Hack/er/ed/ing by Barbara Smith

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

At the American Craft Council Conference Creating a New Craft Culture, keynote speaker Richard Sennett spoke briefly about the distressing doctrine of user friendly and intuitive products which, he believes, perpetuate laziness and the disinterested use of a “thing.” I began to wonder if “the hack” of material goods, or what I then understood to be “hacking,” was an individual’s direct reaction to this need for involvement in the goods we consume; goods which we supposedly desire to be unable to fix. I wondered if what I considered to be an act of making something had been co-opted by this new social condition and redefined simply as assemblages or detournements. Had the same social and technological forces that had combined to create a culture of hackers also influenced the characteristics of the so-called DIY craft movement? How were these makers and hackers functioning under an umbrella of political activism and craft?

To begin to construct a critical discussion of what is currently termed the Maker/Hacker movement, it is necessary to consider the creation of the Internet and open source technology to establish a starting point for the current social condition of connectivity. These ideas are significant to us today because the current trend of hacking consumer products, or being a maker/hacker, is directly linked to the creation of the Internet and the communities of software hackers who initially formulated the beliefs, politics, and ethics which developed as a result of its creation.

While “hacking” has always existed in some form, for our purposes, the clearest foundation of the Maker/Hacker movement is found in the tinkering of ham radio operators and the modding of cars in the 1920’s. In 1969, the earliest incarnation of the internet appeared. The 1970’s saw major universities utilizing email applications to connect individuals. This development later gave birth to a community of computer and software hackers who operated under the philosophy of hacker ethics; a ideology which included collaborative working methods, open exchange of information, and challenging bureaucracies who sought to limit this free exchange of information. In 1991, The World Wide Web first appeared, making our current social condition of connectivity a little less than 20 years old (Chandler). This period also produced the new media boom, or the creation of self-authoring software, which allowed individuals to edit their own photographs and videos, blog, and create web pages. These advances in technology resulted in a lasting cultural and structural impact. Society embraced the heightened sense of interactivity and self-authorship desktop computing allowed. By 1999, new media, the dot-com boom, open source technologies like the Linux operating system, and hacker ethics officially reached the mainstream.

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Today’s privileged moment of interconnectivity and self-authorship has given rise to makers and hackers, both of which function within the ethos of post-production, and utilize the internet as the expression of supposedly subversive and avant gardist creative endeavors. Without this distinction, I would have to believe that I’ve been both DIY and a hacker all my life without knowing it; I’ve been subversively undermining capitalist society when I fix an appliance, sew clothing, knit a scarf, and wire up my rusted out muffler. I did all of these things, often in creative ways, but never thought to post them on online forums so an unlimited number of anonymous browsers could see that I had indeed done these things. Without a community, or network, the Maker/Hacker movement in its truest and most modern form could not exist. Online communities, such as Hack a Day and IKEAhack, enable individuals to operate dialogically by freely dispersing information to large groups of people quickly and easily. Hackers place their ideas into the public domain to collaboratively build an idea and democratize user innovation, helping to drive a user centered marketplace. DIY makers become “hobbypreneurs” who embrace notions of ethical consumerism and create niche markets and customized products (Intuit). Makers connect with customers both online and through events such as Maker Faire; networks become the most important source of meaning. Various forums, such as Etsy labs and craftzine.com, provide a place for free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and skillsets. This being the case, the internet serves to amplify our own social tendencies as humans; both hacking and DIY become a theater of production where an audience is both needed and required, where the individual work is not as important as the collective effort, and where the network, not the work, has aura.

Are the notions of a bottom up capitalism which promotes ethics over profits through hacking and making idealistic? Has the methodology of these movements become an aesthetic or a trend as it has been appropriated into the marketplace? Is the hacking of consumer goods and the DIY craft community acting critically, politically, or disingenuously?

