{"title":"Artisan to Automation: Value and Craft in the 21st Century","authors":"D. McMeel","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2021.1919854","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on contemporary craft as a transactional phenomenon in the twenty-first century. It explores the influence of automation technology – such as laser-cutters and robotics – arguing that our approach to automation has gone unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. Practical implementations of automation reinforce a Marxist ideology that labor is placed under threat and individuals stripped of skill. By focusing on craft as a fundamentally transactional activity between individuals, the essay confronts preconceived ideas regarding automation. It steps through a series of theoretical frameworks including Wittgenstein, Arendt and Marx to unpack the relationship between labor, value and craft. Using two case-studies – one designing aided by a laser cutter, the other drawing portraiture with an industrial robot – the author offers a conceptual shift from considering production to be “from” machines to production “with” machines. I use this shift within the case-studies to offer a delineation of streams for approaching and ultimately reclaiming craft from machines.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"674 - 689"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2021.1919854","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Architecture and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2021.1919854","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ARCHITECTURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract This article focuses on contemporary craft as a transactional phenomenon in the twenty-first century. It explores the influence of automation technology – such as laser-cutters and robotics – arguing that our approach to automation has gone unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. Practical implementations of automation reinforce a Marxist ideology that labor is placed under threat and individuals stripped of skill. By focusing on craft as a fundamentally transactional activity between individuals, the essay confronts preconceived ideas regarding automation. It steps through a series of theoretical frameworks including Wittgenstein, Arendt and Marx to unpack the relationship between labor, value and craft. Using two case-studies – one designing aided by a laser cutter, the other drawing portraiture with an industrial robot – the author offers a conceptual shift from considering production to be “from” machines to production “with” machines. I use this shift within the case-studies to offer a delineation of streams for approaching and ultimately reclaiming craft from machines.
期刊介绍:
Architecture and Culture, the international award winning, peer-reviewed journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, investigates the relationship between architecture and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. Whether culture is understood extensively, as shared experience of everyday life, or in terms of the rules and habits of different disciplinary practices, Architecture and Culture asks how architecture participates in and engages with it – and how both culture and architecture might be reciprocally transformed. Architecture and Culture publishes exploratory research that is purposively imaginative, rigorously speculative, visually and verbally stimulating. From architects, artists and urban designers, film-makers, animators and poets, from historians of culture and architecture, from geographers, anthropologists and other social scientists, from thinkers and writers of all kinds, established and new, it solicits essays, critical reviews, interviews, fictional narratives in both images and words, art and building projects, and design hypotheses. Architecture and Culture aims to promote a conversation between all those who are curious about what architecture might be and what it can do.