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In the first section of the book, the collected chapters focus on the formation of digital texts where process and materials are integral to critical digital making. Important to this thread are elements of material meaning extending aesthetics and pedagogy, beyond instrumentalism, and more into the material performance of digital media. Digital materiality is a conceptual exploration of matter’s impact in our world by consolidating the physical with the virtual. Despite being wrapped in computer algorithms, digital objects are inextricably linked to our physical environments creating symbiotic, relational, and performative ontologies commingling in digital and physical realities. A prime example of this is Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke’s edited 3D Addivist Cookbook (2015) showcasing the critical practices of over 100 artists working with digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing. The 3D Addivist Cookbook takes a critical perspective on these technologies by asking questions about what technological innovations allow us to make, and to question, reshape, and critique these technologies through art practice. The portmanteau of “additive” and “activism” frames “movement concerned with critiquing ‘radical’ new technologies in fablabs, workshops, and classrooms; at social, ecological, and global scales” questioning “whether it’s possible to change the world without also changing ourselves, and what the implications are of taking a position” (Morehshin & Rourke, 2015, para 3). Allahyari and Rourke’s focus on these performative aspects shows a conceptual shift comprehending the impact to digital aesthetics and pedagogy must be in tandem with its existence in a material world. Formation is at the nexus between the material and the digital with an awareness of digital making’s effect ←5 | 6→in the world, doing something commensurate with our bodies, social environments, and classrooms.

It is precisely in these forms of material and code that informs research surrounding digital making and arts learning. Whether it is Kylie Peppler’s (2010) notion of media arts or Robert Sweeny’s (2015) focus on new media art education, contemporary digital learning and media scholars are mapping out ways old and new technologies collide in spaces of learning and society. In what Estrid Sørensen (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.