They offer a variety of events influenced by the viewers’ actions in real time, such as displaying images as visualization of thoughts, presenting the viewers’ body movement and facial gestures, or following the visitors’ movement through the exhibition space.
All the works in the exhibition were produced by “makers.” The term “maker” was coined in 2005 by Dale Dougherty, president and CEO of Maker Media, Inc. in California, who is considered the spiritual father of the global maker movement. He identified the selfproduction of devices by DIY, domestic means as a growing phenomenon and established the web-magazine Make as a platform for interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge. This website and others like it have enabled shared learning and exchange of knowledge between people engaged in such practices, who became known as makers. In time, Dougherty also established the Maker Faire,
a contemporary take on American county fairs, which allows people who have developed and built technological inventions and devices in their home yards and garages to present them to others and share their knowledge. This fair is currently held in over a hundred countries, including Israel, allowing hundreds of thousands to see and experience a variety of inventions. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, regards the maker movement as responsible for the Third Industrial Revolution (the second being the Internet), leading it with ideas such as the use of open code, crowdsourcing ideas, reusing found designs, and self production of tools. His book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (2012) discusses the blurred boundaries between the analogue and digital worlds and predicts that in the future every person will learn how to design the products he or she needs and that self-making will change the power forces at work in our society.{2}
Maker projects may fall under a variety of headings, such as interactive installation or kinetic sculpture. They may also be connected to Umberto Eco’s notion of the “open work.” However, the current exhibition wishes to avoid such projection of one field over another. It includes works by makers who are artists alongside makers who are scientists and programmers. The common thread between them is a productive spirit of sharing, such as Anderson describes, and raising funds through crowdfunding.
Consequently, makers also contribute to the effort to put an end to intellectual property rights and promote the democratization of ownership of hardware and information {3} – thereby seeking to change the relations of power in capitalist society.
While at first the term “makers” designated DIY technology fans, nowadays this global phenomenon is often described as a revolution which finds expression in a variety of fields. The international maker community comprises software and hardware experts, engineers and robotics specialists, researchers, scientists, mathematicians, and any number of interested people. This diversity is also evident in the participants in the current exhibition. For instance, Liat Segal, an artist and maker whose works have been displayed in major museums in Israel and around the world, presents Attending Machine – a printer which prints portraits produced from pictures uploaded to Facebook profiles. Matan Berkowitz (technologist, artist, and head of shift Company) and Liron Zabari (multidisciplinary artist) have produced, together with HAR, Zohar Levi, and Roi Stepansky, Rorrim (Mirror in reverse), which invites the viewers to take part in a synchronized, harmonious movement-dialogue. ForReal Team consists of Zvika Markfeld (technologist, programmer, and inventor), Saron Paz (experience designer and new-media artist) – both university lecturers and among the people responsible for the Israeli Maker Fair – and Tomer Daniel (programmer). They collaborated with Eyal Gruss (Dr. of Theoretical Physics) to produce CommonSense, which invites the viewers to share the production of thoughts. They all share a passion for creating and producing projects, as well as a cultural and social stance that believes in sharing and inviting other people to take part in one’s creation. For some of the makers this is a full time job, while others are “weekend warriors,” whose creative work takes up long hours of their time and considerable amounts of money.
The wish to make projects and share knowledge has resulted in many maker conventions, events, and marathons, whose purpose is to share innovative creativity and promote thinking outside the box. Inspired by communal events such as the Burning Man or Foo Camp (an annual hacker event), numerous conventions and Hackathons (a compound word composed of hack and marathon) are held in Israel – events centered on technological applications and developments by makers. GeekCon conventions, for instance – marathons during which the participants make unusual devices – promote projects defined as “useless devices” to encourage originality. Kinnernet focuses on technology and the Internet. GeekCon Green is meant for initiatives related to ecological innovation. MahaNet is a military framework for innovation in surveillance and combat devices. Other Hackathons promote a search for solutions to challenges faced by people with special needs, and there are many more. Some of the projects on view in the exhibition were developed in maker conventions. Human Sound Objects by Eran Hilleli, Doron Assayas Terre, and Giori Politi was developed in Kinnernet 2012. Noy Barak, Nathan Intrator, and Lenny Ridel presented in GeekCon 2015 a project based on a unique development by their company, neurosteer, which they have also used in their work Brainstorm in the current exhibition. The work Alonely was developed by a team of seven makers – Batt-Girl, Eyal Gruss, Christiane Huber, Alon Kaplan, Adi Lavy, Rotem Levim, and Neora ShemShaul – for the Tribeca Hackathon in the Print Screen Festival in Holon.
These projects were redesigned for the museum space. Other projects were built especially for the museum and engage with its space. Parallelograms by Eddie Israelsky and Alon Segal uses virtual-reality technology to allow the viewer to experience, within the exhibition space, different time and space. The roots of the collaboration between art and technology may be found as far back as the 1960s, in attempts by artists and scientists to encourage interrelations between the two disciplines. “Generative Computer Graphics” is considered the first such exhibition. An initiative by German mathematicians to use a plotter to produce drawings, it was presented in Stuttgart, Germany in 1965. In 1967 a number of American artists and engineers, including the artist Robert Rauschenberg and the engineer Billy Klüver, founded the Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) organization and provoked a great deal of interest among artists exposed to this new enterprise. In 1967 the photographer György Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Massachusetts. Nowadays, it is a leading academic center for people engaged with new media. This is where the global model for the Fab Lab (short for Fabrication Laboratory) platform was developed as a workshop for community computerdriven manufacture, where makers may produce new prototypes.
The inclusion of technology-based works in the arena of art did not result in a new artistic movement. It only opened up a new field of possibilities for artists. While the first years were informed by excitement at the novel technology, as the home computer market developed the field became more and more experiential. Pierre Lévy, a French philosopher and new-media researcher specializing in the cultural and cognitive consequences of digital technology, claims that the ability of computers to be in constant touch has contributed to a transition from a world of individual thought (“I”) to collective, pluralistic thought (“we”).{4} Not every person creating in new-media or combining technology in his or her work is considered a maker. Makers are driven by a passion for making things with their own hands while embracing a spirit of sharing information and thoughts about processes to better allow them to implement their ideas. Disapproving of limits set on information-sharing, they contribute to selfproduction by using open code, thereby contributing to a transformation of power relations in capitalist society. On a visit to Israel for the Hackathon in Yeruham in June 2015, Dougherty said in an interview, “I believe in a wide definition of the notion of ‘maker,’ and I wish many more people would regard themselves as such, for the simple reason that they are indeed makers, even before we decided to call them so.”{5} The visitors are invited to embrace the practices of the maker community and take active part in writing a layered communal text. Through the free HMOCA app (developed by Liron Lerman), the text you are reading may be searched for additional layers (written by people from different disciplines), to which you may add your own thoughts or
responses.
{1} Paul Virilio, “Red Alert in Cyberspace!,” Radical Philosophy, no. 74 (Nov/Dec 1995), p. 2.
{2} See Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (Crown Publishing, 2012).
{3} See Carmella Jacoby Volk, “Academia as an Agent of Change,” in Drorit Gur Arie (ed.), Museum: Use Value (Petach Tikva: Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014), pp. 93-96 (Hebrew).
{4} Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence (New York and London: Plenium Trade, 1997).
{5} Ram Hadar Goldschmidt, “Between Hacker and Gardener: Interview with the Inventor of the Maker,” June 17, 2015, available at http://www.ynet.co.il/ articles/0,7340,L-4669199,00. html.
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