These questions reflect a difficulty in ascertaining intent amid a flurry of websites, books, terms, films, articles, and lectures on this subject. It becomes challenging to tell practice from practicality; to tell social from cultural from economic. This fluidity promotes what Lane Relyea calls a “premature triumphalism.” This outcome plagues many social movements whose 1960’s style utopianesque rhetoric creates an artificially heightened sense of expectations. At the ACC conference, I repeatedly noted that the DIY discourse suddenly merged with Feminism, the Green movement, and the Bicycle movement without clearly articulating this tenuous relationship. Certain parties believe a revolution is coming; their social system has been identified as superior if only for the short term. A critical observer recognizes the “premature triumphalism” Relyea cites. Victory has been claimed too soon.

Post-production allows an escape from interpretations, as well as an escape from the critic, as artists opt for experimentation and construction over deconstruction. Along these lines, French philosopher Bruno Latour notes that the present day role of the critic is “…not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles…[the critic is] the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” ( Abstract Hacktivism 28). My experience at the American Craft Council Conference showed me that DIY embraces such a doctrine: democratic and judgment free. For the Maker/Hacker movement to put itself forward as a subculture, as culture jammers, as grassroots activists of the everyday, as purveyors of ethical consumption, as writers of craftifestos, as creators of craft mafias, as yarn bombers, as something inherently political, they show that within this craft conversation there is something lacking. It is the political undertones which both groups embrace that have earned them the labels of Hacktivism and Craftivism respectively. The addition of the “vism” denotes the political and points to the missing element: An important component to any successful political movement is debate and criticism.

While cognizant of activist minded work such at Cat Mazza’s Nike Petition Blanket, in considering the Craftifesto by Amy Carlton and Cinnamon Cooper, I am struck by the appearance of a remixing of feminist theory, the heavily female demographic of DIY, and the use of women’s handicrafts such as knitting and cross stitch. I submit that much of DIY and Craftivism are operating under the assumption that “the personal is political.” This phrase, which was taken from a collaborative essay by Carol Hanisch in 1969, is often misinterpreted to mean that every personal choice, action, and inaction is fundamentally political. Considering the embattled quote in context, I interpret the phrase to describe women’s acts of consciousness-raising as a method to understand and challenge various power relationships. It was through these realizations that women could begin to recognize the potential for change, gain voice, and enact their own liberation. The mid 90’s saw this phrase become a slogan as it was co-opted by conservatives to promote personal sources of social change which resembled (but did not challenge) ideological structures and social values already in place (Hill Collins 170). This change in the definition of the personal is political, marked a change from Hanisch’s Marxist ideals of group struggle to an acceptance of individuals working within capitalist structures to profit in the marketplace. This shift resembles the creation of bottom up capitalism, of ethical consumerism and the creation of elitist niche markets by “hobbypreneurs”, of hackers and makers collaborating with large corporations to produce trendy new goods. Opportunistic semantics hide an ahistorical consumption of goods, handmade or otherwise, which are not necessarily political, subversive, or avant garde. Shopping as activism functions as borderline slacktivism. Anything existing in the mainstream cannot be subversive. True avant gardism lasts only until recognized.

In a generation of people who have come to age within a social condition of self-authoring software, interconnectivity, immediacy, social networking, and gadgetry, and are now faced with increasingly sophisticated and miniaturized technologies presented to them in uncustomizable goods, I postulate that what maker/hackers are really doing is bringing the condition of the everyday into plain sight by transforming the previously disregarded. Their approach to online forums and collaborative working methodologies highlights a fundamental human need: our propensity to form communities. These are not necessarily critical spaces. Hacktivism, which supposedly creates a conscious awareness of commonplace consumer goods, works within the formulaic design trend of sampling. The “handmade” often becomes a gimmick in this realm. Instead of embracing the entire spectrum of Hacktivism, Craftivism, and DIY as automatically political or subversive, we need to reintroduce a discussion of process and practice with vocabulary that provides a framework for reflection and self-criticism. DIY is a lifestyle and a trend; it is part of consumer culture. If we accept without question that it is indeed political or hermetic, we are complicit in activism as novelty; we forgo revolution for modification.

