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Toward a Practice of Digital-Handicraft

M.C. BAUMSTARK AND THERESA SLATER

This chapter speculates emergent themes in the practice of the digital-handicraft, a hybridized field of making by considering the sense of touch, and its implications in interdisciplinary artmaking, new pedagogical models, and alternative modes of organizing and resisting. We begin by acknowledging affinities between craft and digital, recognizing ways that multiple hybrid digital-handicraft practices challenge the false binaries of hand and/or machine. Then, we examine ways the sense of touch functions as critical feedback in order to explore the intersections between hand-making and digital labor, calling attention to tacit knowledge, traditional teaching methods, and digital prosthesis. Haptic technologies are key to this emergent practice, allowing users to touch digital objects, deepening the continuous 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.