Today’s guest, Kazys Varnelis, helps me take a look at today’s maker culture through the lens of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as the many DIY and counter-culture movements that sprang up in the second half of the 20th Century.
We talk about making as a startup culture, and making as a form of everyday life. And we spend some time thinking about the things that don’t seem to count as making, from cooking and gardening, to renaissance fairs and fanzines.
Finally, I encourage Kazys to engage in some reckless speculation about what the future might hold for making cultures, and he nobly obliges.
Kazys is a lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick and also teaches at Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab and co-founder of the conceptual architecture/media group AUDC. He’s also an artist, and editor and writer of many books.
This episode riffs off an article published in the New Yorker in 2014 by Evgeny Morozov, called Making It. If you haven’t at least skimmed that piece, I’d recommend doing that first, then coming back to this. It’s all right, we’ll wait.
Show notes
- The Arts and Crafts Movement
- The Evgeny Morozov article
- William Morris
- Karl Marx on alienated production
- Henri Lefebvre on everyday life
- Horatio Alger myth
- Stewart Brand
- Chris Anderson’s book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
- Mark Hatch’s book, The Maker Movement Manifesto
- Techshop
- Manuel Castells’ book, The Rise of the Network Society
- Social architecture examples: refugee shelter in Calais
- Habitat for humanity
- Backpacking and making: Make Your Own Gear
- Renaissance fairs
- Artificial General Intelligence
- An AGI wins at Go
- Keynes, and the 15 hour working week
This episode will be broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Sunday 27 March. To listen on Resonance, check out the show page.
This is the last episode in this series; thank you to everyone who has supported this show, especially all my guests, Lighthouse and Resonance FM. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening too.
This series of Looking Sideways is a Lighthouse production for Resonance 104.4 FM.
Andrew Sleigh 