Open Source Curriculum

About the Topic

“Clay’s methods are situated in our bodies and mirror our own evolution through time. Clay has always been an evocative scribe of its moment. Its technologies have followed humanity’s every shift. This shifting path is not a record from primary to advanced, but a continually recurring event. The potential of our present moment is that we can reach back and forward through time, through the clay in our hands, and the machines that have evolved with us. In this present, we can find traces of the cyborg in the earliest pinch pots, and folk practices in 3-D prints. Our future isn’t foreign but is already embedded within us.”*

This conversation will explore how our soft bodies engage with the digital softwares that currently surround us. This is not just a one-to-one relationship where one works upon the other; rather, each are malleable mediums through which meaning, making, and communication are channeled and transmitted. The intermediary and active space between digital media and technology and the ancient haptic knowledge of working with clay is an intermingled and tangled pathway to more expansive thinking about our creative process, the field of ceramics, and the agency we have to mark our places in the universe.

In this conversation, we will consider software (ie. Soft Ware) as: Meaning making engines; Languages to bridge the gap between body and machine; Revealer of our expanded body; Systems for understanding our relation to the universe; Games that catalyze our process; Languages to communicate across space and time; Magical scripts.