I want to dedicate some portion of this blog to my experience with the Makey Makey project. As I was telling a friend today, the idea of designing a speculative/contemplative object for graduate level ‘show and tell’ is a bit terrifying, though I am glad we’ve had enough time with each other in the same room that I can open up about Noah and I’s idea.

There has a peppering of alternative aesthetics practices within most of the theory we have encountered this semester. Imaging alternative models that still, in some way, index or localize modern computation networks, can be conceptually difficult. Yet we are never fully outside the field of such things. Indeed our lives, at least in the abundantly resourced West, depend on them. To siphon (in Cohen’s terms) such knowledge of networks into a demo for a speculative design piece can feel more rewarding than pontificating with some clearly smart folk in a class room, but only momentarily. I suppose what I am try to make clear (if only to myself) is that by the end of this class it would be hard for me to reconcile theory without practice, or vice versa. That has to be a good thing right?

I wouldn’t give up the goods regarding our Makey Makey project yet, but working with Noah has helped me enjoy the process a lot more than if I had gone at it solo. This may be due in part to his insistence on keeping things somewhere between smart and stupid, but also in the way we have continued to improvise our design. I forgot to mention this to him during our meeting today, but our project seems to play with some very, very important specs from our coding days: to do more with less, and to keep things “readable”. Crits, here we come.