Make.garden (Mg)

Make.garden (Mg) is simple-to-use software for creating online environments that encourage offline activity and creative thinking. Mg supports remote working and acts as a bridge between activity IRL and online for makers. Mg is a place for work in progress, a sketchbook of ideas and inspiration in a virtual studio where other makers, students and staff can be invited to view and make comments. Mg encourages risk and experimentation, of the unknown or yet to be worked out, which are central to the development of an artist. Mg fosters the supportive and critical community that forms around a cohort of makers. This presentation will give an introduction to Mg and discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated, through necessity, the need for tools and platforms like Mg for makers and those involved in art pedagogy. This will be followed by a five-point discussion around Mg in dialogue with Roland Barthes lecture series How to Live Together and Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Shared pain points experienced alone. Affect of physical and online environments, through the analogy of the allotment. Symbiotic relationship of the individual maker to others. (Re)creating or (re)establishing art education concerning boundaries of community. Midpointness. The presentation will conclude with speculations for how Mg might grow in a post-pandemic world for makers. Mg provides a forum for generative potentials over final outcomes that combines interactions that leverage technology to further amend sustenance and participation of a maker’s practice. Mg supports distributed idiorrhythmic clusters and embeds the conditions identified as being sympathetic to makers, mindful of avoiding the drawbacks driven by the attention economy common to online experiences