Critical Digital Making in Art Education. Группа авторов
responsible for machines and tools, materials and transport, decentering the maker as a sole producer and, instead, situating a digital-handicraft practice as inherently collaborative. Expanding fine craft to consider including digital technologies, we open craft to technologies with it has affinities, like robotics, computer modeling, and rapid prototyping.
Within the digital-handicraft practice, haptic touch offers opportunities for makers and users of these objects (and technologies) to engage critically with cultural production. The psychological and experiential value of haptic touch cannot be understated. Within a mixed reality, one can engage with digital objects with ←27 | 28→the same critical experience as physical craft objects. Considering both the human labor inherent in virtual spaces, and the importance of touch upon digital objects, makers can apply critical craft methods to digital objects, and vice versa. Digital objects can benefit from discussions of authenticity and traditional skills, and craft objects can be rendered and edited digitally before a singular print, reducing the traditional need for multiples.
Haptic technologies emerge from and reflect the tacit knowledge of making, pointing to a future of crafted digital objects and spaces. There is a possibility for an aesthetic shift in the virtual field to embrace the messy, unique, and flawed, in the same way craft experienced movements like the Sloppy Craft (Paterson & Surette, 2015), Funk, or DIY. Mixed reality allows for the blurring of aesthetic lines and becomes a site for the digital-handicraft, where makers can sculpt material remaining in the virtual sphere, and could teach tacit knowledge from remote locations. Haptic devices help bridge the boundaries of reality, and introduce opportunities for discoursal disruption.
In the past 20 years, digital spaces, for example, the Internet, built and sustained communities such as the Maker/DIY Movement of the early 2000s. This new wave of craft was among the most democratic in living memory, largely due in part to the movement’s accessibility. The Internet allowed for the democratization of processes and ideas, connecting like-minded people continents apart. Artists, such as Cat Mazza, constructed digitized craftworks like the Nike Blanket Petition (2003–2008) wherein participants knit or crocheted a square of a blanket, sent it to Mazza who assembled the blanket, photographed it, and posted it to a specific URL (Mazza, n.d.) where visitors could scroll over the quilt to see where each square had come from. In the act of running over the surface of the blanket with a cursor, visitors mimic the physical touch of a real encounter.
The need for a more comprehensive consideration of digital-handicraft is clear. Having articulated the similarities between the two discourses and the theoretical and practical links that construct the digital-handicraft field, we turn now to the practical application (and potential complications) of such an idea within education, cultural production, and social justice.
DIGITAL-HANDICRAFT IN PEDAGOGY, ART-MAKING, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Having established the potential for a digital-handicraft practice, the implications of such work have yet to be fleshed out. Intersections between the digital and handmade are rapidly emerging in schools, community spaces, and art galleries as we write. As a relatively new discipline, we focus on pedagogy and social justice as sites for a digital-handicraft practice. Rather than offer concrete solutions for ←28 | 29→an emerging field, this chapter articulates potential themes likely to emerge in the doing of digital-handicraft and speculates on the implications of this practice.
From the beginnings of hypertext to digital humanities, contemporary pedagogies must include the digitally mediated perspective which allows artists and makers to think through innovation, software, materials, and technology design within a cultural context. Artists and makers will play and push the limits of the technologies, often leading to nuanced digital-handicraft aesthetics; it is an artist’s mode to be innovative. While it may appear novel, this sort of cultural creation is nothing new. As Patton and Knochel (2017) put it: “Creating with computational objects may appear to be a new form of material play in the art classroom; however, DIY subcultures have historically played with electronic and mechanical equipment in inventive ways” (p. 37). These exploratory practices had led to the development of new and future materials, like those cataloged in Howes and Laughlin’s Material Matters: New Materials in Design (2012). These material advances include traditional craft materials like metals, glass, and ceramics, but expand to include microlattice, soft circuits, or conductive ink. Further, the research of MIT’s Self-Assembly Laboratory is exemplary in digital-handicraft, where artists synthesize technologies and design to develop visionary materials such as printed inflatable materials (Sparrman et al., 2019) or active textile tailoring (Tessmer et al., 2019).
The ongoing research of Lynne Heller and Dorie Millerson at OCAD University (Toronto, ON) outlines key themes at work in a presentation titled All Hands on Tech: Craft, Pedagogy and the Digital Challenge (2017). The themes identified emerge from a series of eight semi-formal interviews from craft and design students and their studio technicians, concluding that resisting binaries, new models of learning, 2D/3D translation, the impact of time, concerns of agency, and need for communication are pivotal in the teaching of digital craft (Heller & Millerson, 2017, p. 15).
Millerson and Heller specifically ask how artists and makers track the “digital/material blend.” Many of the participants in the study identified as being self-taught when it comes to digital technology. The researchers stress the importance of managing student expectations, specifically when it comes to learning and understanding the limitations of digital technology. For example, many 2D representations (within the software and virtual spaces) require faculty assistance when translating to a 3D dimensionality and materiality, enforcing the need for education around the use of tacit knowledge such as self-taught gestures and routines.
Another key theme relates to time, where “many of [the] interviewees reinforced the idea that digital technology can be deceptively time-intensive and demanding” (Heller & Millerson, 2017, p. 20), not to mention the scheduling of production. In other words, participants acknowledged the similar time constraints between physical making and virtual labor, echoing our concerns about labor and time.
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The final theme from the study centers around communication between the student and technician, whose central role is mitigating expectations. Even though participants perceive themselves to be self-taught in regards to technology, the need for traditional craft educational models becomes apparent. Technicians, in this case, take on the role of a craft educator demonstrating and articulating tacit and haptic knowledge. As Millerson mentioned in a conversation about their research, “Rather than inserting hacker/maker spaces into craft, why don’t we incorporate those technologies into educational models that already exist?” (Millerson, personal communication, January 10, 2018).
Utilizing models already at work in traditional handicrafts—mentor-apprentice relationships, side-by-side collaborative work, and skill sharing—with digital technologies allows for more seamless integration of the digital into craft education. Rather than replacing crafting spaces with “Maker Spaces,” educators ought to consider integrating new technologies into existing studio sites with craft education at work. Screens, haptic technologies, and 3D and textile printers expand the traditional craft studio into a mixed reality space, capable of new modes of production.
The activist potential of the digital-handicraft becomes clear as technology makes craft more easily shared, and craft renders technology more physically accessible, such as in Mazza’s Nike Blanket Petition. In contemplating a future for digital-handicraft activism, we consider themes of accessibility and criticality within existing activist projects