href="#ulink_20e6fb3a-9123-56a9-878f-2de930e98c3c">2009) calls the “materiality of learning” there is a shifting sense of what material does and what accounts for the doing. Many theoretical positions take up distributing agency through forms of the sociomaterial (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011) or the posthuman (Snaza & Weaver, 2015), to augment understandings of learning in digitally-rich networked environments where handcraft and coding coexist. Mary Callahan Baumstark and Theresa Slater meditate on this commingled interaction of new media by teasing out the traditions of hand-craft with digital-handmade practice. In their chapter “Toward A Practice of Digital-Handicraft,” Baumstark and Slater assert craft is a position, rather than a set of practices or materials, developed through tacit feedback. Their chapter explores interaction techniques for touch, including touchless interface and single or multiple finger techniques and how these gestures foster collaborative critical making and practices, particularly between the discourses of the digital and handmade. Positioning handmade-digital practice as historically based in craft and new media theory, with wide-reaching implications for the emergence of digital practices within handmade traditions, a conceptual framework is presented for expanding and complicating the relationships between handmade and digital discourses. These relationships between the digital and handmade assert an awareness of the physical nature of digital technologies eschewing our conceptual relationships between code and plastic bodies.
Lena Berglin and Kasja Eriksson extend this exploration by mangling technical systems through thoughtful play with found technological objects like old speakers and headphones, combining a bricolage approach with do-it-yourself improvisational sound installations. In “Experimental Material-Digital Art Education by Vague Research Studios,” Berglin and Eriksson explore how sound and vibrations extend the movement of air pressure to the material world as tactile sensations. By creating pedagogical experiments based on phenomena like sound, sound waves, and electricity, Vague Research Studios provides examples of collaboration in research and pedagogy rather than learning how to solve predetermined problems.
The ideas of misuse and play as part of Berglin and Eriksson’s art practice are found in many contemporary artistic practices and especially in new media work. Connecting to the theme of formation, it is important to the creative practice of art making and learning that the technology does not prevent possibility through predetermined labels as an instrument. Artists and makers alike are invested in ←6 | 7→opening up technologies, commonly referred to as tinkering or hacking, to explore the possibilities of the technical system in question. Marc Fritzsche’s “Critical Perspectives on 3D Printing in Art Education” is just such an endeavor. Viewed as potentially revolutionizing form of production, Fritzsche examines the opportunities for using 3D printing in art pedagogy. Fritzsche plays with the tension of how to use computers “against the grain,” that is, in artistic ways not foreseen by technicians or programmers subverting discourses of efficiency or manufacturing innovation. Fritzsche questions how can playful, free, and inspiring approaches to technology be established and maintained despite course requirements and standards of practice. In his university seminar course, the question of production becomes an inquiry as opposed to closure of form.
As with many of the authors in this section, materials begin to take on unusual relationships that are disorienting yet serve as powerful provocations to the role of digital media arts in the spaces of learning. Meditations on materials and social practice take on new significance as a form of participatory art engaged in social reconstructionism or a philosophy focused on achieving social change. Sean Justice explores this through his concept of the social interface in the chapter “Designing the Social Interface: More than Social, More than Material.” Justice examines social art practice from a sociomaterial and systems approach. Describing pedagogy as an emergent social/material artifact to be questioned, probed, and even disrupted in everyday practice, particularly in art classrooms, Justice’s chapter illustrates how a critical making prompt invites collaborative engagement. To operationalize the sociomaterial approach for analysis, the author introduces the “interface” as a guiding metaphor for designing social practice in learning environments.
The gesture to focus on the formation of digital objects within a social milieu can take on outright activist intent as was referenced earlier in the aligning of critical praxis, digital making, and activist art. Karen Keifer-Boyd’s “Interactive Visualizations of Relationships that Matter” explores data visualization as a broad term for numerous approaches to present information visually. This chapter describes how critical digital visualizations are used to integrate digital technologies with pedagogical practices to bring awareness of equity and social justice to art spaces. Just as digital materiality asks us to reconsider how the digital and physical world interact, Keifer-Boyd’s framing of visualizations provide a pathway to question the formation of knowledge in as it is imbued with sociocultural meaning.
CO-CONSTRUCTION: FORMING ENTANGLED COMMUNITIES
The integration of digital technologies with pedagogy elevates the entangled nature of coming together both as individuals through technologies and in the ←7 | 8→formation of communities. Forming collectives and giving definition to community forms are of central concern for the theme of co-construction. As Helguera (2011) suggests, socially engaged art is a community-building enterprise focusing on processes that often empower participants. This is different from enabling audience participation, such as Fluxus event scores in the 1960s, due to the increased potential for collaboration and active co-construction of a community. Chapters in this section show a variety of learning communities and community formations through critical digital making. The collected authors find communities in classes and outside of classes, online and offline, in living communities and intergenerational communities, and within disciplines and transdisciplines.
Defining entanglement as the inseparability of community members, the chapters in this section articulate entangled communities. Additionally, the form of community itself includes material and virtual potentials that feminist physicist and philosopher Karen Barad would call entangled agencies (Barad, 2007). Each community member becomes entangled with each other when its production can be conceptualized through co-construction or an agency manifesting in assemblage. In other words, in the entangled space, the interactions of community members and artifacts are crucial to establishing the form and relations present in the community.
One way to observe the entanglement of a community is through its economy and trades. Social practice artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle’s TIME/BANK (2010-present) uses a web portal as an exchange platform bypassing money to offer skill and time-based currency exchanges. The exchange system takes inspiration from other historical actors such as American anarchist Josiah Warren, who ran the Cincinnati Time Store from 1827 until 1830, searching for ways to subvert the translation of all social interactions into forms of capital. Aranda and Vidokle use the currency of time to orchestrate a different set of relations manifest in value exchanges binding participants within a different expression of an economic community (Aranda & Vidokle, 2010–2011). While not dealing in economic exchanges, Susan Whiteland’s chapter “Digital Intergenerational (DIG) Art Club” uses digital making as the agent connecting multi-age partners in forming learning communities. Her university students taught digital drawing using iPad Apps to a group of youth and a group of elderly adults connecting participants virtually by exchanging their digital works to cultivate relationships across members. Their digital works became the currency/agent facilitating the exchange and the entanglement of the intergenerational communities providing a venue to explore the humanness of participants.
The exchanges in a community can also take form through virtual conversation. In the chapter, “Critical Dialogue in the Re/making
