Readings – Anna Huff

Reading Response: What is Cybernetics?

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Cybernetics is about the essential relationship between humans and machines. Norbert Wiener makes the case for making smarter and more capable machines to free humans from being button pushers or mind numbing computer operators which is a waste of human intelligence. The advancement of machines is actually a humanist motivation and Wiener envisions it as craft movements that use social reform and integration as their central idea.

Feedback loops and AI is essential for machine and human communication and symbiosis. Machines act as a “pilot” or “guide” for humans; just look at phones and computers. These communication and researching machines already act as our external brains. Opening communication and integration between man and machine is important for creating sympathy. The more machines can be humanized, the more we can humanize the systems machines already control and influence like economy and social fabrics.

The Fold

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The Fold by Gilles, Deleuze combines analysis of Baroque thought and Liebnitz to describe “the fold”. The fold is difficult to describe since it is applied to broad and specific things from describing the universe to the in-separation of the body and soul. This mirco/macro model is very similar to Liebnitz’s monads, which are the philosophers description of the building blocks of the universe. Within each monad, reflects the entire universe and therefore a single branch can reflect the cosmos. The fold is like the arrangement, construction or interaction of monads. The building blocks do not combine. They fold in unity or in arrangement to create forms and objects.

The soul is described as an evelope of folds. The soul contains infinite folds because it is only with the possesion of the soul, can people percieve other folds. There is no material for what is being folded but rather a process of how things, thoughts, matter, can interact and touch in infinite points. I still do not understand what the fold means or its allegorical purpose but what I can do is associate “the folds” to what I already know. For example, the shape of proteins on a molecular level are complex folds, and the shape and struture are what gives it function. Protiens are a literal interpretation but an example I can use to comprehend the philosophical applications. The fold can create strutures, envelope, increase or unfurl. I suppose the ability to create rigidity/ fluidity, clarify/obstructuct, and combine/divide faces is a useful picture to use to describe poetic truths about how things are.

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Weaving Algorithms: Reading Response

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Even though digital weaving may only be useful for planning weaves on the Jacquard Loom, the algorithmic problem-solving for the basic weave structure is important for studying generative design. The basic weave is a very old technique that has proven to be durable, flexible, and incredibly adaptive. Weaves are a great analogy for how craft transforms into design and slowly becoming more and more automated. The loom as a machine has evolved over time and as more components are automated, it is still the action of weaving, the weft going over and under the warp, the action of intertwining, is what gives it strength and the material is what gives it flexibility. Sure, models of weaving can be done digitally but the qualities of weave cannot be substituted for digital fabrication. The digital world relies on the tried and true structures of the tactile world and it is a slow and continually improving translation of languages between the two disciplines.

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Sympathy of Things

Reading Response 1 p. 31-41

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In the reading Lars Spuybroek argues “Craft and Code” are really one in the same and describes code as something that “speaks the language matter speaks”. Using the example of someone writing the same letter over and over, each letter will never be identical just like code can make infinite variations of the same action. Mechanical machines are guilty of creating perfect copies where digital machines can express the nuances and interlacing structures done by craft work. The way this works is through continuous systems and using Lars’s steps/check list of Redundancy, Changefulness, Rigidity, Naturalism, Savageness, and sometimes Grotesqueness(p. 39-40).

What stood out to me was the proclamation that “as all craft moves towards design, all labor must move towards robotics”(p.39) In order for craft to survive in the protection of design, digital manipulation must replace labor from the artist to the machine, but not in the way industrial manufacturing has altered the labor of products. The “products” must be varied, like technologically induced evolution in the mutation of genes. I can grasp how digital machines can replace drafts of gothic cathedrals but it is something originally done by craftspeople and now copied by machine. We are still stuck trying to emulate hand work. It seems like digital machines are really the only hope to maintain a sensitivity to craft since human labor must eventually be replaced by machines. I do agree with Lars but it is still unsettling. Yet the idea of “technological abstinence” is even more damaging. Progress cannot be slowed, it is something you want to stay ahead of.

Question: is Spuybroek trying to sell digital machines to crafters or a warning to try to preserve craft?