In craft work (Sennett, 2008) there must be some kind of responsive co-hesion between a human and a tool, with each continuously responding to the other so that the ‘whole’ (human plus tool) works effectively. Skill and experience with a tool (or tools) is a core part of hand craftsmanship: car-penter and chisel, painter and brush, embroiderer and needle. The tool
seems to be an extension of the body; the mind does not think what the hand must do to manipulate the brush, the hand and brush become one, a brush-hand (Pallasmaa 2009, p. 48). In traditional craftwork there is al-so al-some kind of responsive cohesion between a human and the crafted ob-ject. The human gives form to the object, and the developing object ‘talks back’ to the human; Donald Schön characterized any reflective practice as a “conversation with the situation” (Schön, 1984). For the craftsper-son, this ‘conversation’ is enjoyable, engaging, addictive. Juhani Pallasmaa writes that “When I see the total correspondence and unexplained affini-ty of a craftsman’s persona, his/her hands and his/her workshop environ-ment, I am deeply moved”, noting the unity of professional world, hands and place, and the “marriage of an individual and craft, responsibility and pride” (Pallasmaa, 2009, 50).
Much has been written about digital craft. One of the first books was Ab-stracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, published in 1997. In it, Mal-colm McCullough discusses the interaction of maker and tool in digital craft:
As a point of departure, consider the example of a skilled com-puter graphics artisan if we may use this word. His or her hands are performing a sophisticated and unprecedented set of actions.
These motions are quick, small, and repetitive, as in much tra-ditional handwork, but somehow they differ. For one thing, they are faster; in fact, their rates matter quite a bit. They do not re-ly on pressure so much as position, velocity, or acceleration.
The artisan’s eye is not on the hand but elsewhere, on a screen.
(McCullough, 1997, 19)
McCullough (2015) describes the changing role of the hand in digital work as interfaces matured.
The eye is on the screen, because that is where the action is. In tradition-al handicraft, the eye is not so much on the hand but on the point where the crafted object is changing: the hands on clay for a potter, the edge of a chisel on wood for a carpenter, the tip of a soldering iron for a metalwork-er. While I type, my eye is on the cursor as letters appear, not on my fin-gers on the keyboard. The cursor is an extension to my finfin-gers, more dis-tant than the tip of a chisel at the end of a shaft but similarly responding instantly to the actions of my muscles. I have a cursor-hand.
For a ‘computer graphics artisan’ making computer graphics (or a virtual reality scene, or a computer game) there is a similar connection between craftsperson and product as in traditional handicraft. The crafted prod-uct is digital and the craftsperson is working directly on a prodprod-uct that is digital, like a woodworker working directly on wood and a metalworker on metal. However, when the final product is not digital but physical, the
image on the screen is an intermediate stage inserted between the craft-sperson’s action and the end product. This is a significant difference, be-cause an important characteristic of traditional craft is the direct connec-tion between craftsperson and the materiality of the product. Pallasmaa (2009, 55) writes that “The work of the craftsman implies collaboration with his material”. In the digital sphere, there is still responsive cohesion between a human and a tool, but the tool now is working on a model or de-scription of the object and not on the object itself. The designer and end product are separated, so the responsive cohesion is between the human, the tool, and a model as substitute for the crafted object.
Consider a traditional craft furniture maker. He or she may use draw-ings, may even use a model or prototype to test and explain how the fin-ished piece will look. There are components to be crafted and then assem-bled, following a well-established sequence of activities. Consider a digital craft furniture maker. He or she will make a digital model using comput-er software, then send the data from that model to a selective lascomput-er sintcomput-er- sinter-ing machine for an aluminium chair, or a numeric-controlled laser cutter for a plywood chair. In the first case, the object is crafted directly, while in the second case a digital model is crafted that is then used to make the object. Production in the digital age is about the flow of information: “de-sign prototypes become de“de-sign specifications, then process models, then machine instructions” (McCullough, 1997, 179). The “sensual and tactile connection between imagination and the object of design” is broken (Pal-lasmaa, 2009, 65).
There is a long history of computers in art (Wands 2006). “The genre of
‘computer art’ began in the 1950s, when long exposure photography was used to capture images created by an oscilloscope manipulating electron-ic waves on a small fluorescent screen. …. By the 1990s, the term comput-er art was fading, and computcomput-ers wcomput-ere becoming a mainstream part of arts and entertainment” (Avila & Bailey, 2016, 6).
Figure 2. Dean Bruton (1951-) ‘Dean, Judy and Dog’, 16w x 13h x 5d cm. ABS 3D print, 2012 (left); ‘Viv102’, 60w x 50h x 28d cm. Stone/cement block, 2020 (right). Photographs by Dean Bruton.
