Make It: an Intervention - Major Studio 2

ABSTRACT

The reality of being a person in the world, in as much as you are reading this brief in a developed country in a large thriving and affluent city, is that you cannot pull yourself out of a system wherein the things you buy are made by people from far-flung areas of the world without taking some fairly drastic measures. These things, these objects, are then brought to you over the long distance. You will never really know what materials and physical work went into these things you buy. This system of shipping and selling goods across vast distances to a huge variety of people, though not new, is new in it’s large-ness and disconnect.

My project aims to bring awareness to this complex system. I will create a platform that invites people to ask me to make something for them that they were going to buy at a store. I will then document to process of making the thing and compare it to the original thing and the costs and systems and implications of that original thing.

The research and the making together will make this project more tangible and lend an element of alchemy to an equally unseen process. The interaction between myself as the maker and the buyer will be analyzed and mined for insight.

AUDIENCE

The audience is any member of a society where most members generally have the expendable income to select preferred brands of any general sundry in a store at will.

PRECEDENTS

Miranda July “Learning to Love You More”

Keetra Deen Dixon’s body of work

Stephanie Rothenberg “Invisible Threads”

Francis Alÿs “When Faith Moves Mountains”