New Morphologies by Nick Kuder

New Morphologies: Studio Ceramics and Digital Processes

Studio Ceramics and Digital Processes An exhibition curated by del harrow + stacy jo scott

New Morphologies: Studio Ceramics and Digital Processes andy brayman mustafa canyurt sharan elran eran gal-or jonathan keep geoffrey mann anton reijnders stephanie syjuco unfold With Essays by jovencio de la paz gerar edizel del harrow stacy jo scott joshua g. stein

February 7 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; April 5, 2013 Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University 2 Pine Street Alfred, New York 14802 3

New Morphologies February 7 – April 5, 2013 Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University 2 Pine Street Alfred, NY 14802 ceramicsmuseum.alfred.edu art.alfred.edu The catalog, New Morphologies: Studio Ceramics and Digital Processes was produced by the Division of Ceramic Art with generous support provided by The Marcianne Mapel Miller Fund for Ceramic Art, Alfred University, Alfred, NY © 2014 School of Art and Design New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred University 1 Saxon Drive Alfred, NY 14802 Catalog design by Nick Kuder, Kalamazoo, MI Catalog coordination by Anne Currier, Division of Ceramic Art Gallery photography by Brian Oglesbee, Wellsville, NY Workshop photography by Del Harrow, Fort Collins, co Printed by St. Vincent Press, Rochester, NY All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission except in case of brief annotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. ISBN: 978-0-9840078-3-7

Introduction and Acknowledgements In 2010, Del Harrow was teaching a summer class in the Division of Ceramic Art at the School of Art and Design when he contacted me with a request to examine the Museum’s storage area. This open storage houses 15 percent of the museum’s total collection of approximately 8,000 ceramic pieces. We discussed the possibility of mining some items from the collection, using a 3-d scanner to capture lines of existing historical objects and with information gleaned from this technology, possibly create something new. Surrounded by ceramics dating from as early as 2000 bce, we began a conversation that grew into the exhibition, New Morphologies: Studio Ceramics and Digital Processes. Artists Del Harrow and Stacy Jo Scott were the co-curators who developed this exhibition for the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University. Alfred has a long tradition of combining the arts and sciences within the New York State College of Ceramics, and while the Museum had never undertaken an exhibition of this kind, the time and location seemed appropriate with the exhibition’s inclusion of both art and technology. The School of Art and Design and the Inamori School of Engineering have been increasingly active in introducing 3-d digital technology into their programs. The Museum’s audience, especially the students, would benefit from seeing a range of work by artists who utilize various technological devices and integrate them into their concepts and fabrication methods. In addition to the exhibition, designer Dries Verbruggen offered a companion workshop on 3-d printing using local clays. Using the 3-d printer that operated in the Museum during the reception, Dries generously shared his knowledge at the workshop, expanding the conversation between student and artist in a different format. The curators’ talk by Del Harrow and Stacy Jo Scott in the Museum gallery offered a lively discussion and an opportunity to openly ask questions regarding the exhibition. Foremost, I want to thank Del Harrow and Stacy Jo Scott for the energy and commitment they put into New Morphologies; they carefully chose the participating artists and were hands-on during the installation. Also, a big thank you to the artists for lending their work and to 6

new morphologies

Juliann Crisp, Registrar at the Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, for facilitating the loan of the work by Stephanie Syjuco. The following individuals also deserve my thanks and gratitude: Dries Verbruggen for bringing the 3-d printer to life in the gallery and during the workshop; Museum student assistants Cami Leisk, Heron Bassett, Kathleen Rabe, and Trista Sheehan, for their assistance with the installation; Museum Assistant Allison Benson, for exhibition preparation and the exceptional reception; Kevin Jacobs, from Alfred University’s Career Development Center, for his willingness to partner with the Museum in support of the workshop; members of The Alfred Clay Collective, particularly students Heron Bassett, Kirsten Heteji and Alec Smith, who labored to make the workshop a success; Kevin Jacobs and Kala Stein, Director of the Cohen Gallery, for their roles in organizing and hosting a celebratory dinner at the Gallery on one of Alfred’s famous winter evenings; and Dr. Linda E. Jones, Vice President and head of the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and Professor of Engineering, for her support. I want to recognize and thank the faculty of the Division of Ceramic Art for their generous offer to produce this catalog, providing additional support from the Marcianne Mapel Miller Fund for Ceramic Art for its publication, with special thanks to Professor Anne Currier, who was the driving force in coordinating the catalog, working with outstanding designer Nick Kuder and photographer Brian Oglesbee. I am especially grateful to the Friends of the Museum for their support and funding of the New Morphologies exhibition and gallery talk, and to the Robert R. McComsey Career Development Center and the Marcianne Mapel Miller Fund for Ceramic Art for the support of the Verbruggen workshop. Susan Kowalczyk Collections Manager, Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art

