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Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand - Review

Art Journal, Spring, 1999 by Johanna Drucker

Malcolm McCullough. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. 307 pp., b/w ills. $37.50, $17.50 paper.

One fundamental concern raised by digital imaging technologies is how new modes of electronic mediation affect the definition of fine art - or what remains of its identity after a century's critical interrogation and overwhelming competition from the entertainment and commercial sectors. A conviction uniting the books under review here is that fine art might be able to salvage two things that the current state of things threatens to obliterate. The first is the richly dimensional experience of tactile, spatial sensoria whose contribution to cognitive processes is only recently beginning to be understood. The second is nothing less than original, individual thought and expression.

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Malcolm McCullough's Abstracting Craft makes a particularly compelling argument for the validity of embodied knowledge. "Academics," McCullough states at the outset, "despite a growing faction interested in 'body criticism,' generally ignore the hands in their epistemologies of mind" (5). A professor of architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, McCullough notes that within the limited experiential frame of computer production there are major obstacles to the acquisition of what he refers to under the rubric of craft. His argument reflects an ongoing concern expressed by traditionally trained artists as they watch a new generation adept only at scanning, appropriation, and the use of software. (Their fear: computer design students never learn to draw.) His suggestion is to reconceptualize electronic tools so that they are used not "so much for automating tasks as for abstracting craft" (81). Paradoxically, what McCullough bemoans is the process of abstraction that introduces the distance between hand and material, mind and process. By emphasizing the hand as an instrument essential to epistemological development, cognitive processes, and artistic articulation, he proposes a synthetic resolution of traditional craft and new technology rather than pitting them in an apparently inevitable, unproductive opposition. Unfortunately he stops short of assessing the ways in which the conceptual premises of software products have ignored or incorporated assumptions about what constitutes embodied knowledge in specific terms.

Immersed in Technology, an anthology edited by Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod, also address issues of physicality. A welcome counterpoint to the exaggerated rhetoric of popular journalism on the topic, this sophisticated volume came out of the Canadian Art Centre at Banff, which has provided a forum for ongoing investigation of the intersections between art and technology. The book's contributors are artists who are either technicians or are sufficiently close to the technical processes to have no illusions about them. These are people directly involved in working with so-called immersant technologies (three-dimensional, real-time illusions involving multiple sensory stimulation). The editors establish the tone of the book in their introduction, where they frankly acknowledge the sometimes contentious character of exchanges among the artists involved (certainly a healthy feature of an anthology). Katherine Hayles notes that even the core notion of virtual reality was fraught with misleading inaccuracies and says that the Banff group proposed the term "embodied virtuality" as an (albeit controversial) alternative. The book's finely honed critical edge, informed by a cultural studies approach to gender and politics, succeeds in deflating mythic fantasies about the virtual. Chief among these is that of total escape from one's body, identity, and life that drives much of the Wired-type hype surrounding electronic art.

As Catherine Richards writes in her essay "Virtual Bodies, Spectral Bodies," "Dreams of transcendence, of freedom from the flesh, exacerbate rather than solve our problems." These artists clearly grasp the difference between science fiction and social reality even when their work risks fueling the very fantasy industry sought by the next generation of entertainment moguls. Here the psychological effects of a representation that is constantly remade from the orientation of the moving, turning spectator undergo reassessment within the terms of the history of art as mimesis. There are additional philosophical issues raised by the way the senses participate in consensual illusions in virtual environments. In classical aesthetics, there is a hierarchy in which touch is denigrated for its immediate relation to sensation while sight enjoys an elevated stature on the basis of the degree of abstraction on which it functions. These distinctions are challenged when visuality (both seeing and representing) is interdependent with movement, spatial knowledge, and tactile experience (as per the theme in McCullough's book). This collection is an excellent introduction to and a valuable document of this moment of experimentation, even as later technological capacities permit more extensive effects in the artistic projects.

Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand - Review

Art Journal, Spring, 1999 by Johanna Drucker

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