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The Making Of…

The Making Of… was part of a public radio experiment called Localore–10 independent producers collaborating with 10 public radio stations around the nation, creating some of the new public radio programming of the future. During this year long collaboration we explored The Making of the Submerged Turntable, The Making of a Violin, The Un-Making of a Typewriter, The Making of the Homobile and much, much more. And nearly 30,000 people joined us when The Making Of… went live at SFMOMA for three days, with 5 floors of the museum filled with the makers from across our community.

While The Making Of… stories will no longer be airing on KQED, this blog remains active and we will still be taking in stories. The easiest way to submit your story is through Zeega. Visit the Studio page to learn how and to see some of the Zeegas that have already been made for this project.
It’s been a pleasure and an honor to know the Bay Area further through what people make here and why. And why it matters.

The Making Of… Live @ SFMOMA

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On Thursday and Friday, May 30 and 31 and Saturday June 1, The Kitchen Sisters and KQED present “The Making Of… Live at SFMOMA,” inspired by their radio series “The Making Of…” about what people make in the Bay Area and why. Over one hundred makers will present their work, process, and expertise over the course of the 3 days, filling the museum with inventions, contraptions, art, food, stories, music, imagination, community.

As SFMOMA closes for renovation and expansion, a vast community of makers from throughout the region come share their skills and crafts and tell their stories. The Kitchen Sisters will host three days of drop-in demo and conversation tables and presentations. Thursday and Friday will conclude with a daily maker’s talk and gatherings.

“The Making Of… Live at SFMOMA” captures the art, creativity and innovation going on in backyards, workplaces, cultural institutions and public spaces throughout the region. This three-day event is part of SFMOMA’s Countdown Celebration and entrance to the museum is free.

Schedule of makers and events:

Thursday, May 30th, 10am – 6pm

3rd Street (10am-3pm):

The Making of… the Karaoke Ice Cream Truck / Treatbot, San Jose

The Making of… a Hot Rod / Ignacio “Notch” Gonzales, Top Notch Kustoms, San Jose

The Making of… Pizza / Del Popolo

Atrium

The Re-Making of… a Museum / Snøhetta, Craig Dykers & Simon Ewings, Norway

The Making of… the Workshop Residence / Featured Artists:

Phil Ross (fungal furniture)
Johanna Grawunder (lighting devices)
Lauren DiCioccio (trompe l’oeil embroidery)
Agelio Batle (up-cycled plastic)
Maki Aizawa & Tsuyo Onodera (kimono masters)

The Making of… La Burbuja (The Bubble) / Anayansi Diaz-Cortez, Eric Pearse Chavez & Hugo Martinez (Mat-ter), Sonic Trace, KCRW, Santa Monica

The Making of… The Homobile: A Story of Transportation, Civil Rights & Glitter / Lynn Breedlove, Erica Berman, & Sam Lowther, SF

Koret Visitor Education Center (KVEC) – “The Remaking of… Storytelling” – Hosted by Zeega

12:00 – The Unmaking of… the Typewriter – Jeremy Mayer, Oakland

1:00 – The Making of… Wood / Evan Shively, Arborica, Marshall

2:00 – The Making of… Localore / Sue Schardt, AIR (The Association of Independents in Public Radio)

3:00 – The Making of…Zeega / Kara Oehler, Jesse Shapins, & James Burns

3rd Floor Landing

The Making of… Al’s Attire / Al Ribaya, SF

The Making of… TechShop / Blaine Dehmlow & Jess Harrington Au, SF

Rooftop

The Making of… Everything (A Revolving Table of Community Makers)

10am: The Making of… a Diddley Bow / Marilyn McNeal, Berkeley

11am: The Making of… a Democracy / Attack of the Typewriters, SF

12pm: The Making of… Mushroom Furniture / Phil Ross, San Francisco

1pm: The Making of… an Animated Film / Ornana, San Rafael

2pm: The Making of … an Amplifier / Trash Amps, SF

The Making of… the Cinema Snowglobe / JD Beltran & Scott Minneman, SF

The Making of… a Campsite / Alite Designs, SF

The Making of… Kimchi / SunHui Chang & Ellen Sebastian Chang FuseBOX, Oakland

The Making of… Cheese / Cowgirl Creamery, Peggy Smith & Maureen Cunnie, Petaluma/Pt. Reyes/SF