As an artist who has made sculpture via 3D modeling / 3D printing as well as hand sculpting directly on a block of material (figure 2), Dean Bruton comments that “I found the process fun at first but consider the plastic ar-tefacts bland but strangely intriguing. The output is so mechanical, there is no chance of variation whilst the print is in action.” There is no opportu-nity for the artist to respond interactively with an emerging 3D sculpture and its materiality, only with 2D images of the model. “This contrasts with
… involvement of interpretative manipulation within the relational cohe-sion ... a closer connection to the medium and materials compared to dig-ital design tools.” For him, in painting too “The fun is in the hand crafting of the paint surfaces and the manipulation of the subjects’ light and space”
(Bruton 2020). Taipo Wirkkala compared traditional craft to industrial production in similar terms. “The craftsman has the advantage that at eve-ry stage of the work his material is in his hands to feel and command. In industry, the material is constantly subordinate to some preplanned law and machinery and once the job has begun it is difficult to make changes”
(quoted in Pallasmaa, 2009, 56).
Contemporary architecture typically requires both digital craft and hand-icraft. Two buildings that push the boundaries of traditional craft skills illustrate this combination. In Australia, architect Frank Gehry’s design for the brick external wall of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building (2014) (fig-ure 3) for the University of Technology, Sydney, required skilled digital modeling in his California studio after design development using physical models. The digital model was used to make drawings to be interpreted by skilled bricklayers on site in Sydney. In an interview included in a doc-umentary about Gehry’s architecture (ABC, 2015), one of these bricklay-ers described his enjoyment of building the unusual walls, the pleasure of coming to work knowing it would be challenging. If in craft we expect a di-rect connection between a craftsperson and a product, the designer craft-ed the digital model and the bricklayer craftcraft-ed the wall.
Figure 3. Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Sydney, Australia, designed by Frank Gehry.
In China, architect Ma Yansong’s design for the interior of the Grand The-atre foyer of the Harbin Opera House (2015) (figure 4) required digital modeling in the office of MAD Architects in Beijing and skilled carpentry on site in Harbin. “Ma’s formal and spatial manoeuvres here seem driven by a sensibility that is far removed from algorithmic techniques of tracing movement vectors or iterating attractors that underlie the methodology of parametricism. It appears sculptural, in the old-fashioned sense of shap-ing matter to infuse it with life. Ma: ‘I don’t want to make those lines very cold or mechanical or computer-generated. I want to give them a hand-crafted quality… a sense of life. But at the same time, I want to keep a cer-tain level of abstraction’” (Worrall, 2016, 73).
Figure 4. Harbin Opera House, Harbin, China, designed by Ma Yansong (MAD Architects). Photographs by Julian Worrall.
Instances and Series
These two buildings are unique, but in traditional craft a product is often one of a series with small variations between them. Members of a series of African wooden whistles and snuffboxes vary according to the piece of wood from which they are made and deliberate choices of their makers (figure 5). Part of the responsive cohesion between the carver and emerg-ing object is the way in which the maker responds individually to each piece of wood. Members of a set of nine digital objects (they were never made physical) vary using parametric modeling. The responsive cohesion between maker and object is about reflecting on and reacting to emergent forms to set parameters for the next form. The product is digital, so the craftsperson is working directly with the product.
Figure 5. Whistles and snuffboxes hand crafted in East Africa (left); Parametric variations of a digital object by Xiong Lu (right).
Using most current design software, designers can save multiple versions of files or store partial alternatives on separate layers and flip from one to another. A more radical change is the development of software that will work directly and simultaneously on whole fields of possibilities instead of individuals, because this is a mode of working that is impossible in tra-ditional art and craft. Then “parameters can control any feature of a mod-el, that is, can be used to effectively switch between models. Thus two al-ternatives can result in arbitrarily different design configurations” (Wood-bury, Mohiuddin & Cichy, 2020, 51).
Whether working with individuals or fields, every instance can be traced to the choices and actions of a human. The operators in a parametric mod-el are essentially sets of rules by which alternatives are generated. Such rules are set by humans using skill and experience to exploit a sophisti-cated tool. What if the software operates with neural networks that “learn”
to perform tasks by analysing lots of examples without being programmed with task-specific rules? Computer systems might generate whistles and snuffboxes having been “taught” to do so by finding commonalities and permissible variations in a large corpus of examples. In painting and mu-sic, these techniques have been used to generate products that are not eas-ily distinguishable from those of human painters and composers (Avila &
Bailey, 2016, 6). The identities of the ‘craft people’ are then diffused. They include those who made (crafted) the examples used to ‘train’ the soft-ware, the person or team who wrote (crafted) the software and selected the ‘training set’ of examples, along with the person or people who used the software as a very sophisticated tool in some kind of collaborative pro-cess to generate and select the products. The user (or viewer or listener) may not be aware of its origin.