Students Eager to Utilize Mak erspaces, Face Barriers to Entry

ARTS & CULTURE

November 4, 2022 Established 1874 Volume 152, Number 7

Students Eager to Utilize Makerspaces, Face Barriers to Entry

Leela Miller

Senior Staff Writer

A makerspace is an environment dedicated to tinkering, designing, inventing, and collaborating. It’s a place where students can actualize far-out ideas with laser cutters, sewing machines, and 3D printers and nosily watch as peers build musical light bulbs or wearable synths.

Many Oberlin students are eager to access these kinds of spaces; we’re a crafty bunch. However, makerspaces are often inaccessible to those not enrolled in specialized academic programs. The Art Fabrication Lab, for instance, is a highly sought after resource typically only available to Studio Art students. Even harder to access is the Theater department’s set shop which, according to student employee College second-year Elijah Freiman, is only authorized for use by theater professionals.

In years past, students had the option of visiting Wilder Hall to use the craft supplies in the craft room and the fabrication materials in the Oberlin Student Makerspace. The craft room — where students can find sewing machines and looms — is still open, but it is meagerly stocked with supplies, the door is unlabeled, and, according to

The TIMARA makerspace allows students to craft and experiment.

Director of Student Involvement Tina Zwegat, it will be closed for renovations beginning in December.

Organizations that primarily utilized this space are inactive this semester, and many former student leaders have recently graduated. Abe Reshad, director of language technology and academic support, said that the current inactivity of the organizations can be mainly attributed to COVID-19, which temporarily made it impossible for clubs tied to physical spaces to exist and for knowledge to be passed down between student officers. Reshad teaches and oversees 3D printing in Oberlin’s Language Lab, and he has aided makerspace club members in using 3D printing technology in the past. Now, he’s hoping to help rustle up enough student interest to restart the organization.

“I think it’s really valuable to have a space where students can create things … especially physical ones because everything’s so digital right

Photo by Erin Koo now,” Reshad said. “There’s a lot of learning that takes place in a space like that.”

Luckily, there are other accessible makerspaces on campus. The TIMARA makerspace, located in the basement of Bibbins Hall, is home to a treasure trove of equipment for students interested in electronics, craft, and the exciting intersection of the two. The room that it’s housed in is small, and there isn’t enough space

A diagram illustrating the “periodic table of wood” hangs proudly on a door. In a corner lies a table full of drying coffee mugs. It’s clear that this is not only the studio of a craftsman but an artist.

John Cavanaugh, director and creator of the Artist Diploma program, devised the program because he saw a need for piano technicians who were not only technically skilled but artistically savvy as well. By teaching students in a music conservatory setting, the program aims to bridge the gap between pianists and technicians through collaboration.

“We’re the only school that does this,” Cavanaugh said.

Upon graduating from the program, 90 percent of students are offered jobs in top positions at major music schools and acclaimed piano factories. Wenqin Yi OC’ 20, who was recently offered the top piano technician position at Michigan State University, is one of those alumni.

“A lot of young kids, they graduate, and they have difficulty getting one job,” Yi said. “But with piano technology, you spend two years and then you have a stable, strong skill that you can make a living with.”

The students in the program come from a wide range of backgrounds. Some came to Oberlin knowing a bit about piano maintenance, and some were pianists themselves. Among the members of the class are a retired high school music teacher, a student who is 70 years old, and a former restaurant owner.

“The students I went to school with were people who were tired of the rat race,” Cavanaugh said. “It’s a very eclectic group of people who are interested in this.”

The work of a master piano technician is interdisciplinary. A skill that combines mechanics, woodworking, math, physics, and the manipulation of tone and voicing, working on pianos is often equated to working on an elaborate crossword puzzle.

Unlike crossword puzzles, however, there is the additional challenge of working with a piano’s organic materials, as the materials in pianos expand and contract with weather changes. This leaves piano technicians with the difficult task of restoring pianos while constantly keeping the future in mind. Every move a technician makes could See Artistry, page 13

See Oberlin, page 12

Piano Technicians: The Unseen Artists of the Conservatory

Gracie McFalls Senior Staff Writer

In the early hours of the morning, before the music-making of the day begins, piano technicians are hard at work tuning pianos.

There are 250 pianos in the Conservatory, many of which get tuned daily. Tuning a piano takes even the most skilled technician about an hour, and there are only a handful of people in the Conservatory equipped to do the job.

The impact of this daily task is enormous. Every student in the Conservatory interacts with a piano at some point before graduating. First-year students take an introductory piano class upon arriving at Oberlin, pianos are almost always used for demonstrations in theory and aural skills classes, and every performance major collaborates with pianists for recitals or even for national and international competitions. In short, having properly tuned pianos is vital not only for student learning but for the reputation of the Conservatory as a whole.

