Somewhere in the world right now it’s 2:00 A.M. and some academic on a deadline is hunched over a standmixer with a hope and a dream instead of (or perhaps in addition to) paying for therapy. In a publish or perish world where faculty are increasingly feeling “supervised,” two unsupervised stress bakers produce critical baked goods and reflect on this process with the help of Claude (and CoPilot when they run out of free tokens for Claude). This critical making (or critical baking) project brings together digital humanities scholarship and self and community care in the form of shared and distant cheesecake.
In our unsupervised moments, we often reflect on what drives us to persevere in academia, and the act of baking–having both hands and short-term memory occupied with a task that we have done many times before–acts to free us from our stressors while tethering us to the task of baking. The act of reclaiming our time from academic production and redistributing it to the production of baked goods that we share with our communities is in itself a small act of resistance to the increasing supervision by a large swath of political actors and administrations.
The critical making process incorporated Claude to create the simulation, but the reflections are honest glimpses into both authors’ motivations for stress baking. While the authors’ original intent was to task Claude with creating the simulation largely unsupervised, the prompting and prompting process required a great deal of supervision, redirection, and restarts. This presentation will demonstrate the critical baking simulation, discuss the creation process, and share insights around Artificial Intelligence, creativity, and reflection that this project highlighted.
If you have a Claude account, you can remix our artifact here and add your own reflections.