Article for Digital Creativity, December 2000
"Digit to the Digital”
Integrating computer aided design into the craft of contemporary jewellery
Stephen Bottomley, December 2000
Today the computer more than any other piece of technology epitomizes modern life.i
My project is to work with the technology of today and make jewellery that is inspired and informed by this digital revolution.
Developments in science and engineering often act as a catalyst to the creative arts, yet in the applied arts where skills and techniques are ingrained in traditional training, there is often a reticence to embrace new technology. The more traditional way for a creative jeweller to train has been to develop a vocabulary for their work through the exploration and reinterpretation of existing techniques and materials, yet this ignores the movements of our age such as computer aided design (CAD) and manufacturing technologies, (CAM), which are transforming the world about us. What are the implications for art and craft as atoms become replaced by digital signals and the physicality of reproduction becomes a 'virtual' on screen experience? ii The advantages and disadvantages for our art and craft of applying computer aided design need to be explored and hopefully this will result in a better understanding of the senses which we so naturally rely on to design and create objects of applied art.
Fundamental values of artistic endeavor, labour, material and intricacy have remained unchallenged within the crafts world for centuries and have become synonymous with how we value the objects of the past. The advent of digital technology presents the greatest development to our working practice since the Industrial Revolution. I can not imagine a more challenging or exciting time for the artist or crafts person, or, for the future of craft and design, than to see what can be made tomorrow with these tools of today.
Rapid prototyping, (RP), that accompanies the twin digital technologies of CAD and CAM, can turn intangible digital data into physical objects, the virtual to the real, in hours rather than the weeks it would have traditionally taken by hand. Have hand skills evolved from the ‘digit to the digital’?
The rapid prototyping process’s, which include; thermojet wax modelers, stereolithography, selective layer sintering, laminated object manufacture and fused deposition modelling, offer an alternative to making objects through long and laborious hand process’s that have become synonymous with craft iii.
Touch is a vital sense from which we derive thousands of haptic responses with it we can make informed mental decisions, our own complex machinery of the hand, the heart and the eye. Together these three form the sacred trinity that Ruskin championed in the late 19th Century and which formed the pillars of craft practice and doctrine for the century to follow. Touch is vital, yet is only one of the three senses and from what we have witnessed at the end of the 20th Century there is a sustained challenge to not only the sacred trinity but to all structures and barriers between disciplines. In the modern world where we are bombarded every day with the imagery, reality and fiction which has become so interchangeable that it has almost lost its ability to surprise us any more, the eye and the mind have surely already gained a new position of authority.
The computer as an art and design tool is the natural champion of this age and crosses effortlessly between genres, be they film, fine art, craft, science or mathematics. It is a truly universal media. The balance of these three key skills can be reevaluated and the potential for involving the imagination and eyes more as a means of fabrication explored. The computer environment provides a weightless environment where considerations of scale, mass and time can be removed from the equation. Here the tyranny of repetitive mindless labour can on one hand be removed and simultaneously replaced with the potential to develop the most intricate and complex mathematical forms thanks to the number crunching capability of a computer processors. This is the enigma of computer aided design that it can deal with the laborious and mundane seemingly effortlessly and provide the potential to revisit moments of design and undo wrong turns. In short it provides the capability "for combining the skilful hand with the reasoning mind".iv
What proto typing should supply the designer/maker with is an invaluable process with which to refine and improve ideas of form and style in a quicker, more accurate, way than traditional modeling or sketching techniques can offer. Rapid prototyping should become an integral and vital part of the visual practice of design.
It is said that voyages of discovery need not involve a journey but are rather dependent on the discovering new ways of viewing the world. There is a growing implementation of digital design and computer modeling within both industry and the art school. Yet a clear picture of how this technology may shape the future of our crafts practice is not visible. While some view this digital era as a savior from an age of industrialization, others perceive it as a pariah, offering speed and precision at the cost of human sensitivity to the material qualities realised through hand labour.
What are the true advantages and disadvantages of this most topical emerging technology? Goldsmithing, has always traditionally been at the forefront of mankind’s technical and scientific development. Does this technology offer new opportunities for extending the boundaries of our craft? Is the computer a natural development of the tradition of the tool in craft practice, or, is it something new?
By exploring the application of CAD/CAM into the work of leading practioners in the field of goldsmithing and jewellery in the UK and USA, alongside the insights I develop integrating this technology into my own existing professional practice, I will seek to answer these and other important issues.
My project builds on my experience from 1996-98 at the University of Brighton and Rhode Island School of Design as a goldsmith where I began incorporating computer generated design with my jewellery.This new work will have two distinctive, although inter-related strands. It will evolve from working closely with current software to explore combinations of scanned forms and patterns with associated structures. Alongside this I will be exploring the issues of the physical and virtual worlds of both electronic design and physical representation as we reevaluate our craft and ourselves in the light of the technology, which embodies the 'spirit of our time'.
Footnotes.
i. Bellerian,G & Abercrombie,S, Work, Life, Tools, The things we use to do the things we do, Exhibition Catalogue, The Monachelli Press, 1998. The majority of the cross section of people asked to participate chose an electronic device as their most important tool, paper and pen were next favourites.
ii. Question first raised by McCullough, M in the early chapters of Abstracting Craft, The Practised Digital Hand, Cambridge,Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996
iii. For a full description of these techniques please see Delcam’s website http://www.delcam.com/info and for examples of the Rp machines http://www.3dsystems.com
iv. McCullough,M, Abstracting Craft, The Practised Digital Hand, Cambridge,Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996, p.81