WORKING DRAFT 1.3.15
Making to Ornament: Retro-Tech Studio
Winter 2015
Faculty
Sarah Williams, C2106 Sem II, 360 867 6561, williasa@evergreen.edu
In-training teacher-programmers-artists
John Grieco, 3D printing and computer studies, mailto:grijoh11@evergreen.edu
Chrissy Giles, studio practice and visual arts, mailto:gilchr08@evergreen.edu
Whitney Evanson, photography and Photoland, mailto:evawhi23@evergreen.edu
Katie Hatam, creative writing and electronic fieldnotes, hatkat26@evergreen.edu
“[B]eing is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive
subordination of older, lower-order behaviour systems to newer, higher-order systems
[and vice-versa] as … existential problems change.” Clare Graves as variously cited by
Juhani Pallasmaa in The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture
From the Academic Fair handout: Each student will choose to do program creative work in one of
three interrelated studios, one focused on wood and metal working practices, one focused on solid
modeling for 3D printing, or a third focused on retro tech—handmade plus digital mashups-including 3D printing and a low tech making process of student choice. The studios may diverge in
addressing how forms, patterns, techniques, and technologies of ornamentation complement
making processes, though all three will emphasize the responsive and responsible use of tools and
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materials in sustainable ways. Studio work in the first part of winter quarter will prepare students to
work collaboratively on small group projects in the second half that challenge them to integrate
structural elements, connectors, and skin/shell/envelope, while considering materiality,
ornamentation, and the hand as a mental organ of motoricity. These small group projects will be a
primary focus of our assessment and evaluation practices. To support and augment studio work, we
will actively engage in scholarly research and writing, seminar reading and reflection, lecture
workshops, and field trips. Students interested in field study including apprenticeships and
participant-observation regarding making and ornamentation practices are encouraged to contact
faculty Sarah Williams as soon as possible to develop an in-program ILC.
Students in Making to Ornament will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and
satisfactions of being makers, and of the uses of ornament to enhance objects. They will develop
skills in drawing, design, and the use of tools and materials (both low-tech and high-tech), and
abilities in expressive, expository, and reflective thinking, speaking and writing.
Making Studios (Students committed to one of the three studio tracks when signing up for the
program):
Students choosing the Retro Tech Studio will combine hand-made and machine-made, low-tech
and high-tech in their making and their ornamenting. What would you like to make and to
ornament that combines handcraft with 3D printing and scanning technologies? In a time in which
it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than the end of capitalism, what do you want to engage
with as “tender”? All students in this studio will use an in-program only ILC to articulate their
specific learning objectives, practices (including a bibliography of related readings), expected
outcomes, and preferred method of documentation and assessment. An apprenticeship, internship,
or field study is encouraged in this studio.
Successful participation in the Retro-Tech Studio includes completion of a high-tech 3D
printing and scanning project--“An Embodied Architectural Order,” as well as completion
of an individual project (or series of studio-based work) that mashes-up students’ choice of
both high-tech and low-tech practices.
Studio Schedule
Tuesday: 9-12, AA 1114 and/or AA 2101, Mini-seminar and student check-in followed by studio
work
Wednesday: 9-11, CAL, 3D printing studio instruction and work
Thursday: 9-12, AA 2101, Studio work
*Monday and Friday: Reading, Research, Studio Practice, Individual and Small Group Project
Design/Work
Assignments and Requirements
1) Retro-Tech Studio Work and Electronic Portfolio: Students must engage in making and
ornamenting using high-tech + low-tech practices for approximately 20 hours per week.
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All students must make and maintain an evergreen.edu Sites website to document and
share their Retro Tech studio work. Required features include a weekly posting of
activities, images, notes and hours re: individual studio practices; a PDF of a successfully
negotiated ILC (including studio practice learning objectives, activities, and outcomes)
and, if applicable, a field study; and images, drafts, notes from 3D printing and scanning
studio project.