The Making of… Chocolate / TCHO Chocolate, Zohara Mapes & Shiao Williams-Sheng

Making Discussions in Koret Visitor Education Center

5:00 pm – The Making of… Rebar and the Alvord Lake Bridge / Roman Mars, 99% Invisible, KALW, San Francisco

5:30 pm – The Making of… The Making Of… The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton, & KQED Public Radio

Friday May 31st, 10:00am – 6:00pm

3rd Street (10am-3pm):

The Making of… the Karaoke Ice Cream Truck / Treatbot, San Jose

The Making of… the Bookmobile / San Francisco Public Library

The Making of … a Truck Camper / Jay Nelson, SF

Atrium

The Re-Making of… a Museum / Snøhetta – Craig Dykers & Simon Ewings, Norway

The Making of… the Submerged Turntable / Evan Holm, Oakland

The Making of… the Workshop Residence / Featured Artists:

Johanna Grawunder (lighting devices)
Lauren DiCioccio (trompe l’oeil embroidery)
FutureFarmers (Flatbread Society)
Maki Aizawa and Tsuyo Onodera (kimono masters)
JD Beltran and Scott Minnemann (Cinema Snowglobes)

The Making of… La Burbuja (The Bubble / Anayansi Diaz-Cortez, Eric Pearse Chavez and Hugo Martinez (Mat-ter), Sonic Trace, KCRW, Santa Monica

The Making of… The Homobile: A Story of Transportation, Civil Rights & Glitter / Lynn Breedlove & Sam Lowther, SF

Schwab Room

The Making of… a Charitable Food Movement / Mission Street Food & ShareTable.org with Mission Chinese Food, Tartine Bakery, Bar Tartine, Commonwealth, Wise Sons Deli, Tacolicious, La Cocina, Wise Sons Deli, Central Kitchen and more.

3rd Floor Landing

The Making of… TechShop / Blaine Dehmlow and Jess Harrington Au, San Francisco

The Making of… a Hat / Paul’s Hat Works, SF

Koret Visitor Education Center (KVEC) – The Making Of… Community Stories, Hosted by Zeega

12:00 – The Making of… Los Cenzontles / Linda Ronstadt & Eugene Rodriguez, Los Cenzontles Mexican Art Center, San Pablo

1:00 – The Making of… Zeega / Kara Oehler, Jesse Shapins & James Burns

3:00 – The Making of… StoryCorps / Isaac Kestenbaum

Rooftop

The Making of… Everything (A Revolving Table of Community Makers)

10am: The Making of… a Sign / New Bohemia Signs & Peter Kimack, SF

11am: The Making of… a Walking Tour / The San Francisco Appreciation Society

12pm: The Unmaking of… a Typewriter / Jeremy Mayer, Oakland

1pm: The Making of… Creative Growth, Oakland

2pm: The Making of… a Violin / Remo Del Tredici, San Francisco

3pm: The Making of… the Warren Hellman Museum, Dawn Holliday, SF

The Making of… a Surfboard / Danny Hess, Hess Surfboards, SF

The Making of… a Campsite / Alite Designs, SF

The Making of… Confectionary / June Taylor, The Still Room, Oakland

The Making of… Dashimaki Tamago / Sylvan Mishima Brackett, Peko Peko, Oakland

The Making of… Chocolate, TCHO, SF

Making Discussions in Koret Visitor Education

5:00 pm – The Making of… a Surfboard / Danny Hess & Jay Nelson in conversation with Sam George

5:30 pm – Filmmakers, A.L. Steiner & A.K. Burns, makers of Community Action Center in conversation with Homobile Founder, Lynn Breedlove

Saturday June 1, 10am – 5pm

Atrium

The Making of… the Submerged Turntable / Evan Holm, Oakland

The Making of… the Workshop Residence / Featured Artists:

Johanna Grawunder (lighting devices)
Lauren DiCioccio (trompe l’oeil embroidery)
Agelio Batle (up-cycled plastic)
Maki Aizawa and Tsuyo Onodera (kimono masters)
JD Beltran and Scott Minnemann (Cinema Snowglobes)
Phil Ross (fungal furniture)
Martha Davis (handmade shoes)

Koret Visitor Education Center (KVEC)

The Making of… a Family Art Commission / DIY.org, SF

Rooftop

The Making of… Modern Art Desserts / Blue Bottle Coffee, SF

The Making Of… TechShop

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Laser cutters, 3D printers, sewing machines, injection molders, welders, notchers, planers, lathes, hand tools, computers. Enter TechShop, San Francisco—three vast floors of every kind of maker’s tool imaginable.

