Projects/Tools of the Trade 2015

Context

How can you integrate Digital Craft into your personal practice?

The notion of a ‘tool’ in contemporary artistic practices is much wider than a simple hand-held implement. Tools can move material as well as ideas. Tools can fabricate as well as disseminate. Knowing one’s tools (how they are defined, designed, and put in effect) not only gives one agency, but often becomes the crux of one’s artistic practice. This holds particularly true for digital craftsmen.

The current range and access to new digital instruments — from dozens of desktop CNC technologies that can make almost anything to hundreds of sensors that can measure pretty much everything — have given rise to a new wave of artist-built machines. Moreover, recent critical practices that break away from the more commercial and industrial (affirmative) applications have brought a new spectrum of objects that instrumentalise design’s potential as a discursive tool.

Whether milling-out matter or carving-out meaning, this project asks you to both envision and build new tools for your practice. In this quarter you will define, design, and put into effect a new tool or medium that will strive for two main aims: it will carry your traces and signature as maker, as well as apply/reflect on the technological possibilities of our time.