2) Attendance and Participation: Regular attendance and active participation in all studio
sessions and the all-program activities are required. See program covenant for details re:
2 or more absences and loss of credit.
3) Transduced Architectural Order: Each student must make and ornament a column, based
on a 3D body scan, that demonstrates your engagement with various formulations of “the
Classic Architectural Orders” in Picon, Trilling, Tory (PDF from Imagining Language on
website), as well as online and library resources (e.g., Khan Academy, Joseph Rykwert’s
The Dancing Column).
Books
Required: Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology (Smelik
and Lykke); 3D Modelling and Printing with TinkerCAD (Kell)y)
Required for students planning a field study: Fake Stuff: China and the Rise of Counterfeit Goods
(Yi-Chieh Jessica Lin)
Recommended: Eyes of the Skin (Pallasmaa), Available free online as a PDF:
http://www.arch.ttu.edu/courses/2008/summer/practicum/Reading%20Resources/The%20Eyes%2
0of%20the%20Skin%20by%20Juhani%20Pallasmaa.pdf
The Transduced Architectural Order Assignment
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‘An Order in architecture is a certain assemblage of parts subject to uniform established
proportions, regulated by the office that each part has to perform.’ Joseph Gwilt, The
Encyclopedia of Architecture
The Architectural Order of a classical building is akin to the mode or key of classical
music, the grammar or rhetoric of a written composition. It is established by certain
modules like the intervals of music, and it raises certain expectations in an audience
attuned to its language. “Classical Order,” Wikipedia
[I]n a recent authoritative statement, Simon Unwin defines architecture as ‘the
determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building,’ whereas building
is the performance of physical realization,’ of which ‘a building’ is the product. Ingold 58-9
This required ‘high-tech” studio project is designed to develop and demonstrate basic
competency in 3D printing using TinkerCad (plus some Blender, 123D Sketch), MakerBot
Replicator 2s, and 3D scanning. Your assignment is to stitch together and then mash-up your
own “transduced architectural order” using a 3D scan you have made and ornamented of your
body plus a 1” by 6” architectural column you have designed, made, and ornamented using
Tinkercad and 3D printers. Our seminar texts by Picon, Trilling, and Pallasmaa frequently
reference the interrelationships between the human body and architectural order. Feel free to
read ahead as well as to draw on other resources, beginning with Geofroy Tory’s work. For basics
regarding architectural order, the body, and the aesthetics of ornamentation see Khan Academy’s
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/beginners-guidegreece/v/the-classical-orders
Studio Seminar
[B]its of Life invokes a figuration that signifies today’s cultural fusion of the biological and
the technological. In Bits of Life, we explore and evaluate the current reinvestment in the
human body, a body that is full of life as well as disease and death, reconfigured by
technology and bombarded by bits and bytes of information and experience. Smelik and
Lykke, Bits of Lif,e ix
Figures are never innocent. The relationship of a subject to a figure is best described as a
cathexis of some kind. …[The student] needs to excavate the implication of this cathexis of
her/his being in the world in this way rather than some other. Articulating the analytical
object—figuring, for example, this family or kinship of entities [called] chip, gene, fetus,
bomb, et cetera (it is an indefinite list)—is about location and historical specificity, and it is
about a kind of assemblage, a kind of connectedness of the figure and the subject.
Haraway, Bits of Life, 38-9
Tuesday studios will begin with the sharing of students’ “thinking figures”—writing (including
creative mash-ups of what writing might mean in relation to new “high-tech” models of writing
such as 3D printing and “low-tech” models of writing such as the metamorphosis of a leaf. Scale
in relationship to how writing does and does not represent space, time, and perception itself
should be considered. Like the figure assembled as “bits of life” and Lykke’s Venn diagram of it,
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including that text’s references to Haraway’s cat’s cradle, ball of yarn, reclamation of the cyborg,
and semiotic square, your task is to create a technology for thinking. This technology should be a
figure that invites others to experience what happened to your mind-body as you read that
week’s seminar texts. Your technology, whether a figure or a tool, should be “an artificial device
that generates meanings very noisily.” When used by others, your figure, tool, or artificial device
should demonstrate (noisily, playfully, perhaps inelegantly) how your thinking about the assigned
texts ornaments—specifically, how it honors—those texts in relationship to your specific studio
practices. Faculty will provide examples including her thinking through/with/alongside Turkana
women’s beads using 3D printing, anthropological literature and field study, and a poetic mashup of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, 3D printing and the current EvoDevo model of “tender
buttons” (i.e., breasts).
