John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

traditional hand skills. However, Bunnell argues the creative imagination and
computer skills of the user are equally implicit in the outcome and use of
computer technology can be integrated as a ‘craft’ skill to allow for the creation
of increasingly sophisticated and complex ideas and critical frameworks.
Bunnell suggests the main advantages of using CAD/CAM include:
• increased autonomy by allowing the designer-maker to give up some
laborious and repetitive aspects of making to specialised machine
operators without risking the integrity of their design
• the ability to produce batches of objects, or work in series as a more
economically viable way of working
• the production of objects of greater complexity than could have been
achieved before
• the development of new aesthetic qualities evolved through integration of
new technologies
• the ability of makers to shift economic and industrial contexts beyond
mass production systems towards smaller enterprises based on the skills
of individual practitioners
In her presentation ‘Otherwise unobtainable: the applied arts and the politics
and poetics of digital technology’ given in 2002 at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Tanya Harrod offered some preliminary thoughts on the relationship between
new media and the applied arts. Harrod said that digital technologies pose a
threat to applied art practice. She speculated that applied artists would most
likely use new media in functionalist ways - as a tool. According to Harrod this
claim that the computer is only a tool is a cliché. She states that we know the
computer is not just a tool and that use of digital technologies affects the
thought processes of practitioners with traditional materials-based training.
Citing the work of Roland Barthes she indicts Adobe® Photoshop® for
encoding a whole range of current cultural norms and endorsing a model of
authorship as selection. She states the dominant discourse around digital
technologies is gendered by “futuristic cybertalk” inspired by science fiction
writers such as William Gibson. Harrod then proposed a feminist reading of
new media that identifies spaces of resistance and transformation and offers
“mutable identities” and “unanticipated possibilities”.
She continued by referencing McCullough's ‘Abstracting Craft’ which she states
seeks to humanise the digital by comparing the use of these with the tacit skills
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