This is all taken care of by the Piano Technology department. However, tuning pianos is not the only work they do; in fact, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Tucked away in the basement of Bibbins Hall, the department is home to the Artist Diploma in Piano Technology program, an immersive two-year mentorship that accepts a small number of students and turns them into expert piano technicians. Inside the workshop, four Steinways take center stage. Scattered around them are wood shavings, spare piano parts, and coiled-up strings.

Dlisah Lapidus

Arts & Culture Editor

The Oberlin College Archives, Special Collections, and Libraries are resources established to conserve the history of the school and community for future reference. The nature of an archive is not only to reflect on the past, but to facilitate the preservation of our present reality for future generations. With content transforming from easily file-able paper documents to more complex, encrypted digital media, archives all over the world are struggling to adjust their conservation systems for these new media documents.

Prior to the creation of the digital College archive, techniques were developed to file online records. To add a digital document like an email to an archival collection, it would have to be printed and put in a physical folder.

“That is kind of how we have approached digital content; things were printed out and brought into the physical archives,” College Archivist Ken Grossi said. “Now we are becoming more formalized in terms of dealing with electronic records. Email is really difficult — you can imagine how many people have email accounts and computers on campus. When it comes to maintaining and preserving the records, it is no different from the paper record. We want to organize documents so that they are easy to find. It is just a matter of how to store them.”

Many techniques used to protect documents and archives are now inadequate for the digital environment, as early methods of creating and storing digital content have become obsolete.

“A difficult aspect of digital preservation in general is the amount of time and resources required to re-format media and maintain equipment and software to ensure accessibility and usability into the future,” Academic Engagement and Digital Initiatives Coordinator Megan Mitchell said. “For a long time, CD-ROMs seemed like a perfect storage solution. Fast-forward, and computers no longer come with built-in disc drives. If you have an external disc drive, the issue then becomes, who has a computer running the Windows 95 operating system that is needed to access the content on the disc?”

The Oberlin College Archives currently refers to standards set in place by the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, which assists schools, institutions, and national archives as they expand online. These institutions must also set their own internal standards for approaching digital archives. There are two primary concerns with the move to digital archives: improving accessibility and more expansive preservation methods.

“[The College Archive] is trying to create both an archival record and a usable record for images to have longevity and to be available in the future,” Visual Resources Collection Curator Heath Patten said. “These digital images are able to be used in many different ways, not only for the Oberlin community and College, but the world as a whole. [Ken Grossi] and I, along with other members of the library staff, sit on what we call a Triple D Task Force. It’s about digitization, digital preservation, and digital archiving. This taskforce is in the process of finalizing a report of what our standards are going to be for digital projects. All of this information will come out in the public domain so that people can see what we’re doing as libraries move into the 21st century.”

The many new technologies being developed for digital archives allow content to be used by a wider audience without geographic or physical limitations.

“We are looking toward new techniques for capturing and presenting imagery. For example, I was working with Abe Reshad in the Cooper [International] Learning Center to create a 3D scan for an exhibit of a sculpture,” Patten said. “Through the use of a digital program, we created a three-dimensional image that we were then able to print. This allows anyone to physically interact with the work of art, addressing issues of accessibility. Somebody with no vision or low vision may not be able to access a digital image, but in a 3D, tactile format, it becomes an accessible resource for them as well.”

The culture that surrounds digital media emphasizes its short-term nature. Online content receives little advocacy for long-term preservation, in part because of the limited resources for effectively preserving it. Additionally, the speed with which content is produced and shared and the variation in its exposure to the digital public leave archivists to wonder how best to approach the medium. While many archives focus on ancient history and natural history, contemporary content is constantly being created and disappearing before it can be saved.

“As we create content, you have to think about its lifespan,” Patten said. “The question is, how are we going to present it? How are we going to store it? What do our repositories look like? Who has access to those? On what platforms will we deliver the materials? These are things that we have to think of as we digitally archive. When I was younger, there were magnetic tapes and vinyl, and then CDs came out; we felt like that would last forever. But now we know CDs are defunct technology. The newest technology is never permanent. So we always have to think about the future and what that will look like.”

Behind the Scenes of OMTA’s Original Production, Portal

Juliana Gaspar

Arts & Culture Editor

College second years Lila Iyengar Lehman, Charley Schmidt, and Jaka Jacklin separately shared their experiences working in tech for show Portal. the show is co-directed by College second-year Abigail Nordan and College third-year Becca Dulaney, and runs from Nov. 5 and 6. The Portal cast and crew were informed that they would not have access to the space they originally thought they would perform in only a few weeks before they opened. Lehman, who is on lights, Schmidt, who designed the set, and Jacklin, who is managing sound, each faced individual struggles when reworking their original plans. Behind the scenes for lights, sound, and set is a rewarding and enriching but strenuous process, and they are all happy with the final product of the show.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

How has the change in setting been for you as the lights designer?

