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Tag: craft

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.

On craft, digital making, glitch, and hyper kawaii

This is a lecture I thoroughly enjoyed preparing, and had great fun delivering to my first year digital media class of 200 students. The prezi slides are below. My intention was to provoke students into thinking in interesting and weird ways about remediation across media platforms, about object animation through digital means, and about the new aesthetics of the glitch and hyper kawaii. I ended up being more successful than I expected, in that the lecture provoked extreme reactions oscillating from strong rejection of the very premises to enthusiastic exploration of the implications and pathways opened by them. I start with a quick overview of the changing meaning of craft in a time of digital mediation, then move on to the aesthetics of remediation between analog and digital forms, and object animation and its effect on experiences of the material.

Julie Watai - http://juliewatai.jp/
Julie Watai

I constructed the main argument around the transition from industrial culture in which production is determined by the logic of the assembly line, to a post-industrial culture in which production is determined by the logic of mass customization. Arguably, the latter is characterized by rapid prototyping, experimentation, iterative error discovery, and modifications leading to unexpected outcomes. I illustrate this with a beautiful quote by David Pye, from his The Nature and Art of Workmanship, where he argues that while industrial manufacturing is characterized by the production of certainty, craftsmanship is always the production of risk because the quality of the result is an unknown during the process of making.

xMinks at work
xMinks at work

My favorite part of the lecture is where I managed to integrate into a single narrative phenomena such as glitch aesthetics and hyper kawaii, exemplified by Julie Watai and xMinks, with a cameo by Microsoft’s ill-fated Tay AI bot.

The image I used as canvas for the prezi is a remediation of the Amen Break 6-second loop into a 3-d printed sound wave, crafted by a student of mine last year.