According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas, authors of the recent book Abstract Hacktivism, in this moment of interconnectedness, we must go beyond Derrida, beyond binary oppositions, and beyond Baudrillard’s simulacra. I conclude that we must begin to think relationally instead of oppositionally. This is not a struggle of the old versus the new or the institution against the individual but a call for a critical discussion of craft, a dissection of semantics, and an attempt to intelligently quantify a moment socially, culturally, and artistically. We need more than a building up; we need criticality. We need to be able to deconstruct what is built, we need to act responsibly, and we need to be able to (and do) make value judgments about how we use information, what we make with it, and how what we make functions in the world.

BARB SMITH received her B.A. in Fine Arts and Art Education from Purdue University in 2003 and her M.A. in Photography and Related Media from Purdue University in 2005.  After teaching jewelry, metals, and design at Purdue University for three years, she moved to New York to study under Jamie Bennett and Myra Mimlitsch-Gray at the State University of New York-New Paltz. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Metal in 2010.

Works Cited

Chandler, David L. Who ‘Created’ the Internet? It’s a Tangled Web. The Boston Globe. October 2000. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/nett20.shtml. Accessed 12/6/09.

Hill Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Temple University Press, Feb. 2006.

Lane Relyea: Bricoluer as Entrepreneur. SMAC: scribemedia art culture, May 27, 2009. Accessed 12/15/09. http://www.smac.us/2009/05/27/lane-relyea/

Research Brief: Today’s Hobbyists are Tomorrow’s Hobbeypreneurs. Intuit Future of Small Business Report, Dec. 2009. Accessed 01/11/10. http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/ifosb_hobbyists_report.pdf

Von Busch, Otto and Karl Palmas. Abstract Hacktivism: The Making of a Hacker Culture. http://www.scribd.com/doc/21277/Otto-von-Busch-AbstractHacktivism. Accessed 12/6/09.

July 12, 2010 | admin | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »

Lacquer’s latency by Matthew Larking

‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ (1998)

‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ (1998)

‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ (1998)

Kenji Toki (b.1969) took his Master of Arts in the lacquer section of Kyoto University of Arts in 1996 though he has been exhibiting in dozens of group and solo exhibitions since 1992 and international shows since 1995. His work is a hybrid of craft and design that also engages fine art, photography and architectural installation. While he uses software applications and rapid prototyping to arrive at finished works, he considers this less a break with long held craft traditions than a fusion of lacquer with technology. He positions himself as the present manifestation of the spirit of progressive kogei he discerns in Japanese lacquer since the 7th century. Indeed, he considers his computer a ‘craft tool.’

In pursuing a concept of progressive tradition, Toki overturns long held ideas about lacquer. It is conventionally used to coat the kind of tableware objects kept and used indoors. The novelist Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) wrote of lacquer in his eccentric aesthetic treatise, ‘In Praise of Shadows’ (1993), that darkness was indispensable to its beauty. Toki, however, for the Kyoto Art Festival (1998), created curved lacquer sheets called ‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ that were elevated above the ground and arranged along a bridge that spanned a pond. The purpose of such a setting was to bring the craft out of the shadows so that lacquer’s brilliant color could be appreciated. It was also a mild riposte to objections about keeping lacquer out of direct sunlight due to the damage it causes the surface, dulling its sheen. Toki’s work, too, chimed suggestively with his inspiration, form and material. The lacquer sheets were inspired by the surface of water and their evident droplet shapes further conspired. Lacquer too is a liquid material that hardens by chemical reaction with moisture. It was perhaps fortuitous that the exhibition coincided with Japan’s rainy season.

‘Form for Wish’ (1999)

‘Form for Wish’ (1999)

Kenji Toki ‘Form for Wish’ (1999)

While previous work was intimate, works like ‘Form for Wish’ (1999) in the collection of Ayabe City, Kyoto Prefecture, assumed a monumental scale. Once again Toki coated the abstract work with his trademark red lacquer, but used carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) to create the form. Such fiber is more often used for applications in the aerospace and automotive industries. It helps  Toki achieve a thinner, stronger and lighter construction. ‘Form for Wish’ is approximately six meters high, a centimeter thick, but weighs merely seven kilograms. The uptake of the material seems like a shift away from tradition, but Toki notes that practically any surface can be covered in lacquer, and part of his attraction to the space-age material is that there are no preconceptions of how the material may be put to use. The form further reengages traditional lacquer craft ideas through an attention to the molding of the surface.

