why I interact with my world makes less important the what, since I now know that I determine the meaningfulness, or rather, as David Loy imprinted on us, the meaningfreeness, of whatever crosses my path.