“Urban Interventions and Critical Making”

The third session on “Urban Interventions and Critical Making” on the 28th of February is approaching soon. This is setup as a stepping stone/brainstorming session for the “Workshop Critical Making of Frictional Urban Interfaces”.

In this session, we will discuss how making and hacking haven’t always been considered as synonyms. Nonetheless, we see that both can produce similar interventions. In this meeting we will look at how, what has been termed Critical Making brings the two together, with a do-it-yourself philosophy in which people are encouraged to dismantle the machines, technologies, and tools that surround them. Critical Making, therefore, takes the materiality of technologies as its point of departure and produces inquiry and intervention in the process of design, engineering, and artistic production. This stress on the physical production of technologies as a point of their interrogation introduces a new vocabulary of attention and renovation into technological praxis and reveals some previously untapped potentials within them. For our case in point, we especially want to question how can this new vocabulary and potential uncovered in the practice of Critical Making be used to work with the frictions of our contemporary technologically mediated cities.