ABSTRACT
Experiential prototyping brings together assorted individuals working at the intersection of hands-on practice and critical making in a collective constructivist performance. That is, functional objects and material forms are opened out and reappraised beyond their former utilitarian design. This is a dynamic model that embraces methodologies of risk and a deeply playful attitude. It encourages probing into the inexplicable whilst replacing traditional top-down methods of assigning value, with an approach that employs and advocates home-brewed methods for collective gain (for example, self-organized digital literacy circles). Championing the amateur in the realm of the professional places value on a diverse array of participants following their own enthusiasms to encounter experiential prototypes wishfully imagined. The rationale for an approach that combines a mix of professionals and amateurs, whose activities are deeply intertwined. This type of model encourages both individual reflexivity about how this engaged but autonomous activity may relate to wider social transformation and understandings. As such, radical play and speculation are enacted through ongoing experimentations against the current of pulling rank, tokenistic engagement, digital device obsolescence and reflection about such attitudes to what may hitherto be viewed as throwaway technology. From this perspective, an artwork or an event is undertaken as an occasion to develop a prototype to solve a puzzle or gain insight into the politics, potentials and limitations of an emergent technology. Strategies which artists in this vein use to shape their work, demand an investment from all the senses, and, more especially, a firm trust in the path of awareness as an alternative to the path of identity, for instance clinging fast to a particular subculture per se.