A model for how to become aware of thinking as a technology, as well as a model methodology
for thinking about thinking as a technology is Jenny Sunden’s Bits of Life chapter, “What If
Frankenstein(‘s Monster) Was a Girl?,” which is itself modeled on Shelley Jackson’s hypertext,
Patchwork Girl. We’ll read Sunden’s chapter (#10) week two. Many online resources are available
for exploring Patchwork Girl (e.g., N. Katherine Hayles’s work: http://nkhayles.com/articles.html;
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.100/10.2hayles.txt ; as well as
http://elmcip.net/creative-work/patchwork-girl and
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/huffman/Productions/pgpaper.html; http://web.mit.edu/commforum/papers/jackson.html
Studio Reading and Assignment Schedule:
“If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself.” –Patchwork Girl
Wk 1
Tuesday: All-program meeting
Wednesday: 3D Modeling and Printing with TinkerCAD chs 1-3, look ahead to ch 10 to see the
possibilities of what could become of your 3D scan. Backup lesson: Blender, introduction to the
User Interface. Making a tree in blender.
Wednesday: 11:35-1 WordPress Workshop w/Amy Greene, Computer Ctr 2619
Thursday: Excerpt from Geofroy Tory’s, Champfleury (PDF on studio website);
Wk 2
Tuesday: Bits of Life: Intro, plus ch 3; +Thinking Figure; Screening: Excerpts from “Donna Haraway
Reads the National Geographies of Primates,” and Lauren Steury’s “iCyborgia”
Wednesday: 3d Modeling and Printing with TinkerCAD ch 4, making a rocket, then moving from
rocket to column. (base, shaft, and capitol)
Thursday: Studio work; DUE by 5PM: In-program ILC released to faculty online through
myevergreen.edu
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Wk 3
Tuesday: Bits of Life: either ch 1 or 2 and ch 10; +Thinking Figure
Wednesday: 3d Modeling and Printing with TinkerCAD chapter 10 using your own 3d scanned
figure and “tinkering” with it.
*Your 3d figurine should be in the 3d printer queue by the end of class today.
Thursday: Studio work
Wk 4
Tuesday: Bits of Life: ch 6; +Thinking Figure
Wednesday: Ornamenting: TinkerCAD ch 9. How to create SVG’s and import them into
TinkerCAD.
-Moving from Doric to the more detailed columns such as Ionic and Corinthian.
-Lesson will be on ornamenting your Doric column with text, leaves, hair…
-Using Inkscape (open source version of adobe illustrator) to make 3d printable text,
leaves/plants, or anything not easily modeled. Then adding them to your column.
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Backup Blender lesson: Touching up your 3d scanned images in blender. Filling holes and
smoothing.
Thursday: Studio work
Wk 5
Tuesday: Bits of Life: chs 4 or 5; +Thinking Figure
Wednesday: Final touchups before printing “Architectural Order Assignment”
Criterion: Size of your object/column, is it printable? Watertight? Is your column flat on top in
order to hold the weight of an object? See PAGE 11 for more details of requirements!
Backup blender lesson: Column continued.
Thursday: Studio work
Wk 6
Tuesday: Bits of Life: chs 7; Due: Presentation of “Embodied Architectural Orders”
Wednesday: Individual Retro Tech project based 3d modeling and printing lessons.
