space between physical and virtual intersections.
This digital-handicraft practice considers labor as a key component of cultural production immaterial or otherwise. Considering the invisible labor of workers behind technology and materials, the digital-handicraft practice is inherently collaborative, decentering the maker as the sole producer of culture. Further, as a practice demonstrating improved accessibility and utilizing various tactile modalities, digital-handmaking invites criticality within the making process. Digital-handmaking offers new modes of making and sharing culture, rendering traditional handcrafted objects virtual and dematerialized, ready to share, and digitally designed objects suddenly made physical through haptic technologies.
Exploring both the pedagogical and activist implications of a hybridized field, this text complicates existing models of craft education and activism (craftivism) ←21 | 22→and considers what traditional craft models may offer digital spaces and vice versa. Here, we speculate the future of a hybridized discipline, necessarily expanding both traditional craft and digital scholarship to include contemporary modes of production and accessibility.
REALIZING THE AFFINITIES BETWEEN CRAFT AND THE DIGITAL
Traditionally, craft was constituted by materials, techniques, function, and lineage. Romantic notions about the “human imprint” (Mazanti, 2011, p. 61) and craft’s authenticity continue to pervade the material culture. Scholars like Louise Mazanti and Glenn Adamson approach craft as a discourse and material position capable of reflexive change and transformation (Adamson, 2010, 2013; Mazanti, 2011). In this light, craft expands beyond the reaches of regional tradition, limited materials, and the touch of the hand to include 3D printed ceramics, LED-ridden textiles, and virtual showrooms. Given the rise of three-dimensional modeling, rapid prototyping, and haptic-digital controls, craft has gone digital.
The relationship between craft and digital fields is often positioned as antithetical, even binary, as craft was defined as “anti-technological” since the Arts and Crafts movement (Greenhalgh, 2002, p. 7). Just as our crafting ancestors confronted the changing landscape of mass production, contemporary issues between the handmade and digital exist on a continuum. In order for scholars to better analyze the contemporary work of cultural producers, for educators to equip and prepare future makers, and to expand the ways in which material production is entangled within economic and social frameworks, we must interrogate the affinities between craft and the digital.
Positioning traditional craft and computers as antagonistic oversimplifies and dehumanizes both; physical and digital craft discourses are non-binary. While craft literature situates local craft as being separate from, or better than, mass-produced goods (a handy pseudonym for machine-produced), most writers problematize the agency and humanity of the workers considered “replaceable parts in a bureaucracy” within capitalism (Greenhalgh, 2002, p. 16). Moreover, craft industries, even cottage industries, exist within a capitalist, global market, consuming materials from conglomerates they profess to oppose.
The labor of traditional craftspeople and those producing digital products ought not to be siloed but considered in relation to one another. Positioning digital labor as separate from “handmaking” rejects the historical, physical, and immaterial labor inherent in digital work, denying agency to workers behind the creation, maintenance, and operation of digital technologies. Simply put, the use of machines in production does not remove humans from labor consideration. As ←22 | 23→artist Allison Smith so aptly put it, “We forget that even today Nikes are made by workers. We [in craft] tend to think of mass-produced ‘machine-made’ things as if they’re totally devoid of human hands and workmanship, but the machines are making these things; people are making these things” (Smith, 2010, p. 624). We can easily substitute “computer,” “tablet,” or “VR headset,” for “Nike,” but the sentiment remains; all production includes human labor.
Beyond labor, physical and digital craft discourses share linguistic and technical similarities. Even the term digital can refer “not only to the information, virtual realm of ones and zeros but also to the fingers—those physical manual extensions that apprehend the world” (Bratich, 2010, p. 303). Furthermore, as Heidegger (by way of Bratich) reminds us, our metaphors for understanding and comprehending, like grasping, sorting, feeling, “depend on a hand with its digits” (Bratich, 2010, p. 303). Even within the virtual sphere, our digits connect us to virtual engagements.
The digital, however, is only one part of the digital-handicraft method we will outline, and we must re-examine our understanding of the word “craft” itself to move beyond stagnant definitions. Alexander Langland’s (2018) text Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, posits the Old English craeft is nearly untranslatable, but “a form of knowledge, not just a knowledge of making but a knowledge of being [it combines] skill, intelligence and virtue” (2018, p. 16). Although the German equivalent, kraft, is often translated as power, one might interpret power to be potential or ability, rather than force or might. The idea of craft, here, is easily applied to a number of forms of knowledge with potential, like witchcraft, wildcraft, and spycraft (Bratich, 2010), and now, with our addition, digital-handicraft.
Much of the evolution of the digital sphere was influenced or impacted by handiwork, such as the Jacquard loom influencing Ada Lovelace’s vision of early algorithms, or similarities between fiber’s binary systems (like the knit/purl of knitting) and those of binary code (Lovelace & Toole, 1998). Even “digital images” echo craft, “constantly woven and rewoven in their on-screen performativity” (Monteiro, 2017, p. 59). We refer to virtual spaces as constructed or built, using the metaphors of physical labor to explain dematerialized constructs. Finally, the common touch gestures of the virtual field, like moving and clicking a computer mouse or swiping a mobile device, are learned and practiced gestures that quickly become second nature, similar to many repeated gestures within craft, like casting on (in knitting or crochet) or tapering in metallurgy.
This last connection—the similarities in touch gestures and the feedback loops they produce—drives us to reconsider both digital and physical handicraft as overlapping and influencing, rather than mutually exclusive. If we conceive craft and digital to refer simultaneously to our comprehension, extension, knowledge, and potential within the material and virtual space, informed by external systems, touch gestures, and techné, what might emerge as spaces for potential growth?
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Craft is often defined by a maker’s tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to a way of knowing, the kind of knowledge we often neglect to analyze or articulate until, particularly in craft, we are asked to teach the skill to another. The struggle to communicate the bodily knowledge that knows when the clay is centered, when the glass is properly roughed out, or the stitch complete, influences physical craft’s educational models. Mentor-apprentice relationships, communal workshop models, or marketplace demonstrations all depend on the physical presence of an
