Woman doing eye exercise, photographer unknown, 1937, source: Spaarnestad Foto)
Loes' Fabricademy Documentation
This my documentation blog/notebook for the Fabricademy Course of 2019. I'm participating from Amsterdam with Fab Lab Waag as my local lab.
About me
Hi! I am Loes Bogers (not me in the pic though).
I live in Rotterdam, but I'm from lovely Southern city Eindhoven, and I work in Amsterdam. My work home is the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences where I work as a researcher at the Visual Methodologies Collective, and coordinator and educator of a semester course on (critical) making and digital fabrication.
I’m currently working on a book project with Letizia Chiappini and Geert Lovink called the Critical Maker’s Reader: (Un)Learning Technology. It's an edited volume that addresses questions around contemporary critical making. What might making become after the recent death knell of MAKE magazine, its maker faires and the maker movement they envisioned? What was making before? What could it become? The reader will come out as a printed book and open access ePub, and will be published by the Institute of Network Cultures in November 2019. I work with students on related practices and topics in the interdisciplinary semester course Makers Lab: Making as Research that I developed with Shirley Niemans.
Back in 2015...
I know Shirley back from when I did the Fabacademy in 2015. It put a lot of nice projects in motion for us and led to a great friendship! My final project was a toy for wunderkammers, that I loved making and am still proud of because of all the work and learning that went into it. I also feel quite ambivalent about it now, because it was such a self-indulgent thing to create in a way. At the same time the skills I learned were invaluable, and the process has shaped my thinking on the meaning of making and the kind of knowledge created by developing intimate knowledge of tools, materials and general craftsmanship.
*Video of my final project from Fabacademy, Loes Bogers, 2015*Why fabricademy?
This year, I'm able to join the Fabricademy with the generous support of my university. This program directly ties in with some current developments: there's recently been a great interest in practices that could be called critical making, and we're looking to expand our research and education more specifically toward critical making in the context of the fashion industry. What would be a better place to get started than here? This truly is a bucket list moment for me <3.
PLus, it's kind of all the things I love combined! I enjoy learning and a bit of a challenge, and the things I could practice here will be a starting point for a personal project I have in mind in collaboration with a terrific community of innovative performers. I'm looking into a collaboration with local drag performers.
##Some related previous work
I have a BA in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory & Practice from Goldsmiths, London. I'm definitely a bit of a hybrid practitioner and a large part of me is bookish and researchy, but I very much enjoy this combination. I know about areas of (digital) media, electronics, some coding, and digital fabrication. Although I've sewn my own clothes I don't have much fashion in my background besides a 32-year for vintage clothes and dressing up unapologetically whether there's an occasion or not. The projects I have done tend to deal with gender, embodiment, data and often some kind of politics. Here's a few:
Movement-moving machines
This is a project where I looked into dance systems and dynamics of music, migration, spaces and touch. For one experiment I hacked two pair of tap dancing shoes to make a sound system that can be turned on and off as people touch or let go. The very start of my love affair with electronics!
image by Loes Bogers, 2010
Dancecoding
During a residency at Kitchen Budapest, I did this dancecoding project with local contact improvisation dancers and the developers of Fluxus: a livecoding language used for performative programming. We did a week of dancecoding jams to explore formats, techniques and modes of collaboration during arts exhibition SZOB|A|R|T.