Patterns of reciprocal influence: the violin as instrument of craft, science, and computation
https://www.lcclub.co.uk/glxorlw The violin is a complex and tenacious instrument that occupies many worlds of work; an incomplete list includes musical and visual aesthetics, physics, craftwork, mathematics, and increasingly, artificial intelligence and related computational practices. Despite the many modes of engagement and interactions, the violin remains remarkably stable over time. How? Through interviews and fieldwork within this diverse set of communities this study asks; 1. what are the characteristics of the violin that work to keep it “alive”; 2. what kinds of heuristics guide human interaction with the violin (and why do they matter today); and 3. how do these varied worlds interact and overlap (and what can they show other forms of collaborative work).
https://asperformance.com/uncategorized/p2e3c92l https://www.worldhumorawards.org/uncategorized/exvd1tihbsv Transcript:: “The violin is a complicated structure…and you don’t know all about it…little things which seem trivial seem to make a difference…there’s a lot of little trivial things and we don’t know which are the important ones and which ones aren’t. So we should just assume, unless we can prove differently that everything, every aspect, will have some effect on either the way it lasts or the way it sounds, or the way it feels. If we change it in any way, we will change it, potentially, in one of these modalities. It’ll either be less durable or it’ll be harder to make, or it will be less comfortable to use, or it won’t sound as good, or the opposite: it might be better. So it’s not that things can’t be improved, or understood, or changed. It’s just that you have to assume that nothing is accidental – or things are accidental but they’re not insignificant…You start seeing things, instead of just seeing them as an aesthetic holdover…
(Re)collecting craft: reviving materials, techniques, and pedagogies of craft for computational makers
https://www.worldhumorawards.org/uncategorized/c1gcwjcdg4 This historically-speculative research recollects three traditions of craft: and examines how craft’s foundational relations to materials, techniques, and teaching and learning can be called upon to strengthen and extend computational craft (as practiced in fields like CSCW and HCI). Drawing from literature in HCI, craft studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) we explore craft’s modern formation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as read across three sites: Scandinavian Slöyd, British Arts and Crafts, and Japanese Mingei. From this review we draw three key themes: craft’s accountabilities to natural materials and local ecologies; craft’s holistic ways of making with ‘head, heart, and hand’; and craft’s distinct histories and styles of teaching and learning. We then show how these lessons can be applied to contemporary practices and pedagogies of computational making. We argue that doing so can help to rebalance computation’s ecological ties and relations, recenter its practice from a narrow cognitivism towards a sensorially rich and ‘whole-self’ concept of making, and reimagine ways of teaching and learning that are more inclusive, relational, and heterogeneous. This paper is presented at CSCW 2023
Sensing (co)Operations: Articulation and Compensation in the Robotic Operating Room
https://www.jamesramsden.com/2024/03/07/2q03lgp6dhq How does the introduction of robotics into the OR reconfigure the sensory environment of surgery, and how do surgeons and their teams recalibrate their work in response? We explored the entangled and mutually supportive nature of sensing within and between individual actors and the broader world of people and things (with emphasis on vision and touch) and illustrate how such inter-sensory dependencies are challenged and sometimes extended under the conditions of robotic surgery. We illustrate how sensory (re)articulations and compensations allow the surgeon and surgical teams to adapt to a more-than-human sensorium and conclude by advocating new forms of sensory-aware design capable of enhancing and supporting embodied sensory conditions both individually and across teams. Our findings and subsequent call for sensory-aware design practices were published in ACM’s CSCW conference proceedings of 2019, where they were awarded a Best Paper award.
Digital entanglements: Craft, Computation and Collaboration in Fine Art Furniture Production
https://giannifava.org/ztxsj7ko https://asperformance.com/uncategorized/ooxvfbuo1k How do new human-robot relations alter the nature of collaborative and creative work? What tensions surface when the materials, tools and practices of creative wayfarers move into abstracted spaces? To answer these questions, we traced the studio work of fine art furniture maker Wendell Castle and his team during the introduction of “Mr. Chips”, a computer-numeric-controller (CNC) robotic arm. We grounded our work in the histories of craft and reported the ways in which this new, complex, computational device contributed to that history while reconfiguring the team, and Castle’s own creative practice. Our findings were published in ACM’s CSCW conference proceedings of 2015, where they were honored with a best paper, honorable mention award.