I have been a fan of MAKE magazine ever since it came out. This summer I updated my subscription and I learned about CRAFT. A new magazine (with an identical design scheme and layout) but devoted to the neo craft movement that has really taken off in the past few years. Initially I was excited and almost ordered a subscription right then. I held off so I could buy a magazine at the store first and see if I really liked it. Yesterday I stopped in at Barnes&Noble on the way to class and got my hands on an issue.
While very very pretty, unfortunately it also confirmed some suspiscions I had with the magazine. Deep down inside me I couldn’t shake the worry that this was a case of “MAKE is for boys and CRAFTS is for girls”. The majority of the projects featured in MAKE were done by men. Not really a problem but I thought surely some of the interesting crafty electronic projects made by women could be featured in MAKE too. But as the editor noted in this first issue of CRAFT:
“For instance Ph.D student Leah Buechley from University of Colorado at Boulder sent us photos of her programmable LED tank top that flashes the Game of Life. This project definately has the elements of a MAKE project–it involves soldering, LED technology and programming. But there was also craft elements that don’t quite jibe with MAKE’s harder-edged sensibility: it requires a sewing machine, sewing skills, fabric and a pattern. And unlike the projects in MAKE, where the end result is more about function than form, it’s essential for this project to be as aesthetically attractive as it is useful”
Hmm lets break this down shall we:
Ms. Buechley while having “male” elements of led lights etc (and I might add a very ingenious way of wiring this whole thing together with electronically conductive thread) doesn’t make the MAKE cut because some MAKE readers might have to learn how to use a sewing machine and make something that might be aesthetically pleasing. Well I call bullshit on the sewing machine part. In Vol. 6 of MAKE there is a project of how to make a laptop bag out of a t-shirt. And it calls for a sewing machine. If MAKE readers are so into building and designing I really don’t think mastering a sewing machine and throwing together a basic tank-top pattern is going to be that much of a problem. If anything it adds to their skills.
And what is wrong with aesthetics? Flipping through some back issues I cannot help but notice that aesthetics come into play anyway. Many artists are featured. People build things with certain colors or shapes. Not everything is a huge mess of wires. And some as I have mentioned in previous blog posts find that mess of wires to be a type of aesthetic. Is it something against a so called “female” aesthetic?
I cannot help but feel like women’s work gets too seperated. When I first started working with electronics in my eyes soldering and breadboarding was embroidery. Ironically the roots of computer technology begin with craft. Weaving helped pave the pave to punch cards and beyond. Mathematical genius Ada Lovelace worked with these ideas and was essentially the first computer programmer.
I will probably not be getting a subscription to CRAFT. My plan is to flip through them and if a project intrigues me I’ll pick it up. Since I am already pretty keen to the craft movement none of the articles gave me any new information.
I have never particularly liked ex-pats. In Ecuador I knew a few here and there. They struck me as having too much time and money and opinions. They merely live out a colonial fantasy of instant privilege. While I was doing some googling on another topic altogether I came across this rather insulting piece of webspace. link
The article in brief encourages people to come to Ecuador to take advantage of a third world economy…living it up while completely ignoring the reality of where you are living. Highlights from the piece include gems such as:
“A friend of mine drove through a protest during the last change of government. I asked her about it and she said: “Oh, that’s why everyone was banging on pots! I thought Ecuador had won an important soccer game.”
and
“You can have your cook, driver and cake, even though the cake mix may not be available in Super Maxi. Since the maid will take care of getting the foodstuffs anyway, who cares?”
This sort of attitude sickens me. Its one thing to live in a new country and actually participate in the culture, its another to just wile your time away using a poor economy/people to feel rich and powerful.
I went to an artist lecture given by Sheila Pepe a couple weeks ago and something she said about the artist progress really stuck in my mind. Basically there is no better thing you can do for your art than go to your studio everyday. I forget that sometimes. But going in today reminded me of that basic good.
A work in progress:
My works in progress unfortunately tend to remain the “pile of wires” phase for a long time. This has made getting decent crits from profs a little hard. Because unless you understand electronics it is understandably difficult to imagine what is going on and why. But it is absolutely imperative to make sure you have all the ‘guts’ up and running reliably before delving too deeply into the aesthetics. I personally think wire work to be very beautiful and can inform the aesthetic outcome of a piece.
Also an article from the boston globe stresses that great things take time. Kind of a duh, but we live in an instant gratification society, so maybe we need a couple articles like this.
I used to work strictly with conceptual ideas of dress. But then I discovered electronics. People sometimes ask me if I will ever combine the two someday. For now the answer is “probably not”. Despite all the interesting stuff going on with wearable electronics it feels tacky to me. And the electronics have not evolved enough to truely combine effectively with fabric. This is not to say there aren’t some amazing fabric technologies out there. But we are still on the way. So unfortunately whenever anyone tries to make a wearable electronic piece, to me it just looks like a dress with a cumbersome PCB board tacked on. There is no real discussion between style and function, garment and technology. They just ram into eachother. I have some ideas but I would need to collaborate with someone who is far more technically skilled than I. Maybe even a whole group of people.
In either case thanks to boingboing I got to see some interesting animatronic dresses by one of my favorite designers Hussein Chalayan.
Video 1 shows the entire runway show. Which for me was a treat.
And Video 2 shows a little bit of the work in progress which is always fun to see.
Chalayan as you can see was blessed with a huge staff of talented people to realize his vision. I think the strongest point of his pieces was that the movements of the dresses were extremely subtle and organic. This is very difficult to do on such a small scale. However constructually they run into the same problem that I was discussing earlier. The dresses do not really embody the technology. It was a bit of a shame that he didn’t just keep the muslin and the exposed wire guts and armature.