‘Latency#9’ (design process) (2003/4)

‘Latency#9’ (design process) (2003/4)

Kenji Toki ‘Latency#9’ (design process) (2003/4)

Latency Concept

Latency Concept

Kenji Toki Latency Concept

‘Latency#8’ (2003/4)

‘Latency#8’ (2003/4)

Kenji Toki ‘Latency#8’ (2003/4)

Since 2002 Toki has conducted his artistic research in computer assisted design (CAD) and rapid prototyping to search out the implications of new technology for craft in his hybrid digital/hand practice. Toki extracted curves based upon the natural forms of leaves and entered these into computer software where he created a seamless surface between the lines. He then used the automatic construction process of rapid prototyping which converts a design into a solid object through the build up of layers. These layers are sliced in the CAD model and that data directs a laser on to the surface of a tank of photosensitive resin. Where the laser strikes, the resin solidifies. The layers accrete into a final form which is then coated in lacquer by Toki. The point of these experiments, which Toki calls ‘Latency,’ was to arrive at forms mechanically created though finished by hand. These were based on nature, though not found in it. The result was something that also retained connection to traditional lacquer ideas of flowing curvature, lightness, organicity and a certain cleanliness.

‘Forms that are too fine to waste - Chicken Thighs’ (2006)

‘Forms that are too fine to waste - Chicken Thighs’ (2006)

Kenji Toki ‘Forms that are too fine to waste - Chicken Thighs’ (2006)

Further reference to mechanical construction arrived in a series of individually produced and hand finished copies exhibited at Kyoto’s Gallery Gallery in 2009. These works took their formal cue from the mass produced polystyrene trays found in supermarkets for food packaging and display. Toki’s trays are again homage to mechanical reproduction and traditional craft. He uses his computer to generate an object as a body for lacquer and he uses his superlative lacquer coating skills to create objects which are almost perceptually indistinguishable from the visual and formal characteristics they ape. Indeed, Toki compares his lacquer application to both the skill of the painter, and his minute and precise hand movements to the precision of digital measures.

Traditional lacquer production fell into decline in 19th and 20th centuries as it could not compete with the mechanical production methods that turned out copious quantities of inexpensive products for a receptive and burgeoning consumer class. Toki, however, inverses that trend, utilizing technology to produce individual mechanically produced works which straddle a virtual-handcraft divide. Such an inversion allows Toki to individualize the reproducible.

Matthew Larking is a lecturer at Kyoto Notre Dame University, Kyoto, Japan, and has written as an art critic for The Japan Times since 2002.

All images courtesy of Kenji Toki http://www.kenjitoki.com/

May 23, 2010 | MatthewLarking | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

A Copy as Woodblock Print by Claire Cuccio

There is no place better to contemplate the valuation of a copy than on the second floor of a timeworn house behind Kyoto’s Gion district—the home of the Satō Woodblock Printing Workshop. Here making copies is business, but in Satō’s workshop, copying is still handcraft, codified as dentō kōgei ( ‘traditional art craft’) by the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, the same classification of craft explored in the journal’s current issue. Despite its institutional classification with other traditional Japanese art crafts, Satō’s handcraft is diminished by its final product, duplicates. Satō’s finished products are naturally the most accessible, tangible and therefore customary means by which to assess value, but like all works designated broadly as copies, they are devalued along the original/copy binary. But what if we invert the priority and privilege process over final product?

Take the ukiyo-e series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) that includes the iconic prints The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Red Fuji. Under the supervision of a publisher, the original series was designed by Katsushika Hokusai and produced in collaboration with a team of woodblock carvers and printers between 1826-1833 in the latter years of the Edo period. Reproducing such canonical ukiyo-e series constitutes one mainstay that keeps the shingle hanging outside traditional Japanese woodblock printing workshops like Satō’s. Reprints of Hokusai’s Fuji series are sought not simply to satisfy enduring consumer demand for the visual frames that merge landmark, landscape and daily life, but also as manifestations of the virtuoso display of woodblock techniques that reached their apex in Hokusai’s era: the multitude of straight and curving hairpin-thin lines carved in relief; the layering of primary-color pigments printed as many as 20 times over to achieve different hues, tones and degrees of saturation; gradations of color finessed through various styles of the technique known as bokashi, among others.

