A POWERFUL IDEA & Extra Notes on Maker Culture

(This video serves as a nod to the title of this multimedia project website and also to share the texts and the ideas that have influenced my teaching, learning and creative style over the years.)

In 2009 I applied to Stanford University’s documentary film school in Palo Alto, California. I wanted to make a film exploring Emerson’s writings on Self-Reliance , Walden & the Duty of Civil Disobedience. I wanted to tell the story of my grandfather and the factory he built in Puerto Rico more than 50 years ago and how it inspired many members of his community and members of our family (myself included) to learn how to make things and use those things to become self-reliant.

I chose the documentary film program at Stanford mainly because of my love of the art form, the beauty and vibe of the school and my deep desire to return to a place with sun and sea. I wanted to join this special community to learn to tell stories with a form that had truly enhanced my personal education experiences over the years.

It was, like many things I’ve been known to take on in my educational path, a pretty wild and kind of random idea. I have this tendency to DREAM BIG and then try to work backwards from the vision to figure out how to make things come together. Sometimes this process works and sometimes it doesn’t… but no matter the outcome, I always learn new and useful things to add to my project notebooks.

In this case, I didn’t get into Stanford– but I learned tons from preparing my application and seeing and studying the films that their current students were making in the program.

I was not surprised to receive the brief and impersonal rejection note in the mail– lots of my project ideas get rejected every day– so this wasn’t new. But a little part of me really did wonder what life would have been like in that world of beautiful ideas, completely engaged in making something meaningful with a team of people interested in the craft of filmmaking and digital storytelling.

The schools I was interested in attending (mainly for their structures and programs) were not really interested in my learning style– this has basically been the case for me in the course of several applications and inquiry letters to different arts and education programs and organizations in the US.

Some places denied entry, some extended trial periods in the form of short term project contracts and others embraced my creative and seemingly random set of skills whole heartedly.

Each attempt to carve out an original education, whether it is met with failure or success, speaks to the larger goal–the vision of reaching wholeness through connected learning and like Mimi Ito said in the week 2 lecture, “making meaningful social contributions”.

I bounced back from the whole Stanford rejection thing pretty quickly and kept trying stuff out in the world. I created The Young Producers project and piloted it in a couple of places around Boston and then went to work at the Museum of Science managing the programs at the Flagship Computer Clubhouse.

I didn’t know it then, but the Clubhouse was pretty much the learning environment I had been hoping to spend some time in at Stanford— exposed to new skills, tools and technologies for story-telling and surrounded by really smart, really interesting people.

I had the experience any way– the universe has a funny way of balancing things out.

I spent over a year and a half soaking in the goodness of the learning culture created by the Lifelong Kindergarten group and shared around the world through the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network. If you haven’t heard of this organization, please check out their page. It’s amazing!

Obviously I was inspired by the work done there to think about how I might build a non-traditional creative space for youth, families and community members who want to make and invent new things with others around them.

A little background info on the naming of the Rockshelf Studio project (as requested by my good friend Nicole):

Back in 2004 on my 23rd birthday I received a beautifully hand-written version of a poem out of the collection “The Dream of a Common Language”– The hand-written gift of Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich was given to me by Kate, a good friend and teacher I met while working as a counselor in the Upward Bound program at the Noble and Greenough School.

I didn’t really understand the whole poem at first, but over the years– through reading it aloud and playing with the words and ideas– I’ve come to understand the meaning of the text.

“No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born”

I loved those words so much I started exploring different texts and experimenting with this big idea to turn the many terabytes of video footage, images and audio files of my friends, family and creative pathways taken over the years into a collection of short multimedia narratives.

I believed this project was going to help me balance some things in work and help me create a good infrastructure for myself and the youth in my family to strive toward self-directed learning and entrepreneurialism in the way my grandfather had done– developing a simple idea made to help other people become self-reliant and self-empowered.

I named the project for this website after an image in that Adrienne Rich poem of a woman at a kitchen table working pieces of cloth into a quilt–making and mending for her family. The image is juxtaposed with the concept of the rock shelf as an organically developing part of the natural landscape built over time by the bits and pieces– the scraps of earth and sediment falling into place just right and creating a strong foundation for “everything that grows.”

“Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow- colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow
original domestic silk, the finest findings
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright; silk against roughness,
putting the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.”

I wanted to play with this idea of the MAKER mom (or family) as the Rockshelf of the local community. Thus the concept for Rockshelf Studio was born.

Reading and learning about the maker movement this past week in the Learning Creative Learning course made me think of this image again of the mother engaged in the practice of making and mending.

I was moved to share a quick story about my mom and how she’s always taken after her dad– turning ideas into things… She used to make our clothes when we were little and then after some rough encounters with the world she just stopped making stuff and more recently she started up again and has been documenting and sending me pictures of the things she’s currently making.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.We even collaborated over smart phones to design a hooded scarf for me to wear around NYC to keep my head warm when I’m running around pitching ideas to people who more than likely are going to reject them.

I love the fact that I walk in to these meetings rocking something that my mom made with her own hands to pitch something that I’m building in my head and would like to see out in the real world.

It feels like a poetic experience– the perfect thing to share on the Rockshelf.

Check out some of my mom’s current creations and stay tuned for her Etsy store. She’s currently taking some time to learn more about operating online market places to share and sell her work on the World Wide Web.

Go mom! Way to make a creative comeback!

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