Thursday: Studio work
Wk 7
Tuesday: Bits of Life: chs 8; +Thinking Figure
Wednesday: Individual Retro Tech project based 3d modeling and printing lessons
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Thursday: Studio work
Wk 8
Tuesday: Bits of Life: chs 9; +Thinking Figure
Wednesday: Individual Retro Tech project based 3d modeling and printing lessons
Thursday: Studio work
Wk 9
Tuesday: Bits of Life: ch 11and12; +Thinking Figure
Wednesday: Individual Retro Tech project based 3d modeling and printing lessons
Thursday: Presentation of Individual Retro-Tech Projects
Wk 10
All-Program: Presentation of Small Group Projects (no studio sessions)
REDUX: The Retro Tech Studio Syllabus as a Mash-Up of Sorts
What would you like to make and to ornament that combines handcraft with 3D printing
and scanning technologies? In a time in which it is easier to imagine the end of the earth
than the end of capitalism, what do you want to engage with as “tender”? Retro Tech
Academic Fair Handout
Why ‘Making”?
“The prevailing educational philosophies regrettably continue to emphasis and value conceptual,
intellectual and verbal knowledge over the tacit and non-conceptual wisdom of our embodied
processes. This attitude continues against all the overwhelming evidence of this catastrophic bias
….” Pallasmaa 022
Why “Ornament”?
“Beauty is not a detached aesthetic quality; the experience of beauty arises from grasping the
unquestionable causalities and interdependencies of life.” Bits of Life 12
Why “Engendered Theory”?
“The ‘bits of life’ figure, which is the central pivot of [our required studio] book, can in many ways
be seen as a follow-up to or daughter of Haraway’s cyborg [and grand-daughter of Steury’s
iCyborgia]. Referring both to infotechnlogical and biotechnological processes of bodily redesign
and convergences, the ‘bits of life’ figure also points in the direction of the blurred boundaries
between organism and technology, and between matter and discourse….”
“The bios/zoe-centered vision of the technologically mediated subject of postmodernity or
advanced capitalism is fraught with internal contradictions (183)… the potency of bios-zoe
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displaces the phallogocentric vision of consciousness, which hinges on the sovereignty of the “I.”
(184) … The subject is a spatial-temporal compound that frames the boundaries of processes of
becoming. This compound…is to a certain extent unhinged, and therefore affective. Turning the
tide of negativity is a transformative process that achieves significant reformulation of the link
between understanding and freedom. … by the desire to become. Desire, here, is ontological
and not erotic; it is the desire to be (or rather to become) and not the desire to have.
[C]ontemporary culture tends to react to technological advances with a double pull that swings
from hype to nostalgia, from euphoria to melancholia. A system that prides itself on being an
information society is actually based on immaterial labor, which involves communication,
cooperation, data processing, information management, and media work. This labor forces trades
phonetic skills, health and good looks, linguistic ability, and proper language, and it accents
services as well as attention and great concentration. Consequently, it prioritises the production
and reproduction of affects, such as caring, serviceability, and the re-creation of fast-disappearing
community bonds.
‘Life’ privileges assemblages of a heterogeneous kind. Animals, insects, machines are as many
fields of forces or territories of becoming. The life in me is not only, not even, human.
Positive metamorphosis can be seen as political passion. It endorses the kinds of becoming that
destabilize dominant power relations and deterritorialize fixed identities and mainstream values.
This passion is ethical as well as political because it mobilizes the critical resources of the intellect
as well as the creative imagination….” Bits of Life
Why “Retro Tech”?
In my country --[and student’s choice of place and tradition]—numerous traditional specialized
crafts—such as the building of traditional church boats, basket making, burning of pine tar,
restoration of buildings and objects, and painting of imitation materials in buildings—were almost
lost in the period of euphoric industrialization of the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately, a new interest
in traditions has followed the industrial rage and saved these and numerous other crafts, but
there are still countless skills and an immense stock of unverbalised knowledge around the world,
embedded in ageless modes of life and livelihoods, that need to be maintained and restored.
