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

embodied in traditional craft practice. However, she quickly pointed out the
negative aspects of the innate “audit-like” nature of human-computer
interaction. Harrod then tried to identify some general principles of the creative
engagement with new media as a different kind of time consumption. This
includes the potential to spend more time conceptualising and less time making;
and the ability to produce objects and images that could not have been made in
any other way. Harrod calls this the “otherwise unobtainable”.
The works in the ‘MadeKnown: Rapid Prototype Sculpture’ exhibition (13 Sep -
18 Oct, 2005, curated by Ian Gwilt and Brit Bunkley) represent an international
survey of artists who have embraced the potentials of 3D printing to create
sculptural objects. Artists from Australasia, Europe and the US were invited to
send a piece of work via the Internet as a 3D digital file. These files were
fabricated using the 3D printing facility in the School of Design at University of
Technology, Sydney.
Although many of the participants in MadeKnown (Gwilt, 2006) are the same as
the ‘Intersculpt’, ‘Telesculpture’, and the ‘International Rapid Prototyping
Sculpture Exhibition’ the level of critical discourse around this exhibition (for
example in the exhibition catalogue) is of a more developed nature. In his essay
‘Techniques Matter’ Andrew Benjamin distinguishes between two radically
different forms of representation: what he terms the ‘pre-digital’ which uses the
computer to represent design and ‘digital practice’ in which the computer itself
becomes a design tool (Gwilt, 2006, p.4-5). Benjamin states that with the
application of digital technologies concerns are generalised regardless of
discipline and the most important relationship is between the immaterial and
the material states of digital production (Gwilt, 2006, p.7).
In ‘Feeling the Rub: making an ontology of painting’ Mark Titmarsh asks if
there is a difference between making something in particular and the universal
nature of all making? (Gwilt, 2006, p.11) Titmarsh states that ‘to make’ is as
elementary as ‘to do’ and ‘to be’. McCullough is referenced in regard to a hybrid
form of craft-based knowledge (Gwilt, 2006, p.16). Again, the issue about
whether ‘digital crafting’ treats the computer as more than a tool or as a medium
is discussed. Titmarsh argues for an embodied link between the physical
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