PART IIII — Metaphors to Making

8 minute read

Figure IIII.1 | William Cromar, cromar-luddites@Jul_9_10.49.09_2013, using Cornelia Solfrank's website Net Art Generator.   The image generator was programmed by Panos Galanis of IAP, and automatically collages a number of images gleaned from the web, in this instance 6 images found in response to the title "luddites." Here, this image was generated from the following sites:   ludditelink.org.uk :: view aes-humanities8.wikispaces.com :: view bookpalace.com :: view wikimedia.org :: view gawkerassets.com :: view oxford-royale.co.uk :: view

A smart artist makes the machine do all the work. – Cornelia Solfrank^[1]

Artists are makers, but what do they make? Something tangible? Conceptual? In the contemporary era, processes of making have been batted around between craft (creation by hand), industrial process (creation by machine) and concept (supremacy of idea over object). While there remains a tendency to authenticate and validate a work of art by recognizing the hand of the artist in its production, increasing numbers of artists embrace the industrial and conceptual as valid touchstones for making. Throw in the digital, now, and what does it mean to make something? This debate begins about two centuries ago...

Revolution...

The Industrial Revolution brought many benefits, but for some craftsman, it brought obsolescence of skills and loss of status. Around 1811, a movement sprang up among weavers who objected to automated looms, operated by a cheap and unskilled labor force, being introduced into the English textile industry. The weavers took Ned Ludd, a legendary chap who had reportedly destroyed a knitting machine a generation earlier, as their mythical leader in a frenzy of machine breaking that ultimately led to military intervention. Luddites, as they came to be known, have since symbolized fear of technological change, but this association misrepresents their anxieties. In The Making of the English Working Class, historian E. P. Thompson quotes news accounts of the day:

They broke only the frames of such as have reduced the price of men's wages; those who have not lowered the price, have their frames untouched; in one house, last night, they broke four frames out of six; the other two which belonged to masters who had not lowered their wages, they did not meddle with.^[2]

This reportage suggests the Luddites were acting from a sense of economic self-preservation rather than a blind fear of change, and were by their actions critiquing a social policy of free-market wage deflation. Thompson suggests they would have been unconcerned about adopting new processes if they could keep their livelihood.

Social critique of the Industrial Revolution came from designers as well as craftsmen. The artist and critic William Morris, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, called for a rejection of the shoddy products and working conditions of the industrial milieu and a return to quality, traditional craftsmanship and making. The Arts and Crafts Movement was a somewhat utopian social ideal spurning industrialism, but it became a prelude to Modernism with its call for simple quality and honest use of materials. It inspired designers worldwide, including Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, Art Nouveau in France, and even the beginnings of the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus began as a merger of the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde's Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Soon after Walter Gropius took the helm, it began to reconcile the Arts and Crafts values of material integrity, simplicity and quality with the processes and aesthetic of the machine. Additionally, it leveled the hierarchy among all makers: fine artist and craftsmen had equal status in the curriculum.

Meanwhile, Marcel Duchamp changed the terms of artmaking forever with the factory-produced Readymade Fountain, in a deliciously subversive linkage between the industrial and the conceptual.

By the 60's the tendency to embrace the industrial came to full flower with Donald Judd, who did not build his own work but rather specified it via working drawing to be constructed in a factory. Artists such as Sol LeWitt, who also rejected outright the validation of the artist's hand, declared the idea behind each work to surpass the work itself, and Joseph Kosuth claimed that art is not making work, but making concept.

In the meantime, Robert Mallary began a search for the means toward a technical revolution in art. Better known for his Neo-Dada found object assemblages, around 1967 he collaborated on a computer program named TRAN2, which his website describes as:

... a computer graphics program with twenty sub-routines to generate sculpture. The program presupposes a means of compiling form description data for use by the computer. This is done by breaking down the solid into a regular series of parallel cross sections, or contour “slices,” which are then graphed and digitized as X, Y and Z coordinates and transferred to punch cards. A sequence of mathematical transformation procedures is brought to bear on the contour sections whereby the computer, in effect, models and reshapes the contour sections into an original sculpture. The computer plotter reproduces a series of perspective views of the generated form together with a complete set of the transformed contour sections. These are used as patterns to complete the sculpture in some appropriate material. ^[3]

In short, he creates a primitive form of 3D printing, as seen in Figure IIII.2. By using the computer to "fill in the blanks," Mallary opens the door to the concept now being explored by many contemporary digital artists: creating a process through which work can self-organize. Andrew Kudless (Matsys) and David Fletcher proposed the Resonant Field (Figure IIII.3) for the Jardins de Metis in Canada. Mounds are created at a self-forming angle of equipoise, seeded with local flora, and left to evolve itself into a unique ecology. Cornelia Solfrank (Figure IIII.1) pushes the boundary of auto-organization even further, allowing the view to set the terms of art self-generation in the Net Art Generator project.

Figure IIII.2 left | Robert Mallary, Quad IV, 1968   Figure IIII.3 above | Matsys and Fletcher Studio, Resonant Field, 2009

What does it mean for a work to make itself?  The presence of the hand of the artist may not validate it, but the presence of the mind of the artist does. We find that presence in the script that determines the form, not the form itself.

... or Evolution

In this section we explore software primarily through metaphors to making. The terms for making in art—drawing, sculpture, photography, cinema, performance art and so forth—are well established, but jargon-laden and specialized. If you are unfamiliar with cinema, and you land in a territory of animation that's informed by cinematic metaphor, you quickly become lost. A metaphor is meaningless if not perceived.

Some softwares wear their metaphors to making on their sleeves: Photoshop is clearly organized around a darkroom metaphor. But how many Photoshop users who have never stepped in a darkroom understand the dodge or burn tools? Further, how many understand there are as many painting metaphors as there are photographic in this robust, game-changing tool?

This portion of the text exists to familiarize the modeler with artistic processes of making and their metaphorical extensions into digital practice. It turns out modeling integrates a broad range of art practice, from drawing through performance art, from craft through concept. Rather than obsoleting previous means of making, modeling synthesizes and evolves them into something utterly new, yet recognizable—if we know the metaphors! This knowledge allows the digital artist to become Solfrank's smart artist...