The Medium is the Message II: craft, and the logic of digital making

Following from the opening lecture for BCM112, in which I laid the foundation for approaching digital media convergence from a McLuhan perspective,  these are the prezi slides for the follow-up lecture focusing on the logic of digital production. I open the lecture with a fairly dense conceptual frame establishing the logic of craft and production in digital media, and then follow this up with a range of examples focusing on the aesthetics of glitch, hyper kawaii, vaporwave, and Twitch mess. Again, I build up the concept frame as a shift from the industrial logic of the assembly line to the internet’s logic of mass-customization, where the new aesthetic form is characterized by rapid prototyping, experimentation, rapid error discovery, and open-process mods leading to unexpected outcomes . The key element of this logic-frame is that the openness of the process of digital making – all aspects of the object are open for modification even after release – leads to an emergent unpredictability of the end-result [there is no closure], and a resultant risk embedded in the process. This state of indeterminacy is how digital craft operates, and it is the risky openness that generates the new aesthetic of the medium.