Lila Iyengar Lehman: It’s definitely been stressful for me, especially because I’m pretty new at lighting design. Last year, in the fall semester, I worked on the production of Dance of Hands. I wanted to be assistant stage manager, but they needed a lighting designer and I thought, “I guess I can learn how to do lights.” The second show I did was The Theory of Relativity last year in Wilder Main Space. Because it was in Wilder, I felt like, “Okay, I know how it works, I can totally design lights for Portal.” So when we had to change locations, it was very freaky for me. This transition not only required moving all the lights, but learning about a lot of new equipment that I never had to deal with before. The actual lighting design itself wasn’t that difficult, it was more about if the design could be done with fewer lights, because we didn’t have access to as many. We have these three big trusses, which are like 10-foot-tall tripods, and each of them can hold four lights. We had to limit ourselves and how many lights we used because I could have had 24 or 25 at Wilder; that was my plan. So I just had to rework the plot a little, which wasn’t that difficult. The difficult part was trying to work with fewer lights.

Has this abrupt change been a learning experience for you in any way?

LIL: Honestly, it’s been good in a lot of ways. The Oberlin Musical Theater Association got people to help me throughout the process. Double-degree second-years Nelson Gutsch and Andrew McCracken both work in the lighting shop. On the actual moving day, they had to show me how everything worked with the trusses and the installation. It was the kind of thing where having someone who understood a little better than me to answer any questions I had was really good. When all this was thrown at me, I just wanted a month or two of practice and experience with the equipment before I had to put it into action immediately. I’m sure there are some things that could have been more thoroughly done if I’d had more experience with the equipment. It’s been stressful for me, but it’s also been a big learning experience. I’ve learned a lot of specifics about how to plug everything in, all the different cable connections, how everything’s wired, and how it all has to be set up. We also got eight new LED light fixtures. I’ve learned a lot, but right now, at this very moment in the middle of production week, I have a hard time seeing that as a silver lining, because I’m so overwhelmed.

How have the cast and crew dealt with this together?

LIL: The community is so lovely. I haven’t gotten a ton of time to get to know all the actors, but they’re all incredible people. At first we didn’t know if we’d even have a show, because we were told Wilder wasn’t available and they were trying to find us a new space. Everything was really up in the air for a couple of days, and we had to inform the cast of that. When we told them, they were all so supportive. No one had any thought of giving up, which was really motivating for us. Everyone totally stuck with it throughout the whole process. It is disheartening when tons of things go wrong, and we all definitely felt that, especially in these last couple of days of tech rehearsals. However, everyone’s been super, super supportive of one another. I think that’s the thing that really allows a show to survive and make it through — the people involved. Every theater performance is about the unique group of people who are putting it on.

What does your job as set designer entail?

Charley Schmidt: Interestingly enough — and probably an issue on my part — when I first signed up for this, I thought my job as set designer was just to design the set. It turns out the designer for any specific aspect of tech also manages the process. So, I designed the set, I made the budget, purchased the materials, built the set, and moved it into Langston Hall.

How did you physically manage the new space?

CS: We took the piano out of the room and we put all of the chairs on one side. In Wilder, you have a lot more space, and the way we were oriented, it was a much longer space and not nearly as wide. The hardest part was probably the windows. They’re such gorgeous, nice, enormous windows, and that’s not really a problem for me, it’s much more of a lights problem — it does interfere with the theater lighting.

The directors already had an idea of what they wanted the set to look like. So I was looking at the drawing, and from that I just needed to make it work within the space. I wanted to use what we had in storage to keep the budget low. For that reason, I looked at what we had and what we could use. Then I figured out how I would take those things to make the most realistic version of what the director wanted. It’s very much a collaborative process, so you have to really be in touch with the other people in the project.

What has the change in venue been like for sound?

Jaka Jacklin: From a technical standpoint, the change between venues has been all right for sound. The majority of my job was recording lines and creating sound effects. For the sound effects side, that was easy. I just needed to take the audio files and my computer from one location to another, no change required. However, for the lines of one particular, that one was a little bit different. The lines and the recordings themselves were tailored to the venue; we were going to make it feel like there was someone speaking on stage who wasn’t really there. Because we changed stages, that obviously meant that the effect was ruined. The week before tech week was a scramble for me and the voice actor for GLaDOS. The hardest challenge was just making sure we got to record all the lines in time, because the change in venues really did throw a wrench into that plan. We had about a third of the entire show’s lines recorded and suited for our original venue when the directors told me what happened. Aside from that, nothing else was hard. It was definitely a hassle, but in the end, I think I created something that at least sound-wise I can definitely be proud of. Location doesn’t matter when we’re doing the show itself.