Unmaking: Against General Applicability is a multi-author text from researchers at the Critical Media Lab Basel, with Merle Ibach, Michaela Büsse, Felix Gerloff, Viktor Bedö & Shintaro Miyazaki. As a contribution to "The Critical Makers Reader: Collaborative Learning With Technology" published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019, the piece questions the belief in the applicability and efficacy of DIY production, open-source, and method sharing as they have matured into institutionalised and domesticated forms (e.g.: hackathons and 'Maker weekends').
“Making” is a key concept that frames a host of more specific practices, lending characteristic manual/moral, communal/communicational, aesthetic/ethical, and enacted/economic inflections and values. Even simple, historical, traditional, technological or digital acts of object and media creation, of art and design but also of writing and thinking itself, are recast-able as “making”. What is it that happens to the thinking and doing of such activities, when such a recasting is desired, chosen, projected, enforced or assumed?