The Material and Immaterial: Holistic Approaches to Integrating Craft and Technology

Description

Teaching Futures is a quest that challenges us to not only anticipate, but shape the unknown. This must involve not only forward speculation, but deep consideration of past methods of developing knowledge. We are artists whose creative practice involves a back and forth between textile tradition and digital imaging and computation. They both also serve as Assistant Professors of Fashion Design teaching BFA Fashion students, MFA Design and Technology students and MFA Textiles students. They are actively working, in their studios and classrooms, to find connections between tradition and innovation, hand and machine, the material and immaterial.

In this panel we will consider, discuss and engage participants in a conversation around the links of haptic knowledge to digital experimentation. An apt question considering that the DEL Teaching Futures 2019 marks the centennial of the Bauhaus- founded on a commitment to craft knowledge as a key component of art and design education. The Bauhaus built philosophically and historically on educational innovations in experiential learning such as Friedrich Froebel's Kindergarten. Froebel's Gifts (used in childhood by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier) highlight the role of manipulative tools in knowledge formation and in modern art and design education.

We continue to value the hand as we look toward new and dynamic ways to teach futures. In "Fewer, Better Things" Glenn Adamson argues the medium in which a draft is rendered can influence the form the object will take. He compares automobiles rendered in watercolor, marker, and digitally to show the medium's influence on the designers decision making. The way in which the final form is impacted by the initial mode of expression has implications in regard to integrated practices which blend multiple media in their exploration phase.

Through our work, we posit that the outcomes of our hybridized craft and digital methods are distinctive and warrant deeper analysis and discussion.

Timetable

1. Introductions (4 minutes)
2. Gregory Climer presents artwork (8 minutes)
3. Anette Millington presented artwork (8 minutes)
4. Relating our work to the seven qualities (10 minutes)
5. Dialogue with audience (15 minutes)

Takeaway

In New Craft/ Future Voices, J.R. Campbell defines characteristics unique to emergent digital craft and considers how digital tools are impacting craft practice. In our panel we will flip this dynamic and consider how the hand manipulative experience effects digital thinking. We propose seven qualities of hand work that impacted our creative practice. These seven qualities have enabled us to play with technology in ways which are meaningful in our own artwork. We propose that these characteristics may be valuable in the teaching of new technologies and want to open the conversation to the conference attendants. The following are qualities we have found in common:

1. Community-Shared Procedures and Methods. Craft communities are communities of shared knowledge in which peers learn from one another. Often framed as "tips and tricks", individual knowledge is exchanged and evolved as it moves from person to person.
2. Trial and Error, Iterative Process. We do not learn only by doing, but by reflecting on our doing. The process of making an object is a series of repetitive actions (such as weaving or carving). Artisan methods are refined through a combination of practice and variation.
3. Hack, Breaking Stuff. Craft evolves when practitioners push the boundaries of the materials we are working in. We learn what a tool or medium can do by pushing it to the extremes and finding their limitations. Often when we reach these limits, we also begin to see new possibilities in them.
4. Person and Material are Co-Creators. Learning to listen to the materials and understand what we can and cannot do is critical for working successfully. This respect for the material as a co-creator requires flexibility and decision making while executing a piece, as opposed to enforcement of an outcome.
5. Material intelligence + Flow. Without material intelligence, a craftsperson cannot enter state of flow. As the craftsperson advances their understanding of the variations in the material, we are able to tap into that knowledge intuitively. We often refer to this as muscle memory or thinking with our hands. This dual level thinking, both the body and the mind, allows for a deeper level of engagement.
6. Making Meaning from Non-Linear Thinking. The ability to make metaphors and meaning with materials and ideas which preclude logic and find sense through a web of connections.
7. Manipulation Leads to Visualization Skills. By engaging with the material we develop an ability to imagine the immaterial. The ability to visualize how something reacts allows you to grapple with multiple possibilities.

Abstract

This panel will look at the potential of "hand craft" making methods to inform experiments with new technologies and to build meaningful relationships with technology. The conversation will be framed around two specific artists' projects. Our mindset is that the "digital vs hand" divide can be replaced with a "diverse tools for manipulating the medium" perspective that changes the conversation from one of either/or to both/and. We intend for the panel and discussion to enhance teaching methodologies which look at digital and hand in a holistic manner.

Through the project descriptions we will see how the artists' conceptual & creative thinking grows out of craft. Essential to creative thinking is the ability to connect and synthesize ideas and experiences. Craft fosters creative thinking because the process is a constant trial and error, a dialog between the maker and the material. Craft teaches you to observe and react to the many possibilities in the material. The confines of established craft methods are a mere framework in which variation and surprise can be found.

Gregory Climer will introduce his ongoing work, animated textiles, in which he uses knitting and quilting to create cel animations. Building off his pixelated quilts, which rely on technology to generate and are transformed when viewed via the smartphone screen, the animated quilts and knits use textiles to create the individual frames of an animation. Starting with film footage, it is converted to pixels, which are recreate in fabric and then rephotographed and returned to the film format. The way in which technology and craft playfully interact in the work offers an example of how technology can be used as one of many tools in the craftsman's tool kit and a way in which artists can capitalize on the unique properties of the tools themselves.

Anette Millington will review her Coded Textile Project that uses computation as both a research and design method, exploring aesthetics and meaning in textile design. This project involves a student research assistant/ coder to build generative art works as a component in print and woven design. The Coded Textile Project works back and forth from the digital to the physical. Moving from drawing to code, to digital renderings, to jacquard production, to diagrams, back to code, to quilt, etc. Current digital generative artworks focus on the ability of digital computation to add time to embellishment. For example, "The Linage Series" uses a coded system, similar to "dna" inheritance, to evolve a print design. Conceptually the piece is a metaphor for how family mythologies are developed over generations of interaction and migration. The coding for this project is based in systems of natural selection, genetics, and syntax tree diagrams.

As we look to "Teaching Futures" we propose a productive shift away from the analog/ digital divide. Rather an embrace of hybrid methods that see the material and the digital as tools used in the same sandbox.