The Virtual Craft Conspiracy

Dateline: 06/15/98

raft has been around for a long time. You might consider African pottery, fired in campfires, golden jewelry of the Incas or ancient Egyptians, glass from Phoenecia or Syria. One could go on: the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Etruscans, the Vikings etc. Fundamentally craft has changed little since those times. The social circumstances of craft have undergone huge changes - from the work out of necessity of 'primitive cultures' to the aestheticism of the Greeks, from the artistry of the middle ages to the craft revival of the 19th C, to the studio craftsperson of the 20th. But when we look at the techniques, little has changed. Pottery is fired in kilns, glass is heated in furnaces and mouth-blown, metals are hammered and wood is lathed, etc. The rise of electricity and the advent of electric wheels, kilns and lathes has done little to change the essence of craft - the immediate action of our hands on our chosen material.

In the second half of the 20th C, the single most revolutionary technological development has been the invention of information processing systems: computers. We are living in an information age. As processing power becomes cheaper, it becomes more widespread and accessible. Today an average citizen in western society can buy a computer system with more processing power than originally installed in the MIR space station. The fist computers built (who remembers hole cards?) cost millions of dollars and had less processing power than todays palm-tops. Thanks to this ubiquity of computers, more and more craftspeople are becoming computer literate and are looking for ways to incorporate this new tool into their craft practice. The result is a new breed of craft: virtual craft.

What is virtual craft? The first thought that comes to mind is CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design/ Computer Aided Manufacturing). CAD/CAM has been aiding industrial design for decades and many craftspeople have delved into the area, some quite successfully. CAD/CAM could be seen as an intermediate stage between craft and virtual craft. But virtual craft is not just the use of computers to design for industrial production. Virtual craft is a new hybrid wanting to generate art and craft works valid in their own right. An example of this is the rendering of virtual ceramics using 3D modeling programs. The resultant images become an art or craft object in themselves, inhabiting a virtual space. Because we can free ourselves from the constraints of the material world, we are able to introduce new, hitherto impossible factors into our work. The possibilities of negating gravity, introducing mathematical formulae, creating virtual surfaces from any image source, linking into historical or cartographic data, modeling virtual worlds, stereo imaging, animation, Web sites, not to mention the many possible combinations of these, give us a new set of tools to view and reinterpret craft. Thus craft may enter a new dimension and begin to inhabit information space.

Virtual craft may exist in virtual spaces, such as the screen or the Internet. Virtual reality Modeling Language enables us to create virtual worlds inhabited with the virtual objects we have created. These scenes can be explored to help us visualise objects or broaden our horizon and generate new ideas. Virtual craft may also find expression in material art or craft objects. By scanning in photos of our work, we can manipulate shapes, surfaces, combine, reduce, deduct etc. The resulting images can be transformed back into a medium which can be incorporated into a physical work, e.g. by printing ceramic decals or by generating objects using such high-tech methods as stereo lithography or rapid prototyping.

The philosophy behind this type of hybrid work is not mere CAD/CAM - few of the works of this type would lend themselves to industrial production. Virtual craft is not about the use of the computer as another design or production aid, but about using 'new technologies' to broaden the horizon of traditional crafts practice, to create new and unforeseen methods, objects and styles. Some have objected to calling this work 'craft'.

Is there a virtual craft conspiracy afoot? No, virtual craftspeople are not conspiring to kill craft. They continue to create traditional craft objects. No one is talking about jettisoning traditional craft practice in favour of 21st C industrial techniques. We have already seen the results of the industrialisation of the crafts, with their culmination in styrofoam cups and bubble-gum jewelry. Craft will not die, at least not at the hands of the virtual craft artist. What science and technology may come up with in the future will be another matter entirely. A time will come when we will be able to choose a craft object from a machine - a 'craft replicator'. Such a machine, similar to the 'kitchen' seen in the Star Trek mess hall, would rearrange the molecules in the air, materialising the desired, pre-programmed object of your choice before your eyes. Fantasy? With the development of nano-technology we are already moving in this direction. Then, we will really have to reassess the role of the craftsperson.