Making, Culture and Apparatus

What is making?

All the participants of the studio have engaged in the process of making in their lives in multiple contexts and forms like cooking, weaving, clay modelling etc. Engagement with making during our early ears was intuitive and done for joy and the sake of engaging solely. As we grew up, this engagement shifted. Making process came into play with an already fixed outcome or an end product in mind.  The discussion opened up this shift where the engagement with the process of making was lost. Rather than reading making ‘backwards’, from a finished object to an initial intention in the mind of an agent, it should be read forwards, in an ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic, and may or may not have a finished end result. 

Villem Flusser opens up the idea of making through the anthropological name for humans, ‘homo faber’ which refers to anthropoids involved in any act of manufacturing. Manufacturing means turning what is available in the environment to one’s own advantage, turning it into something manufactured, turning it over to use and thus turning it to account. He sees human history as the history of manufacturing and distinguishes it into rough periods of hand, tools, machines and robots. The shifts in these periods can not only be understood as a method of humans evolving but also be regarded as the origin of significant industrial revolutions. He regards tools, machines and robots as subsequent simulations of hands that extend one’s hands rather like prostheses and therefore enlarges the pool of inherited information by means of acquired cultural information.

To understand the above in terms of simulation of hands: Tools are empirical, machines are mechanical and robots are neuro-physiological and biological. The transfer of knowledge has not only resulted in shifts in the agency of humankind but also become a stimulus for innovation and making. With each shift, the relation between human and environment changes. With hands, the agency of making remains with humans; with tools, it still remains with humans but it becomes restricted by a geographical factor where the acts of making are located; with the advent of machines, these manufacturing clusters network themselves into machine complexes around which human settlements form from where they are sucked into these complexes periodically only to be sucked out. With robots, the agency of making is shared by humans and robots where the robot only does what the human being wants but the human being can only want what the robot can do. Villem Flusser theorized that the ‘factories of the future’ will become a place in which the creative potential of homo faber will come into its own.

Rachit Raj Somani

Through this study, we traced the process of making and shifts in agencies and apparatuses across local practices, traditional crafts, academic researches and professional practices. We tried to locate the human agency and the agency of making in all the practices to understand its shift temporally. Subsequently, we tried to understand when, where and how knowledge, in whatever form, was acquired and transferred or translated to a different apparatus with a similar function. These inter-relationships, along with the work and learnings of the studio, were traced and drawn as a mind map.