postscript
In a world in which “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”[1] it seems inevitable that maker culture and 3D printing would fall fully into the capitalist machine. Yet, I want to imagine a multitude of uses and practices of maker culture and 3D printing beyond the dominant narrative. Similarly, I want to imagine the potential of academic knowledge production yielded through diverse publishing formats. This desire for potentiality sits opposite to complete understanding or absolute exploitation. Potential is dead when something is fully known or utilized in solely paradigmatic ways. I want maker practices, 3D printing, and the pursuits of research and knowledge to retain that potentiality, which requires all to be imagined and practiced beyond the static and reliable, and instead as the weird, the speculative, the creative.
Acts of speculative making create momentary glimpses of different, sometimes better, sometimes worse, elsewheres that bring the difference of that place into reality, if only temporarily. These elsewheres enable critical scholarship that explores different logics that may help us to better come to understand our own. And in the end, “It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.”[2]