TechShop is a community based workshop on a mission to democratize access to the tools of innovation.

“Any given day its a mix of hobbyists, artists, people who have invented things they’re trying to get to market or to prototype,” says Blaine Dehmlow, General manager for SF TechShop. “Today I saw a guy making a bicycle rack here  in the welding department, another person making jewelry on the laser cutter. And there’s a group here making a medical device for prototype.”

“There’s a folding kayak,” interjects Jesse Harring Au, the Maker Advocate for Autodesk, the software company that partners with TechShop providing free programs for makers. “It folds up into a suitcase so anybody can take a kayak out. And there’s Type A Machines. They make their own 3D printers from scratch in house.”

There are three TechShops in the Bay Area.”A member can come in with an idea, take a class and three hours later they can be cutting stuff and making amazing progress,” says Blaine.

“So many people come in with just that napkin on a bar sketch,” says Jesse. “Just to see something physical come out as soon as possible, I think that’s where the software side of it comes in.”

Jesse’s the Techie…Blaine is Old School 

Blaine Dehmlow, Shop Manger SF TechShop and Jesse Harrington Au, Maker Advocate at Autodesk.
Blaine Dehmlow, Shop Manger SF TechShop and Jesse Harrington Au, Maker Advocate at Autodesk.

“I’m an analog guy,” says Blaine.

“The ‘hammer’ of Tech Shop,” interrupts Jesse.

“We’ve missed a whole generation of inventing, of working with our hands, taking shop in school,” says Blaine.

“All that stuff just got passed away in the last 20-30 years. I think it was probably a liability issue. Remember when that whole thing came in? Everybody decided that if you couldn’t guarantee absolute safety you couldn’t do it.”

“No. I disagree,” Jesse counters. “With the advent of the internet and the advent of the home computer, as a whole country we said ‘let’s stay on top of the new technology.’”

“I don’t think you’re right!” Blaine shoots back, “Because nobody ever lost interest in woodshop…”

“But if you’re a high school…,” Jesse argues.A gigantic water lathe fires up next to us, drowning them out.

The two are a comedy team, playing off each other from opposite ends of “the making” spectrum. They’ve actually started doing a weekly podcast together which they record on their lunch break live from TechShop SF. It’s called Safety Third.

“My dad was a gold and silver miner,” Blaine recounts. “We grew up out in the middle of nowhere. When we got a piece of equipment or a toy you had to learn to repair it and alter it. And there was never a point in our life when we weren’t making a sling shot or a deer rifle or a go-cart.”

“Personally I was sort of so so on the hand skills,” says Jesse. “Blaine was never really interested in CAD, but just through our relationship working here together, we’ve built a car…

“A roadster,” corrects Blaine.

“We built a roadster,” says Jesse. “We’re making watches. We call it CAD to craft.

The two ran a guitar making workshop at TechShop. Thirteen people each made a guitar in six days. At the end of the sixth day everyone had to play their guitar.

“We had a father come in with his two sons and they all built guitars so they played a song together,” says Jesse. “And we had a woman who was making a guitar for her fiancĂŠ. She didn’t know how to play. She makes this gorgeous guitar, sits down and starts strumming and he plays the notes.”

Destructive Testing

IMG_4251Near the front door sits a rugged, hip looking  bamboo bike. “Putting the bamboo pieces together was the problem,”  Blaine says.

Their solution was fiberglass orthopedic tape, the kind the doctor uses to make a cast when you break your arm. It hardens quickly and it’s cheap.

“We were criticized almost instantly,” sasy Blaine. ‘It’ll never work … it probably won’t hold up.’ So we thought, ‘Well, let’s do some destructive testing.’”

They took the first bike up on the TechShop roof and threw it off — eleven times with no failures.

“We only stopped because security came by and told us to stop throwing things off the roof,” says Blaine. “Then we made a jig so anybody could walk up and make a bike in six hours. Whole project — we can get it out the door for about $45.”

