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The Fabrication of Art and Beyond: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture |
Ali Eisa
Making a Mobile Retina Scanner: 'Personal Fabrication' as Sociological Inquiry
'Personal Fabrication', first coined by MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld (2005), refers to "ordinary people creating, rather than consuming technology." It is suggested that new digital technologies, enabling individuals to directly fabricate objects, are already busy democratizing production tools, facilitating creative self-expression and local problem solving. Over recent years this claim has validated a proliferation of diverse material practices including hacking, making and tinkering as well as renewed attention to craft, DIY, hobby cultures and open source production.
There is much commentary on the affinities, conflicts, politics, identities and futures of the multiple instantiations of 'personal fabrication' across popular media, public exhibitions, industry reports (Campbell et al, 2011), policy making (Lipson & Kurman, 2010) and academic research (Toombs, Bardzell & Bardzell, 2014; Birtchnell & Urry, 2013; Ratto & Ree, 2010). However, there seems to be a distinct lack of attention to the heterogeneous and complex understandings of key terms ascribed to the publics engaged in such making practices. How do these 'ordinary people' enact personalization and consumption? How do they make with new digital technologies, what attributes and skills are assumed, afforded and impeded and what happens when it goes wrong or fails? What makes an act of personal fabrication '‘self expression' and what normative identities are assumed in this? Is what they make art and if so what theoretical and historical traditions might this intersect with?
To address the above issues I will present my own personal fabrication project, a clay prototype for a mobile retina scanner, produced during a 3-month ethnography of a hackerspace. This artifact entailed an iterative process of conversation and interview with hackers, informing subsequent writing, drawing and modeling. It brought together diverse, complex and paradoxical understandings of key terms like personalization, consumption, creativity, art and fabrication, enacting what Michael (2013) calls "the interweaving of heterogeneous entities". This included hacker projects, identities and imaginaries, technological objects (digital and analogue), theoretical and discursive elements. The resultant object is an ambivalent hybrid, combining oblique and conflicting ideas, affects, materials and references, balanced between the recognizable and the unforeseen. In attending to "complex, diffuse and messy" (Law, 2004) empirical scenarios of personal fabrication, I hope to complicate what is often a narrow, highly simplified set of terms that underpin the broad array of practices referred to as personal fabrication. I also wish to locate this exploration of fabrication as a means of sociological inquiry, in relation to recent related pursuits such as Critical Making (Ratto, 2011), ‘inventive’ methods (Lury & Wakeford, 2013) and sociological 'craft' (Back & Puwar, 2012).
Biography:
I have been working as an artist for 5 years since graduating in 2010 with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London. Working in collaboration with artist Sebastian Rees under Lloyd Corporation, our practice utilizes multiple media including sculpture, installation, video, print and text, exploring how art might capture the complex socio-economic problems of contemporary global capitalism, including themes such as industrial production, labour, consumption and waste. We have exhibited work both nationally and internationally, most recently including Hayward Gallery (2014-15) and Carlos Ishikawa (2013; 2011). In 2014 I completed an MA in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths and have begun working at the intersection of sociological and artistic research practice. I will be conducting a research project and exhibition as resident at the art and education institute, Rupert, in Vilnius, Lithuania and will be co-organizing a stream on 'The Politics and Practice of Making' at the upcoming London Conference of Critical Thought, UCL, 2015.