CRITICAL MAKING 

Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making 

HONF - STT TELKOM PURWOKERTO 
 

1.   Critical Making  Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making 
investigates the potential of Critical Making as a bridging concept, 
addressing practices at the intersection of design, technology, 
activism and artistic research. The concept ‘Critical Making’ was 
originally developed by Matt Ratto and Garnet Hertz in response 
to maker culture, and referred to practices that critically engaged 
with technology. While it had the Maker movement and its Maker 
spaces (i.e. FabLabs, hacker spaces, and other public workshop 
facilities for distributed, personal digital fabrication) as its points 
of departure, Critical Making has become much more inclusive 
and has emancipated itself from its original context. The concept 
of Critical Making departs from a narrow focus on Maker 
movement and examines the broader field of contemporary art 
and design practices.  

While Critical Making is characterised by a liaison between 

thinking and making, the same can be said for artistic research, as 
it was established as a new academic discipline at the end of the 
20th century. Traditionally, contemporary art has had an edge 
over design in regards to the rigour of its critical discourse. 
Drawing on critical theory, conceptual art and institutional 
critique have radically addressed issues of gender, class, ethnicity 
and even questioned art as such, in its aesthetics, ethics, 
economics and politics. 

2.  Activities  Talks 

Workshop series 
Performances 
 

3.  Date & Schedule  6 March 2020 

11.00 - 13.00  
Talks & Presentation by  
Regina M Sipos (Hungary) 
Jan C. Borchardt (Germany) 
Conny Zenk (Austria) 
Irene Agrivina (Indonesia) 
Tim Murphy (Ireland) 
 
14.00 - 16.00 
Workshop by 
HONF ( Yudianto Asmoro & Dhoni Yudhanto) 
Soil Sonification 
Making a simple device to detect the moist of a soil for a smart 
gardening 
 
 Mood Lamp 
Learning basic arduino by making a mood lamp 
 
Performances 
Conny Zenk 
Rangga Purnama 
Irene Agrivina 
 

4.  BIO  HONF 

HONF  started as a collective in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as a 
place  of  open  expression,  art  and  cultural  technologies  in  the 
wake  of  the  Indonesian  "revolution".  HONF  aka  the  'House  of 
Natural  Fiber'  was  born  out  of  the  social  and  political  turmoil 
against  the  Suharto  regime,  its  nepotism  and  governmental 
corruption.  They  run  various  programs,  activities,  research  and 
projects  under  their  curriculum  called  EFP  (Education  Focus 
Program)  which  focuses  on  the  application  and  practical  use  in 
daily  life  of  collaborative,  cross-disciplinary  and  technological 
actions  responding  to  social,  cultural  and  environmental 
challenges.  In  response  to  the  needs  of  societies  in  development 
and transition. 
As  the  collective  became  bigger,  and  in  2003  they  established  a 
media  laboratory  focusing  on  arts,  science  and  technology  based 
on  open  community  with  interdisciplinary  background.  In  2011 
they  became  a  foundation,  HONF  Foundation  hosted  three  labs; 
v.u.f.o.c  an  extraterristeristerial  study  centre, HONFablab a digital 
fabrication  lab  and  HONF  factory  a  digital  culture  and  media 
forum.  In  2020  they  established  Indonesian  centre  for  arts, 
science  and  technology  and  actively  run  their  communities, 
programs and activities. 
 
Regina Sipos 
Regina  Sipos  is  a  Research  Associate  andPhD  Candidate, 
researching  critical  making  and  social  innovation  in  critical 
technical practice at the Technical University of Berlin, focusing on 
collaborative  technology  design  and  society,  appropriate 
technologies  and  makerspaces.  She  is  also  the  Founder  and 
Director  of  the  Social-Digital  Innovation  Initiative,  facilitating  the 
cross-pollination  of  the  worlds  of  open  source  technology  and 
social entrepreneurship. 
She  designed  and  managed  the  United  Nations'  first  global 
co-creation  and  incubation  platform  for  social  entrepreneurs 
working  with  technology  at  the  International  Telecommunication 
Union  (ITU)  before moving to Berlin to advise Ashoka Germany on 
their Digital Fellowship strategy. 
She  is  in  the  Steering  Committee  of  the  Centre  for  Internet  and 
Human  Rights  at  the  European  University  Viadrina  and  is  an 
Executive  Board  Member  of  the  Global  Innovation  Gathering,  a 
global network of grassroots innovators in technology. 
 
