Suzanne: “So here’s the thing. He wants to buy you guys out. He doesn’t want the ride or the town. He just wants- I don’t know- the creativity. The PR win. He wants peace. And the real news is. he’s over the barrel. Freddy’s forcing his hand. If we can make that problem go away, we can ask for anything…” (Doctorow 388)

“I met a man a couple of weeks ago who had dreadlocks down to his knees, shredded jeans, and a leather jacket with amazing etchings all over it. I went over to see what he was working on and discovered another accidental entrepreneur.” (Hatch, 195).

This quote represents the relationship between technology and capitalism and how the two fuel each other. We, this class, are participants in this relationship. An example of this is purely the texts we read each week. One, an entrepreneurs perspective on the makers movement and how it changing small business opportunity and the other, a creative science fiction novel that spans time and character narrative moralities to flush out the tension in the makers movement with capitalism. This quote touches on creativity as currency, and the appearance of power in public sphere, all of which can be seen in modern company models (Makerbot, Apple, etc). As Hatch awkwardly points out, even someone who wears shredded jeans can do it! (?) I found this quote in the Makers Manifesto to represent the underlying voice of condescension mixed with And-You-Can-Too! that Hatch has describing creative innovation in the tech world. In our own microcosm of technology and creativity in Making Meaning Matter we have to navigate artistic landscapes, while attempting to create something purposeful, with innovation in technology and design. This has created quite a transposition between conversation in ‘the real world’ the Evergreen microcosm, and the various personalities of the class.

“Death was used to drawing stares even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different” (Doctorow, 339).

Speaking of cyborgs and stares… I wanted to make my cyborg have movable limps to bring more life to ‘her’ movements. John and I designed a socket attachments that would allow the arms and legs to move. We also found an already proven, similar model on tinkercad. We pulled the arms and legs off of my virtual body which was creepy and fascinating.

“Our competitors don’t want to compete with us on a level playing feild. They are, more than anything, imitators… There’s no attention to detail. There’s no attention to safety! It’s all cowboys and gypsies” (Doctorow, 262).  -Sammy

Mating Ritual or 3D Scan?

Steph brings up the politics of 3D scanning. Representation and agency of a body that we lose control over once its uploaded to the web, but gain the ability to manipulate and distort the body? Zev is unmoved. He volunteers to be scanned and in what appears to be some sort of mating dance (from an alien perspective) leads to the production of a virtual Zev body, that could be birthed through the womb of 3D printer. Reproduction in its most abiotic form.

“It was telling the story he know, of growing up with an indefinable need to be different to reject the mainstream and to embrace this subculture and aesthetic” Doctorow 289

“Another of my favorite DARPA projects is the Adaptive Vehicle Make program. This is an experiment in creating a new way to develop vehicle platforms for the military by crowdsourcing the design and then using a distributed manufacturing facility to build them. It actually worked.” Hatch 159

I like to imagine us (us as in Evergreen students, us an in radical reject creative folk, us who grew up with the need to be different to reject mainstream, us who embrace this subculture) as the kind of ‘kids’ who would  take Perry and Lesters ride into our own hands to create something. In reality there is us (us the American population, us the American right, us the patriot, us the war monger, us the capitalists) who open source create a “military vehicle” as Hatch puts it, which is a drone. A DRONE. Not (1.) a low humming sound, not (2.) a male bee in a colony of social bees, which does no work but can fertilize a queen, a person who does no useful work and lives off others but (3.)  a killing machine. A remote controlled weapon of war used to kill people. That is what we (USA) have so thoughtfully contributed to opensource.

A ranting inspired by Sitting, Writing, Speaking, Yearning: Reflections on Scholar-Shaping Techniques

“The human body can no longer be figured either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole that is itself conceived as the “environment.” The boundaries between bodies and their components are being blurred, together with those between bodies and larger ecosystems” (Smelik, Lykke x)
-Bits of Life

In seminar last week, I noticed the way we talked about the technological community at a distance- “they” and we spoke about American culture as a whole, a broad America, and about the relationship between technology and human interaction in pedagogy. The only thing missing in our conversations was our own presence, our own insertion of self and therefore self awareness, into the dialogue. We spoke as if we were not in the technological community ourselves dispite our constant engagement with it in and outside the classroom, as if Americans were animals in a zoo we had recently visited and not in fact our own culture, and we spoke of learning as if we ourselves are not students. It was quite strange.

You may have notices that sometimes I roll around on the floor. I stretch my legs over my head, I twist my back and reach my arms up and up and up overhead.  Sometimes people stare at me. Maybe they don’t know why I am rolling on the floor of the classroom? Well I am doing it because it feels good, it circulates my blood, it brings energy into my brain. Referencing the body so overtly in a room designed for intellectual exercise only- seems to make people uncomfortable, embarrassed, or at the very least, interested.

This comes back to the moment where a man holding a scanner, leashed to a computer dutifuly held by another (man) circle my body in the corner of a computer lab. Circling while I stand with out moving. Circling while others stream over to watch. Circling while me behind, where I am aware of my body in the classroom, my body on the screen, that I am a woman, the contours of my ass, the shape I am becoming, the fact I didnt brush my hair. This is the literal process of creating plastic reproduction- the DNA of my miniature 3D plastic self. There is something uncomfortably physical about the copulating of digital and physical world to create another person- the lifeless and plastic mini self that is birthed through 3D printer. My classmates, witness to this dance, are drawn to reproduction in the way, and get scans of themselves in turn.
Sources:

Lykke, Nina. “An Introduction.” Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology. Ed. Anneke Smelik. Seattle: U of Washington, 2008. X. Print.