The Gamelatron

IMG_4236In a side building next door to TechShop, there’s a quiet, clean space for meetings and brainstorming with large paper pads on easels covered with ideas and maker mantras: play, reuse, subvert, challenge, question…

A large installation covers one wall. Blaine walks over and presses a button.  “These are actual Tibetan gongs but they’ve been mechanized. It’s called a Gamelatron.”

The piece is a robotic gamelan orchestra created by conceptual artist and composer Aaron Taylor Kuffner.  After studying in Bali Kuffner created the piece as part of a residency at the TechShop.

“He’s made six of them around the world now,” said Jesse.  “He came into TechShop to build the bent tubing and all the welding.”

“When people come in they’re really putting it all on the line,” says Jesse.

“Maybe they’re in between jobs,” Blaine says,”or maybe they’re taking money out of their budget and they don’t know if they should be putting time or money on this deal. It’s a really risky, tender moment for people.”

Arc from Tradition to Technology

“Jesse makes fun of me because I come from that old side of the tradition and I make fun of him because all he does is double click on a little mouse and thinks that he’s made something,” says Blaine. “But the truth is that when we’re done fighting, I’ve been able to work on projects like our car. I already knew how to build it, but I couldn’t complete the design phase of it without the software and the modeling side.

“So now I’m a believer. But I just need someone who’s twenty years old to do it for me and I just buy him pizza or beer.

“I think building this arc from tradition to technology is going to be how this whole maker movement gets really well founded.”

 

 

 

The Making of Song Reader

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Beck’s latest album, Song Reader, echoes the time when popular songs were played at home, around the parlor piano, porch guitar or grandpa’s harmonica. Existing only as loose-leaf sheet music, Song Reader is an album for listeners to play for themselves.

Since Song Reader’s release in December 2012, Beck fans all over the world have stepped up to the music stand. They’re sharing their versions–each as authoritative as the next–on SongReader.net, the album’s online home.

“There is now this whole universe of YouTube and SoundCloud and a community of people who are excited to produce their own versions and have others react to them,” says Jordan Bass, managing editor of McSweeney’s, the publishers of Song Reader.

“The spirit of this book is really to think about the making of a song, and what an artist can ask from his or her audience,” Bass says. “The idea of the listener having in a role in how the song sounds is something people really respond to now.”

In early April, ten musicians from the Blue Bear School of Music performed seven songs from Song Reader at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco. The musicians used a clarinet, ukelele, sousaphone “and a bunch of other instruments that normally don’t talk to each other,” says Isaac Clemens who blew 10 years of dust off his tuba to play brass for the evening.

“With this experiment what Beck really did was to unleash his work on the creative horsepower of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people,” Clemens says. “He is saying in essence, ‘Here’s a spark, now make a fire.'”

McSweeney’s and Beck are collaborating together for the next issue of Pop-Up Magazine on May 20.
– – – – –

SPECIAL THANKS
Jordan Bass, Isaac Clemens, Derek Fagerstrom, Steve Kirk, Douglas McGray, Joe Rubio and Lisa Strong.

MUSIC
By Beck and many others.

Makers Wanted at SFMOMA

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If you had one hour, one table and a rapt audience, what would you demo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art?

On Thursday & Friday, May 30 and 31st, The Making Of… goes live at SFMOMA.

In the final days before their three-year expansion and renovation project, SFMOMA is planning a museum-wide extravaganza of activities and events open free to the public May 30 – June 2, 2013.

KQED’s Making Of… is one of the centerpieces of this celebration bringing makers from throughout the Bay Area to the museum to demonstrate and present what they make and why.

From hotrods to kimchi, violins to submerged turntables, The Making Of… will feature makers discovered and heard on KQED’s Making Of… series throughout the museum demonstrating in the Atrium, galleries, lobbies, landings, sculpture garden and Learning Lounge.

Send us a video about what you make and how you would demonstrate your work for an hour. Or call The Making Of… hotline (415)553-3362.

UPDATE: Thank you everyone for the great submissions. View a list of participants here.

The Karaoke Ice Cream Truck

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Treatbot, the karaoke ice cream truck, is a silver bullet on wheels that churns out gorgeous ice cream and hot music as it plies the streets of San Jose. The flavors they make from scratch reflect the founder’s Filipino heritage and the cultural diversity of the neighborhoods in and around San Jose. So, grab a cone and a microphone and listen up:

Produced by Charla Bear and The Kitchen Sisters.