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.

Main Assignment

Develop a personal tool that transforms your craft in a meaningful way. This tool needs to be relevant to your personal practice and the bigger context of your craft.

Starting Points

Focus on a particular element of your artistic process and become an expert on it : research and experiment deep and wide.

Define what your craft is and what it’s key characteristics are. Which ones are problematic? Which ones are interesting...

Look critically at the process of making in your craft and explore the possible impacts tools can have on your work.

Tools can be many things: they can be physical tools the way we usually think about them, but they can also be conceptual, abstract: systems, spaces, software, ... basically anything that has an impact on your creation process.

Suggested Reading

Hertzian Tales — Anthony Dunne

Speculative Everything — Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Making is Connecting — David Gauntlett

The Craft Reader — Glenn Adamson

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — Walter Benjamin

The Meme Machine — Susan Blackmore

What Technology Wants — Kevin Kelly

Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand — Malcolm McCullough

The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman

Emotional Design — Don Norman

Designing Interactions — Bill Moggridge

Cognitive Surplus — Clay Shirky

Here Comes Everybody — Clay Shirky

The Long Tail — Chris Anderson

Free — Chris Anderson

Free Culture — Lawrence Lessig

Deliverables and Deadline

1. Tool of the Trade
   An artefact, a critical tool that transforms your craft in a meaningful way.
2. Working demo
   A prototype with a sensor that is more or less relevant to your chosen theme.
3. Short film about your project
   — A walk through : show how the device works. Show the parts, a visual manual / technical documentation.
   — The device in your practice. Make us believe that it exist, show us how it affects your practice.
   — Larger Cultural implications: how does it affect the greater culture surrounding your practice?
4. Research Document
   A text that goes with the film, an artistic statement.

Everything needs to be finished by the week of January 12th 2016.

Schedule

Meeting 1 : Wednesday November 11th

Morning

Present the theme you want to work with in class.

— What is the craft you are going to work with and what are its key characteristics? Which characteristics are interesting for you to work with this quarter? Define this with a short written statement that you will read and discuss in class.

— How could physical or digital tools affect your craft in an essential way? Propose a few scenarios that you find interesting and want to explore.

Afternoon

One on one meeting about the Fantastic Forgeries evaluation and discussion of grades.

Meeting 2

Sensor demo presentations + further development of Tool of the Trade

Meeting 3

...