Podcasts
Patrick Harrop University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
This podcast is intended for educational use only.
It would be difficult to dispute that we are now living at a moment when the fusion of digital technology and craft is revealing a potentially endless array of complex and difficult formal topologies. Material craft has now embraced the potential of the once highly restrictive industrial production that ordained a modular limitation to formal invention, has now evolved into a flexible and adaptable manufacturing strategy liberated by CNC (computer numerical control).
The success of this new technology is contingent on the absolute subordination of a homogeneous substrate. While this may seem to point to an unprecedented material liberty, it does present a problem: We make by challenging and resisting material. It in turn, it reveals an intentional resistance that provokes a cycle of challenges and resistances. When geometry is challenged by aberrant materials, craft is forced into pattern of innovative discovery generated by the imperfection.
How then, do we integrate the indeterminate cycle of craft and invention into a design process transformed by tools entirely reliant on prediction and the (virtual and real) homogeneity of materials? If we look to the traditional use of Techne, an inert and impassive material is by far the worst prerequisite for making. In fact, in order for the cycle of craft to occur, the material must be animate and responsive.
This paper reflects on the nature of material craft in realm of digital fabrication. It will look both at the history and the contemporary opportunity of generative art, automata, responsive technology and its subversive (yet essential) relationship to contemporary making. Aberrent Traces: Provoking Generative Form in Animate Materials.
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L'auteur explore la relation complexe entre la manipulation des matériaux, manipulation matérielle d'une part, et numérique d'autre part, et les effet de cette fusion sur la fabrication d'objets de métiers d'art contemporain.