Jan C. Borchardt 
Jan C. Borchardt works as designer and community manager 
focused on open source, privacy and collaboration. 
His main projects include: 
- Nextcloud, a private alternative to the monopolized products of 
Google and Facebook 
- Open Source Diversity, a community initiative to push forward 
inclusion and diversity in open source 
- Open Source Design, a collective bringing design and open 
source closer together 
- Terms of Service; Didn't Read, crowdsourced analysis and rating 
of website terms of service 
- Keep or Sweep, an artistic exploration at the intersection of data 
hoarding, privacy and minimalism 
He studied information design and collaborates with design 
universities, giving workshops on open source design 
methodologies. His work has been featured in Forbes, Wired and 
FAZ, and he regularly gives talks at conferences around the world. 
 
Conny Zenk 
Conny Zenk is visual composer, video and media artist based in 
Vienna. She is working on topics like social media, migration, 
gender and feminism as well as on urban, architectural and 
spatial concepts mainly using projection, video and screen based 
art in the context of performances and installations. Conny Zenk 
is specially interested in the process of composing and 
performing questioning the relation between a physical moving 
body and digital interfaces. Active as a performer in the scope of 
visual music she is composing and visualizing in collaboration 
with inspiring musicians and sound artists. In various audio visual 
music projects her main work is about creating a language of 
improvisation between different artistic fields and an atmosphere 
of light structures and video based architecture. By means of 
generative programs she creates abstract elements such as 
oscillating lines and surfaces, granular flickering and stroboscopic 
impulses. Conny Zenk plays with the concept of perception and of 
what is not visible. Her work is framed by digital methods within 
the context of social and political questions. 
 
Tim Murphy 
Tim Murphy is an Irish writer and visual artist based in Madrid. He 
is the author of two poetry chapbooks: A ​ rt Is the Answer 
(Bangalore, Yavanika Press, 2019), an e-chapbook of one-line 
haiku, and ​The Cacti Do Not Move (​ Dublin, SurVision Books, 2019), 
a print chapbook of surrealist poetry. His haiku and other poetry 
have appeared in several journals, including ​Acorn​, B ​ ones​, 
Frogpond​, F​ rontera​,​ Modern Haiku​, P
​ resence​, ​Snapdragon​, T ​ he 
Heron’s Nest​, and ​World Haiku Review​. His other books are 
Rethinking the War on Drugs in Ireland ​(Cork University Press, 
1996) and ​Law and Justice in Community (​ with Garrett Barden; 
Oxford University Press, 2010). 
 
Irene Agrivina 
 Open systems advocate, technologist, artist, curator and educator 
Irene Agrivina is a graduate of the Graphic Design faculty at the 
Indonesia Institute of Art (ISI), Yogyakarta, and continuing her 
study at Culture and Religion Master Program at Sanata Dharma 
University in Yogyakarta. She is one of the founding members and 
current directors of HONF, the Yogyakarta based new media and 
technology laboratory. Created in 1999 as a place of open 
expression, art and cultural technologies in the wake of the 
Indonesian "revolution", HONF aka the 'House of Natural Fiber' 
was born out of the social and political turmoil against the 
 Suharto regime, its nepotism and governmental corruption. 
Agrivina runs HONF's 'Education Focus Programme' (EFP) which 
focuses on the application and practical use in daily life of 
collaborative, cross-disciplinary and technological actions 
responding to social, cultural and environmental challenges. In 
response to the needs of societies in development and transition, 
HONF and EFP apply open, collaborative and sustainable actions 
that systematically expand or convert accessible technologies to 
be used as multifunctional tools and methodologies. At 2011 in 
collaboration with Waag Society she co-founded HONFablab, as 
the first Fablab in South East Asia. At 2013 she established XXLab 
an all female collective focusing in arts, science and free 
technology, as a second generation of HONF’s spin-off 
communities, one of its projects, SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE (2015), was 
crowned as the winner of 2015 Prix Ars Electronica awards, a 
prestigious European Commission-supported competition for 
cyberarts in Linz, Austria.