Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

3 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Thinking about / Working on

It seems to be testing and prototyping week:

  • Testing making cyanotypes on various types of fabric and with different exposures. Lessons so far:
    • Grow lights aren’t UV lights and don’t work (discovered after wasting 3 peices of test fabrics)
    • Sun works great but is variable and also impacted by wind, people, etc.
    • Best if you can use glass/etc to hold down the materials close to the fabric. This improves resolution for find details.
    • Canvas has a less dense weave so maybe loses resolution compared to muslin, but the thicker weave creates a really nice pixilated effect.
    • Canvas also sucks up huge amounts of the cyanotype liquid, which is probably making it darker.
  • Testing using Tyvek to prototype instead of fabric:
    • Sews really nicely!
    • Absolutely lowers my anxiety about getting started and fear of wasting materials.
    • Does not turn easily, i.e. going around sharp corners is almost impossible.

Caption: A cyanotype on cotton canvas

Caption: A cyanotype on cotton muslin

Caption: A prototype made of Tyvek

Next this week/weekend:

  • Tyvek prototype of my methodology bag, possibly as a 1/3 size version that might end up also being a prototype for a Nalgeine carrying bag. I like the idea of a cute tiny backpack for a water bottle.
  • Finish testing cyanotype fabrics/methods. This is dependent on when my new UV light arrives.

Thinking about:

  • Role of walking methodologies in this project.
  • What information literacy / etc theories are applicable here? How do I want to apply them within this project?

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

John R. Gallagher: Seeking Human Traces in AI Writing

You might be thinking, after rolling your eyes at my overuse of colons, “Okay, John, what does this have to do with writing? I read your blog for writing, not to read about you playing with pictures.” Fair enough. My point here, as it relates to writing: the images reveal the cracks in AI written arguments. Our brains aren’t able to pick up glaring deficiencies with just written words. With images, we can pick out the mechanical things that don’t look correct.

Christopher Brown from the book “A Natural History of Empty Lots”

Real wilderness is still out there, mostly in places where the climate is too extreme for us to fully occupy. I have hiked examples of it in the hemispheric redoubts of Alaska and Patagonia, and in the harshest reaches of West Texas. But there’s another, hidden wilderness that most of us walk or drive by every day. It hides in plain sight, in the liminal spaces of the city: behind chain-link fences, along the pathways of infrastructure, around abandoned buildings. In the brown lands and in the topographies we can never really occupy, even as we encroach as closely as we can. Urban creeks and floodplains, empty lots, rights-of-way, industrial parks, storm sewers, traffic islands, medians, brownfields, and the rare pockets of land that have somehow escaped development. Places that, maybe for just the current moment in nature’s long now, are mostly undisturbed by human activity even as they are surrounded by it. They are not beautiful in the way of a national park. Many of them feel weirdly apocalyptic, places where nature is in the process of reclaiming spots we trashed, and the romance of the green wild coexists with Anthropocene ruin. You could fairly call them urban wastelands, in both the economic and aesthetic senses of the word. But such places are equally, if not more, wondrous than our greatest wilderness preserves, in part because of the way they show the promise of nature’s resilience, its capacity to adapt to and recover from our damaging impact on the planet.

Natalie Loveless in “How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation”

Research- creation, understood in this way, is a practice of love. It is an erotic, driven, invested practice. And, as such, it fails to fit into those models that see interdisciplinarity as a way to streamline and multiply research productivities. It is too disruptive for that. Research- creation follows desire, and builds spaces and contexts that allow the time and space to experiment in unpredictable directions.

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