Vital Media by Michael Nitsche

Author:Michael Nitsche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media studies; design; media design; interaction design; HCI; performance; craft; digital media; digital folk; new materialism; material culture; hybrid craft; digital performance
Publisher: MIT Press

4    Recentering

This section turns to craft to focus on making and productive practices that highlight the personal encounter with varied materials, each of them having their own specific qualities and abilities. Ehren Tool’s practice is deceptively simple: he makes cups, adorns them, and gives them away. One of these cups serves as the opening example in discussing his practice and history as it tells a multilayered story and offers an example for craft as a critical material encounter.

The critical turn to craft research avoids a revivalist stance. It approaches craft as a form of physical making and critical reflection. Craft scholars such as Peter Dormer (1997), Glenn Adamson (2007, 2013), and Edward Lucie-Smith (1981) assist in a definition of craft, which emerges as cocreative material practices that are based on needs and that further individuation.

Need—the immediate necessity of an acting partner—is tackled first. Differentiating craft from other domains Howard Risatti (2007) defines craft through a framework of need. I will adjust this idea to recognize that needs apply to materials as much as to humans before turning to the emerging crafted objects. Diversity stands out as a quality that includes valuable traces of a shared material culture. But objects as traces of human activity cannot be the end point of this craft exploration. Instead, I will return to making as a form of coemergence and shared becoming. Such a collaboration rejects conclusions and requires time and openness. We return to Simondon to discuss interdependent individuation, a key quality that craft can foster and that leads us to recognize the importance of surprise and improvisation.

Starting with Richard Sennett (2008) and Dormer, the next section discusses how these processes can remain critical and open-ended through the steps of encounter, exploration, and collaboration. These principles lead us to educational approaches and craft’s relation to critical making.

Finally, the work of Amit Zoran serves as a concluding example of a critical hybrid craft practice. Zoran combines digital fabrication techniques with traditional craft methods to create objects with new qualities and stories. His “hybrid assemblage” pieces serve as a possible practice that recognizes the differences, combines them, yet refuses to resolve them.

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