previously separate discourses. With this in mind, we turn to define the digital-handicraft practice as one that uses haptic devices within a mixed reality framework, centering touch as a critical feedback measure within cultural production.
DEFINING THE DIGITAL-HANDICRAFT PRACTICE
The term digital-handicraft refers to a mixed reality framework and a cultural production practice with several defining characteristics. First, a mixed reality framework utilizes virtual reality as augmented to include real-life environments or cues, ideally achieved when the virtual experience is said to be seamless with the real (Milgram & Kishino, 1994). The digital-handicraft is a potential mixed reality in which virtual and digital realities are expanded to include external environments and cues, including craft materials and practices executed through the use of haptic technologies. The actual practice occurs within a mixed reality framework and is ←26 | 27→further defined by the practitioner’s proximity to the craft position (be it processes, materials, or traditions) and use of touch as critical feedback. These few characteristics—mixed reality, craft position, and touch as critical feedback—loosely define the digital-handicraft practice as a hybridized field of production.
The interface of interaction was once considered finite, but as virtual capacities have expanded, as did the interaction space. Some mid-air gesture systems (Microsoft Kinect, Leap Motion, Nintendo Wii) have expanded the experience of the interface to include a continuous interaction space. The continuous action space is an “underlying system [treating] the space on and above the surface as a continuum, where a person can use touch, gestures, and tangibles anywhere in the space, and naturally move between them.” (Marquardt, Jota, Greenberg, & Jorge, 2011, p. 462).
An example of a continuous action space broadening the digital to real space is Tom Gerhardt’s Mud Tub (2009). This project analyses gestures, like turning and digging, in organic mud. Users experience rich, haptic feedback as they control computer games by pulling and pressing mud in a box. This experience, of controlling a representation (the game) with haptic touch (the mud) is considered “haptic realism,” first introduced by Mika Elo, professor of artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki. Haptic realism is “[the] role that touching (both in tactile and in affective terms) plays in representations that are conceived as being realistic” (Elo, 2012, p. 20). Haptic realism is an example of a mixed reality framework, where the real-life environment (the mud) augments a virtual experience (the game).
Digital-handicraft is more than a theoretical practice; it operatively expands the materialized (or dematerialized) potential of making. While craft has continually integrated new technologies, advances such as ceramic 3D printing, fabric printers, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routers, and modeling software shift much of the making process to a computer. This shift, between the physical and virtual and back, will continue to trouble the discourse so long as the immaterial labor of physical craft (and the bodily labor of the digital) is ignored. In recognizing the immaterial labor present in both spheres, the digital-handicraft practice decenters the maker as the sole producer of culture. Instead, this praxis shifts emphasis to the labor responsible for machines and tools, materials and transport, decentering the maker as a sole producer and, instead, situating a digital-handicraft practice as inherently collaborative. Expanding fine craft to consider including digital technologies, we open craft to technologies with it has affinities, like robotics, computer modeling, and rapid prototyping.
Within the digital-handicraft practice, haptic touch offers opportunities for makers and users of these objects (and technologies) to engage critically with cultural production. The psychological and experiential value of haptic touch cannot be understated. Within a mixed reality, one can engage with digital objects with ←27 | 28→the same critical experience as physical craft objects. Considering both the human labor inherent in virtual spaces, and the importance of touch upon digital objects, makers can apply critical craft methods to digital objects, and vice versa. Digital objects can benefit from discussions of authenticity and traditional skills, and craft objects can be rendered and edited digitally before a singular print, reducing the traditional need for multiples.
Haptic technologies emerge from and reflect the tacit knowledge of making, pointing to a future of crafted digital objects and spaces. There is a possibility for an aesthetic shift in the virtual field to embrace the messy, unique, and flawed, in the same way craft experienced movements like the Sloppy Craft (Paterson & Surette, 2015), Funk, or DIY. Mixed reality allows for the blurring of aesthetic lines and becomes a site for the digital-handicraft, where makers can sculpt material remaining in the virtual sphere, and could teach tacit knowledge from remote locations. Haptic devices help bridge the boundaries of reality, and introduce opportunities for discoursal disruption.
In the past 20 years, digital spaces, for example, the Internet, built and sustained communities such as the Maker/DIY Movement of the early 2000s. This new wave of craft was among the most democratic in living memory, largely due in part to the movement’s accessibility. The Internet allowed for the democratization of processes and ideas, connecting like-minded people continents apart. Artists, such as Cat Mazza, constructed digitized craftworks like the Nike Blanket Petition (2003–2008) wherein participants knit or crocheted a square of a blanket, sent it to Mazza who assembled the blanket, photographed it, and posted it to a specific URL (Mazza, n.d.) where visitors could scroll over the quilt to see where each square had come from. In the act of running over the surface of the blanket with a cursor, visitors mimic the physical touch of a real encounter.
The need for a more comprehensive consideration of digital-handicraft is clear. Having articulated the similarities between the two discourses and the theoretical and practical links that construct the digital-handicraft field, we turn now to the practical application (and potential complications) of such an idea within education, cultural production, and social justice.
DIGITAL-HANDICRAFT IN PEDAGOGY, ART-MAKING, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Having established the potential for a digital-handicraft practice, the implications of such work have yet to be fleshed out. Intersections between the digital and handmade are rapidly emerging in schools, community spaces, and art galleries as we write. As a relatively new discipline, we focus on pedagogy and social justice as sites for a digital-handicraft practice. Rather than offer concrete solutions for ←28 | 29→an emerging field, this chapter articulates potential themes likely to emerge in the doing of digital-handicraft and speculates on the implications of this practice.
From the beginnings of hypertext to digital humanities, contemporary pedagogies must include the digitally mediated perspective which allows artists and makers to think through innovation, software, materials, and technology design within a cultural context. Artists and makers will play and push the limits of the technologies, often leading to nuanced digital-handicraft aesthetics; it is an artist’s mode to be innovative. While it may appear novel, this sort of cultural creation is nothing new. As Patton and Knochel (2017) put it: “Creating with computational objects may appear to be a new form of material play in the art classroom; however, DIY subcultures have historically played with electronic and mechanical equipment in inventive ways” (p. 37). These exploratory practices had led to the development of new and future materials, like those cataloged in Howes and Laughlin’s Material Matters: New Materials in Design (2012). These material advances include traditional craft materials like metals, glass, and ceramics, but expand to include
