Makey Makey Full of Cheese

Makey Makey is a blast. I can relate to Diana’s initial frustrations with the device, and, in fact, I didn’t even want to get into the project for the first few days. I think getting a five-year old to play with me with it last weekend helped me get over the hump a little bit.

Much of the work in this project with Nathaniel, in the initial stages, was conceptual; mulling over ideas, sketching possibilities out, chatting about what might work and what might not. Once we settled on a concept, though (roughly: food politics, leading to Makey Makey fun with Polish ham, basil, and New Zealand cheddar cheese) we started to roll with ideas. I’m drawn to this hardware project because a few weeks ago I went to Jody Shipka’s workshop at Eastern Michigan. Shipka, as she does, gave a talk and interactive presentation that centered around the use of objects and materials in composition classrooms (multimedia/multimodality de-centered from the digital). I was struck then by the inventive potentials that became manifest in the workshop–basically, we all brought a bunch of stuff to break, combine, and assemble into new compositions.

I felt similar potentialities opening up the more I got into the process of this Makey Makey project. Nathaniel and I started with some thoughts on slicing a pepperoni and hearing a pig squeal, then started using different foods paired with different sounds or videos and, in short order, we had the makings of guerrilla performance art you might see next Sunday at a supermarket free sample station. I think our process felt similar in nature to what Kelly describes in her blog. At the end of the day, though, the take home for me is that playing with fun stuff like Makey Makey in grad seminar is not only the gossamer dreams of my seven-year old self, but a really interesting intellectual enterprise to boot.