Critical Digital Making in Art Education. Группа авторов
While pedagogy and art-making are primary concerns of potential digital-handicraft practitioners, the contemporary emergence of craftivism, a term coined by Betsy Greer in 2001 (Greer, 2011), and its digital counterpart demand examination. Craftivist Clay: Resistance and Activism in Contemporary Ceramics (Baumstark, 2016) redefined craftivism as a method of making, rather than a discrete, fiber-arts movement limited to third-wave feminism in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Early craftivist literature limited its scope to the DIY scene of North America and focused on women working in fiber arts (see Greer, 2011 and Buszek, 2011). Rather than articulate craftivism as a quick artistic “movement” with limited materials and participants, this chapter necessarily expanded craftivism to include the multiplicity of the craft position. Craftivism as a method, rather than movement, describes “craftivism” as an articulation of resistance against a dominant network that utilizes the craft position (Baumstark, 2016, p. 23).
One of craftivism’s most common epithets is that craft is a gentle, soft, slow, and accessible activism, as opposed to the loud, public, crowded practice of public protest. It is worth noting that feminized adjectives like “gentle” and “soft” offer little critical value to craftivism, particularly when we consider the gendered implications of such terms. While the basic materials of craft (wood, fiber, clay) may ←30 | 31→be considered accessible, technologies like haptic technology, rapid prototyping technology, CNC machines are still shuttered behind institutional access, high prices, and technical know-how. While craft is often touted as a populist method of activism, these sorts of technologies are not. Moreover, digital-handicraft tools are often introduced to communities as a novelty, or through hacker/maker spaces, which are often dominated by men (Guthrie, 2013), and often participate in gentrification and displacement. If these technologies are to affect change, they must be made available through public institutions like libraries and accessible museums and paired with educational initiatives aimed at populations that lack economic access. Straddling public and private, the #additivist movement and subsequent publications revisit “maker spaces” as sites of profound transformation, referring back to Donna Harroway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” while also critiquing 3D fabrication as a framework. Recognizing that 3D fabrication exists as a site of interchange and transdisciplinarity, the creators of the #additivist movement recognize that without “encourag[ment], interfere[nce], and reverse-engineer[ing],” additivism (or 3D fabrication) can either “emancipate [or] eradicate us,” and advocate for digital and material entanglement expressed as collective access and reconfiguration (Allahyari & Rourke, 2017).
While accessibility presents certain challenges for activist potential, the digital-handicraft model offers hybridized forms of activism that result in increased participation and spread of activist ideals. While a physical blanket could only be mailed once, the link to the Nike Protest Blanket webpage could be spammed at Nike repeatedly. The use of a QR code within a tapestry in Guillermo Bert’s La Besta/The Beast (2016) allowed viewers to access a digital, audio file containing stories from some of the nearly half a million migrants that attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border by train each year. Bert worked with members of the Maya community in San Martin, Chiquito, Guatemala to weave the cotton tapestry that echoes traditional Mayan aesthetics but includes an activated QR code. Bert utilizes traditional craft embedded with digital technologies to engage viewer’s haptic sensibilities and share stories of marginalized groups and to advocate on their behalf in the U.S. This work was recently featured in the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s exhibition, The U.S.—Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility.
Activism within a hybridized field in a mixed reality framework complicates the efficacy of resistance. The digital-handicraft practice co-locates activism between the virtual and the real, the action and the object, each intersection offering more nuance and complexity. In Kayla Mattes (2018) recent Response to series, the artist depicted tweets from major corporations like Skittles and Tic Tac as they scrambled to distance themselves from hateful, political speech. Using the crafted language of both woven tapestries and handmade picket signs, the artist reframes corporate guilt as activist action. The disconnect—between the tweets and actual ←31 | 32→activism—is made poignant by the careful handicraft of the object in juxtaposition to the carefully crafted “public relations” response. In a rare, self-reflexive moment, we can see the digital-handicraft practice struggle with the nuances of its efficacy, and the opportunities for critique that may be made available to artists like Mattes.
Moving forward, effective digital-craftivism must consider accessibility and labor first, seeking to offer activism from multiple (material and dematerialized) positions. In contemplating the (im)material labor behind the digital and the handmade, activists must consider the production of their techne, materials, and environments. While their activism might not necessarily address this (the Pussyhat Project (n.d.) founders say little about sourcing yarn), considering labor can deepen our understanding of an activist cause. Activists utilizing these technologies incorporate criticality into their activism at multiple points in the process of making and resisting. As production is made transparent, new avenues of criticality emerge through the interdisciplinary use of technology, material, time, and effort.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As a practice that demonstrates improved accessibility and utilizes various tactile modalities, digital-handicraft invites criticality within the making process. The activist potential of this position makes craft more easily dematerialized, shared, and accessible, thus expanding the possible reach and potency of a craftivist project. A digital-handmade practice considers labor as a key component of cultural production immaterial or otherwise. In considering the invisible labor of workers behind technology and materials, the digital-handicraft practice is inherently collaborative and decenters the maker as the sole producer of culture. Moreover, the role of the hand of the maker within craft production is likely to transform with the increased use of haptic technology in the hands of both viewers and makers.
We put forward that the digital-handicraft, a hybridized field of making, emerges from considering touch; examining touch in both discourses expands the potential of interdisciplinary art, new pedagogical models, and alternative modes of organizing and resisting. Through discovering how haptic technologies let us touch digital objects, we clarified that these prosthetics deepen the continuous interaction space between physical and virtual arenas, resisting apparent binaries. We continue to envision haptic engagement as conventional material for craft production, where themes of accessibility, pedagogy, and authenticity remain at the fore. As craft goes digital, so too does the virtual emerge as crafted, highlighting the potential for new ways of making, doing, and organizing material culture.
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REFERENCES
Adamson, G. (2013). Thinking through craft. New York: Bloomsbury.
Adamson, G. (Ed.). (2010). The craft reader (English ed.). New York: Berg Publishers.
Allahyari, M., & Rourke, D. (2017). The 3D additivist cookbook. Amsterdam, NL: Institute of Network Cultures.
Austin, J. L., & Warnock, G. J. (1962/2010). Sense and sensibilia (Repr). London, UK: Oxford University Press.
Baumstark, M. C. (2016). Craftivist clay: Resistance and activism in contemporary ceramics (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). OCAD University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Berkeley,