Dear Maker
Dear Maker, This text is being written and shared with the intention to bring out, reconnect with, and foster the forgotten, blocked, or hidden maker that already exists within you. It's a reflection and investigation on what I've encountered in my creative process as someone who learns through making, and I’m sharing this with you in case you happen to be on a similar journey so we can support each other in some way. As makers, we process and synthesize information in a hands-on way that requires constant trial-and-error which can be exciting as it is frustrating. It can be a bumpy path to navigate, sometimes with nonexistent ones that need to be paved as we go, but I’m here to assure you that it’ll be a worthwhile journey despite the obstacles that we’ll face. If this resonates with you, I invite you to join in, be it as an observer or a see-for-yourself-adventurer. It's a small gesture, but I hope that it can be an encouraging one that can empower you to (re)discover the urge to make (and break). Together let’s find out how being frustrated beginners in a learning process can be valued as a constructive stepping stone that helps us unlock insights and discoveries about our practice. How can we adapt to the frictional environments that we find ourselves in by embracing our pace, working with what we have, and leveraging them as tools to help us break through the thresholds? Through the series of letters that you’re about to read, you’ll enter an interstitial space where the small things are magnified. Everything's slower and quieter, and for the first time, you can see and hear things that can get blurred into the background or muffled in the hustle and bustle. You may come across creatures that might not be visible to the naked eye or have voices, but here you’re free to find your own ways to communicate and interact with them through your own tweak or invent your vernacular mode of expressions, be it through languages, gestures, or tools. It's a moment to tune in with your surroundings and acknowledge your own ways of seeing and doing things so that you can finally let your freak flag fly. We're not here for a smooth and seamless user experience-–we’re here to expand on and celebrate the friction and the bugs, the hiccups and the latencies––the natural part of the process that is tucked beneath clean and streamlined interfaces. Let’s unlearn the things we've learned to quickly resolve as a reflex, and instead sit with it and actually understand why things are happening in certain ways and how we can understand it from where we are in our journey. Let’s get to making!
|