Critical Digital Making in Art Education. Группа авторов
href="#ulink_d9d7d0a7-43c8-5bc0-93ac-f888ca4e046e">1999, p. 156). Touch becomes a way for us to understand ourselves, our environment, and the reality we inhabit. As researcher and lecturer Mika Elo writes:
It has made it possible to present touch as a sense that can serve cognitive interest by guaranteeing an immediate, hands-on touch with reality. This has led into the most primitive of the senses being regarded as the guarantor of optic intuition, promise of immediate experience and support of conscious thought. (Elo, 2012, p. 3)
Touch’s immediacy offers real-time and complex feedback allowing for intuitive interactions.
Feedback is information received about action, whether that action is a physical grasp or a gesture on the screen. Newer models of haptic technology, like the 3D Systems Haptic Devices, utilize small motors to “[apply] force feedback on the user’s hand” (3D Systems, 2019), so the visual rendering on the screen and the touch feedback work in harmony. Although largely unseen, design and interface development rely on these aspects (time, location, direction, modality, dynamics, and expression) to make a product that allows a free response from the user or maker (Wensveen, Djajadiningrat, & Overbeeke, 2004). This usability is integral in the pedagogical explorations of studio arts incorporating digital technologies.
Touch functions as feedback through haptic sensation, which is
[comprised of] the tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses [and] describes aspects of engagement that are qualitatively distinct from the capabilities of the visual sense …. The haptic sense renders the surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside, on the skin’s surface, and in external space. In enables the perception of weight, pressure, balance, temperature, vibration and presence. (Fisher, 1997, p. 2)
If tacit knowledge is a bodily understanding of a process or gesture, haptic knowledge is a bodily understanding of the world at large.
Haptic technologies emulate haptic sensations focusing on the sensual representation and recognition of vibration and presence. It becomes clear haptic feedback is key in understanding how touch influences both digital and physically crafted production. Given the psychological (and pedagogical) importance of haptic feedback, it is clear haptic technologies may be readily incorporated into the digital-handicraft practice.
Effortless rendering of scale and display in computer-generated imagery is standard, although incorporating touch into these interfaces requires a compartmentalized use of touch, often with a specific gesture or device. For example, Let’s Create! Pottery Lite (Version 1.63; Infinite Dreams, 2017) uses a pottery wheel ←25 | 26→simulation that responds and integrates your touch, illustrating the feedback of gestural movement in the virtual smooth, wet clay. The glazing and firing of a pot are as easy as ordering your 3D print online—technical knowledge of cone rating and temperature are obscured behind novelty and commodity.
Haptic technologies let us touch digital objects. The basic function of haptic interfaces is “used to measure the motion (position, velocity, and possibly acceleration) and the contact forces of the user’s entire body or arm, foot, or hand” (Kortum, 2008, p. 51). Virtual engagement is uncovered using prosthetics, namely force feedback joysticks, pen-based haptic interfaces, exoskeletal devices, and tactile and vibrotactile interfaces often designed for the fingertips. These prosthetics deepen the continuous interaction space between physical and virtual arenas, further embedding haptic realism within the digital-handicraft.
Touch in the digital is too often curtailed to the pointing of a finger. We advocate for the expansion of digital-handicraft to include the use of haptic interfaces, such as Novint Falcon (a device meant to replace the computer mouse), Ultrahaptics (which include a “pad” that controls ultrasound waves to suggest feedback mid-air), Foldaway (a palm-sized, origami haptic interface) or Tactus (a digital stylus that affects indentation, friction, and acoustics while writing); devices which allow for rendering of physical sensation between user and virtual space, such as force or friction, aligning the digital and handmade via touch.
In considering intuitive interaction with material to be central to craftwork, increased access to haptic technologies within a digital-handicraft position will serve to impart characteristics of craftwork onto digital work, rendering digital labor and products authentic and crafted, and their labor non-alienated and skilled. Intuitive interaction between user and materials offer embodied modes of making, offering new potential and intersections between previously separate discourses. With this in mind, we turn to define the digital-handicraft practice as one that uses haptic devices within a mixed reality framework, centering touch as a critical feedback measure within cultural production.
DEFINING THE DIGITAL-HANDICRAFT PRACTICE
The term digital-handicraft refers to a mixed reality framework and a cultural production practice with several defining characteristics. First, a mixed reality framework utilizes virtual reality as augmented to include real-life environments or cues, ideally achieved when the virtual experience is said to be seamless with the real (Milgram & Kishino, 1994). The digital-handicraft is a potential mixed reality in which virtual and digital realities are expanded to include external environments and cues, including craft materials and practices executed through the use of haptic technologies. The actual practice occurs within a mixed reality framework and is ←26 | 27→further defined by the practitioner’s proximity to the craft position (be it processes, materials, or traditions) and use of touch as critical feedback. These few characteristics—mixed reality, craft position, and touch as critical feedback—loosely define the digital-handicraft practice as a hybridized field of production.
The interface of interaction was once considered finite, but as virtual capacities have expanded, as did the interaction space. Some mid-air gesture systems (Microsoft Kinect, Leap Motion, Nintendo Wii) have expanded the experience of the interface to include a continuous interaction space. The continuous action space is an “underlying system [treating] the space on and above the surface as a continuum, where a person can use touch, gestures, and tangibles anywhere in the space, and naturally move between them.” (Marquardt, Jota, Greenberg, & Jorge, 2011, p. 462).
An example of a continuous action space broadening the digital to real space is Tom Gerhardt’s Mud Tub (2009). This project analyses gestures, like turning and digging, in organic mud. Users experience rich, haptic feedback as they control computer games by pulling and pressing mud in a box. This experience, of controlling a representation (the game) with haptic touch (the mud) is considered “haptic realism,” first introduced by Mika Elo, professor of artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki. Haptic realism is “[the] role that touching (both in tactile and in affective terms) plays in representations that are conceived as being realistic” (Elo, 2012, p. 20). Haptic realism is an example of a mixed reality framework, where the real-life environment (the mud) augments a virtual experience (the game).
Digital-handicraft is more than a theoretical practice; it operatively expands the materialized (or dematerialized) potential of making. While craft has continually integrated new technologies, advances such as ceramic 3D printing, fabric printers, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routers, and modeling software shift much of the making process to a computer. This shift, between the physical and virtual and back, will continue to trouble the discourse so long as the immaterial labor of physical craft (and the bodily labor of the digital) is ignored. In recognizing the immaterial labor present in both spheres, the digital-handicraft practice decenters the maker as the sole producer of culture.