Materiality and Interaction in Digital Craft
An intriguing article on Iconeye about Collective Works, a new project by Mischer Traxler for Design Miami. The Austrian-born Dutch-educated design duo designed a machine that weaves wooden baskets, in a project that nods both to the influence of digital technologies on craft and design, but the groundswell of interest in interactivity. Collective Work only gets onto making the basket if someone is nearby; when another person approaches, a blue marker pen is added to the veneer, a hue that gets darker as more people approach.
Collective Work, Mischler Traxler, 2011. Image Iconeye.
While Collective Work could be interpreted as a rather flawed take on interactive design in the ultimately passive nature of this user engagement in production, Katharine Mischler and Thomas Traxler describe this element of ambiguity and paradox key to the project: “The project is ambiguous in many ways. The audience are turned into workers, even though their effort is just the time they spend with the machine. But time is what most of us lack. If nobody is interested in the project, it stops producing and the final product just doesn’t get produced. It is production on interest.”
Yet even if unintentionally, Collective Work also appears to speak about one of the seismic shifts that has taken place in craft in industrial modernity: the transformation of craft from an act that engaged all in the making useful things to the few making autonomous, art-like objects which the view absorbs, passively.
Mischler Traxler’s project is not the only example of this dialectic between interaction, passivity and skill in digital or technologically advanced manufacture. Last year The Journal of Modern Craft reported on l’Artisan Électronique, a “virtual potter’s wheel” from Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen of Unfold design studio. You can see a video here.
L’Artisan Électronique, Unfold, 2010. Image Journal of Modern Craft.
A sensor on the digital potters’ wheel responds to the movements of the visitors’ hands, while a 3D ceramic printer produces the pots from rolls of clay at the other end. As such, l’Artisan Électronique raises questions about one of the hallmarks of craft manufacture; the hands-on engagement with material. Interestingly, the designers deny any dematerialization element: they describe it as an attempt to ‘actually materialize the world of virtual design’ by reintroducing a bodily relation to the process, one that is lost in the creation of designs through merely clicking a mouse and drawing lines on a computer screen.
There is clearly a question of what happens to skill in both Collective Work and L’Artisan Électronique. Anyone can get involved in the process of creation of the wooden or clay pots, and arguably no skill is required for a pot to come out at the end of this. Skill is involved though in these and other examples of digital craft; it is simply being reshaped in response to changing technologies, as it has always been. Take the work of Geoffrey Mann, the final example under consideration here, who trained as a 3D designer and was one of the winners of the Jerwood Contemporary Makers prize in 2009.
Flight Landing, Geoffrey Mann, 2008. Clear cast glass. Image studiomrmann.
Amongst the works recognised was his cast glass Flight Landing from 2008 from the Long Exposure series, which captures the flight path of a wild pigeon. Mann uses CAD, stop motion animation and rapid prototyping to design the object. The most-craft like element, the actual glass kiln casting, takes place in the Czech Republic and is not done by Mann by skilled artisans with whom he communicates his ideas by email. This creates a new moment when Mann sees his object for the first time - which is often not until exhibition installation - just as there is a new moment in the creation of the wooden and clay pots above when the viewers/creators see what their participation has resulted in.
In terms of skill, this has not disappeared in Flight Landing but it has been recast in line with the digital and distributed production process. Mann’s skill resides in curating the project, and in his use of the computer; as he says, “I realised I could use a computer as a potter uses a wheel.” Furthermore, a knowledge and respect of materiality is still important in Mann’s work. He might be designing a glass object on a computer screen, but he has to know how the material will respond to the shapes he produces with the mouse click, as did the creators behind the Collective Work and L’Artisan Électronique. We might therefore be witnessing a distancing between the maker and the material in contemporary craft, but the tenets of craft - skill and materiality - are very much in place.