These traditional cumulative practices of the human hand around the world form the true survival
skills of humankind. Pallasmaa 51-2
As a consequence of the mental transfer from the actuality of the drawing or the model to the
material reality of the project, the images with which the designer advances are not mere visual
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renderings; they constitute a fully haptic and multi-sensory reality of imagination. The architect
move about freely in the imagined structure, however large and complex it may be, as if walking
in a building and touch all its surfaces and sensing their materiality and texture. This is an
intimacy that is surely difficult, if not impossible, to simulate through computer-aided means of
modeling and simulation. Pallasmaa 59
Why ‘thinking figures’ and ‘writing figures’ as technologies?
“Marilyn Strathern formulated this very wonderful aphorism: ‘It matters which categories you use
to think other categories with.’ … There are many philosophers who use cognitive technologies to
increase the transparency of their craft. But I want to use the technologies to increase the
opacity, to thicken, to make it impossible to think of thinking technologies transparently. Rather,
I will foreground the work practice that thinking is. I will stress that category making is a
labor process with its own materiality, which is a different kind of materiality than making
a sailboat, or raising a dog, or organizing feminist demonstration.” Haraway in Bits of Life
35-6
“What then is the relation between thinking and making?” Ingold 6
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Why a transduced architectural column assignment?
“The technological redesign and reconfiguration of bodies and environments becomes more and
more a part of everyday life. Against this background a rethinking of bodies as well as
environments becomes a pressing issue for information science and the biological sciences. As
life bits whether carbon- or silicon-based, are transformed, the body threatens to fall apart into
‘components,’ to decompose down to its molecular structures, which can be reassembled in new
and unexpected ways and remediated in endlessly changing shapes. The human body can no
longer be figured either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an
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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.” (Bits of Life into x)
Why “Field Study”? (including apprenticeships and participant-observation regarding
making and ornamentation practices)
“An embodied manner of learning and maintaining skills as well as responding to life situations is
the dominant mode of knowledge also in traditional societies. Learning a skill is primarily a
matter of embodied muscular mimesis acquired through practice rather than conceptual or
verbalized instruction. I cannot personally recall much talking in my youth at my grandfather’s
farm; everyday life and work took place ‘in the flesh’ of farm life…. The farmer’s knowledge was
constituted of crucial embodied skills that were coded into the seasons and cycles of the year and
the concrete situations of daily life rather than books and notes.” Pallasmaa, 118
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http://www.well.com/~willard/Donna Haraway_The Promises of Monsters92.htm
“In the academic pantheon, reason is predestined to trump intuition, expertise to trump common
sense, and conclusions based on the facts to trump what people know from ordinary experience
or from the wisdom of their forbears. The mission of anthropology has long been to turn this
pantheon on its head.” Ingold 2
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http://faculty.georgetown.edu/spielmag/articles/
“The question is: what difference does it make if discussion is grounded in a context of practical
activity?” Ingold 9
Minimum Requirements for the Transduced Architectural Order Project:
1) Scanned, ornamented and printed body figure
Due: In 3D printing que by Thursday noon of wk 3
2) Designed, ornamented, and printed Tinkercad Rocket Ship to Architectural Column in
Correspondence with Classical Aesthetic Orders and 3D Body Scan/Figure
Due: In 3D printing que by Thursday noon of wk 5
3) Ornamentation must address Picon’s criteria of ornament-as-superimposition including: 1)
Materiality, Pleasure, Beauty; and 2) Social Positioning, Rank, Prestige; and 3) Information,
Communication, Knowledge
4) Making must address Ingold’s criteria for making/building as movement from interaction to
correspondence, what he calls a transduction from haptic and kinaesthetic to material flow. In
what ways does your column demonstrate a correspondence between maker and material?
5) Functionality: Final column must be 1” by 6” with a flat top and a slit in order to be of use in our
program’s studio studio show wk 10.
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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20763/20763-h/20763-h.htm#fig196
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