Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable Makers

Materialist Activist Communities (MACs) concern themselves with material flows in a politically engaged form of maker culture. They speculate, design and make collectively, with a marked environmental orientation, often developing impossible forms of bio-hacking and bio-art. The futures animating them grow out of technoscientific and mundane presents, but as they make knowledge on the sidelines, materializing the existing and the improbable, such groups render the Anthropocene and more-than-human futures tangible. While “maker culture” has been prone to techno-utopian hype, MACs embrace dirt, mess and bodies nurturing a “dirt way” of learning, a principled way of being in situated and partial confusion. We imagine alongside them, also in the dirt way, through ethnography, an explicitly messy way of working out what is important and why.