Commercially speaking, Satō Keizō maintains a sharp distinction between ukiyo-e reproductions divided between two broad categories: fukuseiban, literally “re-manufactured prints” implying machine production, and fukkokuban, whose expression swaps “manufacture” with the Chinese character for “carve” (koku) to generate something like a “re-carved print.” Satō believes that the presence of the human hand in the latter expression indicates a genuine remaking of the original imprint, and he and his team of three printers produce high-quality, exclusive reprint editions referred to as fukkokuban for their Tokyo and Kyoto publishers.

What is the process that Satō and his printers engage in when creating contemporary reprints of Hokusai’s Edo period originals? Their initial challenge is an analytical one: how to reproduce the remarkable effects of the originals. More precise, how do they create reprints without access to the exact materials and the same depth of experience that Edo master printers once passed down through full branches of uninterrupted lines of apprentices? They convene for candid, collegial consultation, pooling their knowledge to discern what combination of their techniques is most likely to achieve the effects in the original—defined in this case by first-edition prints pulled from woodblocks carved from these first-edition prints (shohanbon). When the publisher does not supply the paper to keep within a certain budget, they palpably examine the original paper in order to match it with their own paper selection by color, weight, texture and fiber count. In the next critical step of colorant analysis: the printers do not necessarily reproduce the colors as they actually see them in the original in front of them. Depending upon the condition of the original, the pigments actually range from faded tones to a nearly pristine brightness. Satō’s approach then is to select new pigments that match or at least closely mimic the qualities of the original colorants, while at the same time, diverging to mix shades of color imbued with faded tones. That is, the color in his copy incorporates a derivative blend of authenticity with a contemporary preference for more muted colors than those that would be found in the original in new condition.

The actual process of printing begins only after the arrival of original woodblocks from the publisher’s storage or of new blocks commissioned from a local carver that he generates from original Hokusai prints. Satō’s printers inaugurate the printing process by mixing small portions of five water-based powder pigments (ganryō) in red, yellow, sepia and two varieties of blue in addition to the basic black sumi. The team wets down high-quality, handmade paper known as hōsho, a variety of washi made of mulberry fiber time-tested to withstand multiple woodblock impressions. They arrange the paper and pigments around their workspace along with a bowl of nori, rice-starch paste that is mixed with the pigments to impart depth and hold, and a variety of specialized brushes for distributing the pigment, among other accoutrements. With swift orchestration of pigment and nori atop a block followed by careful alignment of a sheet of paper onto the block, each print is pulled from each block, layering one color at a time through the power of the hand that wields the traditional circular baren. For the observer, the hand printing stimulates awe in the utter consistency of color and effects across an average run of 70-100 prints, the same consistency that also must run across the 46 different prints in the entire Hokusai series.

Awe, of course, is normally the preserve of an original piece of art. And producing a reprint of an original ukiyo-e print merely yields a copy, doesn’t it? More than a century of technological improvements that have led to automated image production has demystified and simplified the process of producing a polychrome printed copy. The smooth regularity of a color-calibrated electronic copy renders superfluous the analytical process of the eye and the hand as well as the selection and regulation of materials required in traditional hand produced prints.

But deconstructing the process of producing a reprint of an original woodblock print on the second floor of the Satō house beyond Gion reveals the art in the copy. Embedded within is a storehouse of human capital that combines material and technical analysis with creative problem solving, physical strength and mental diligence. These qualities do not transcend the content of the artist’s original, but they honor and stand up to the original, and are valid, forceful expressions of materiality in themselves. Inverting the appreciation of a copy to begin with process also calls for participation in a practice that becomes ritualistic for both participant and observer as it approaches history and authenticity.

Claire Cuccio is an independent scholar based in Kobe, Japan, writing on woodblock craft and printmaking in China and Japan.

May 22, 2010 | Claire Cuccio | Tags: , , , | No Comments »
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