Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This text speculates emergent themes in the practice of the digital-handicraft. We propose that digital-handicraft, a hybridized field of making, learning, and enactment, emerges from considering touch as a critical measure. This paper examines the way touch functions as critical feedback in order to explore the intersections between hand-making and digital labour. We put forward that the digital-handicraft expands the potential of interdisciplinary art, new pedagogical models, and alternative modes of organizing and resisting. This digital-handicraft practice considers labour as a key component of cultural production, immaterial or otherwise, and considers new implications of digital-handicraft labour in contemporary art, pedagogy, and activism. We define the digital-handicraft as an emergent discourse capable to expanding the pedagogical, artistic, and activist implication of the handmade and digitally crafted, and speculate as to the future of the practice. Within a digital-handicraft practice, pedagogy and activism become sites of mixed reality, where the online and real intermingle, facilitated by touch and craft. In theorizing a digital-handicraft practice, this text explores what each discipline might offer to the other, as a craft is rendered dematerialized, the online emerges via traditional handicrafts, and new methods of making emerge from hybridized practice.