HM+CU+VC: first meeting with our curatorial partner, Vanessa Chang – what is the data? the discretely articulated sequence of symbols abstracted from typing versus the analog residuals of the embodied act of typing – typing versus playing a keyboard instrument (HM thinking of Nelson Goodman and the density of the analog); MoCap Tango; what does the digital add to making? VR sculpting, the affordance of freely moving within/through your sculpture; computers and higher-dimensional visualization – Tony Robbin, craft objects as three-dimensional projections of four-dimensional hyper-objects, 3D scanning and using hand-made craft objects as data; time and the diachronic happenings in a crafted space…

CU+HM: the flatness of the digital – screens are flat, even the “textures” we map onto 3d surface meshes are flat; flatness as absence of depth, the depth of time and palimpsest. in ceramics we speak of wanting deep surfaces – not flat color like a soda can but a surface you see into revealing complex materiality and extended processes of formation. digital flatness as sheer nowness, non-historicity; bits are flipped not buried. real painting is underpainting; real paintings have depth beyond topography, a depth of synthetic technique driven by the translucence of real materials. skin as testimony to craft, labor, persistence.

digital printing as the flawless materialization of pre-conceived design; analog printing as designing in/with materials. the affordances and myopia of “undo”. digital images have no verso. the backside of a brocade; ground, velatura, glazing, scumble; medium.

HM: thinking about digital workflows that require control of the body, reading a very informative article, “wearables-based affect recognition–a review“; what if virtual materials could respond in ways that are modulated by real-time-detected user affect? [image source]

In the beginning…

Byung-Chul Han (Non-Things 2022) notes that the explosive rise of today’s “digital order” is displacing humanity’s indigenous “terrestrial order” and causing people to lose touch with material things. As a consequence, we have begun to confuse choice with work and are losing our will to care for difficult matters. How will these broad cultural changes impact aesthetics, design, society, and sustainability?

By reintroducing the characteristic tangle of affordances and propensities of physical materials into digital creative workflows — to foster a traditional craft spirit of “working with” a substance as opposed to imposing form upon it (Ingold, Making, 2013) — this project will move towards a more Earthbound (Latour, Facing Gaia, 2017) formulation of digital art and interactivity that remains open to the invention of unprecedented new digital materialities. We will develop and co-teach a new undergraduate course based on entangling digital workflows with printmaking and hand-weaving, to be taught at Stanford University in spring quarter of 2026. We will make experimental objects and systems as material waypoints for our flow of ideas and document their evolution in this online project blog, leading to a public exhibition and symposium in spring/summer 2026.