new morphologies

Tools in Hand: On Clay, Embodiment and Digital Practice Stacy Jo Scott The turn of material objects toward the digital is not only about the addition of new technologies, like computer-aided design and rapid prototyping, into the process of manufacture. It is not only about the ways in which authorship is being re-established. It is not only about subverting the supremacy of specialists, of putting the power of production into the hands of the maker. It is not only about the ways in which shared data will alter the market for objects as it has with old media, transforming objects into data which can be as easily shared as pirated music. It is about all these things to greater or lesser degrees, not always in proportion to the level of accompanying bombast. But at its essence, this digital turn in objects is about the shattering of our perceptions of presence and of the body. The digital, which we accept as virtual, non-material, and not of the earth, finds a poetic foil in clay. Is there anything as of-the-earth, as low-fi, as stubbornly material as clay? This is the same foil that our own bodies enact on the digital. Our conceptualization of the digital as virtual, ideal, immaterial, and ephemeral must contend with our lived experience of our bodies. The digital exists in relation to our bodies and yet the two realms seem at odds. Clay allows a rich evocation of our interaction with the virtual. Clay becomes a stand-in for our bodies. The digital is malleable, contingent, and in a continuous process of reconfiguration. This quicksilver nature seems opposite to the nature of ceramics, whose form becomes frozen in the kiln firing. We approach ceramic object making with our bodies, whose language is at odds with the binary code of the computer. Our bodies follow a different route of understanding than the linear nature of code allows. This digital world is based on mathematics, a system of logic whose linearity our bodies elude. We may wish for the logic and pattern of the computer, may will its organization into our days, but still, our bodies resist. Our lived experience can only pretend at linearity. The precise logic of the computer falls apart in lived experience. If a maker’s hands do not actually touch the material, what does that mean for the agency of the body, for the demonstration of skill, the voice filtering through the sensitivity of fingertips? The moment of hands directly interacting with clay is where clay workers locate the moment of power, voice and agency in their making process. 10

new morphologies

The idea that this moment could be interrupted by the interference of an indifferent machine is deeply unsettling. Our bodies are now revealed to be un-fixed, provisional. In order to retain self-awareness as makers, we must accept a new entity into our bodies. Our sensitivity is filtered through interfaces outside of our own minds, channeled through pathways of mathematics and logic, a state seemingly polar to the poetics of intuition, of body-based knowledge, of pleasure. The machine may steal that moment of greatest pleasure, the guidance of material to a form of our making. The body and pleasure are not solely situated in the skin. â&#x20AC;&#x192; We are truly at the beginning of this infiltration of the digital into the realms of making. To be sure, makers who have used digital means to produce objects have been at it for more than a decade. But still just now, we are only beginning to see what it actually means for makers to work in the digital, not simply with digital tools, but with a digital mindset. This mindset has become such a thorough framework in daily life that it has, so far, almost achieved conceptual invisibility. The digital is by no means new, but I would argue that our cultural self-awareness of it is. It is beginning to loop back on itself and now we are gaining a better viewpoint. And some makers are ready with their tools very much in hand.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Ď&#x20AC;

new morphologies

New Morphologies Del Harrow Coming to an exhibition like New Morphologies, which deals with the intersection of studio ceramics with digital processes, we might assume that the show’s theme presents a dialectic, an unexpected intermingling between two fields with little else in common. This is the idea of ‘old media meet new media’ ( a bit like your grandparents signing up for Facebook ). But the artists in this exhibition present us with projects that show deeper — even historical — connections between studio ceramics and digital culture. Ideas fundamental to studio ceramics, like highly flexible production, sharing of technical information among specialists, and form as an evolving morphology, are also ideas that characterize new manufacturing by digital fabrication. This show challenges our tendency to conflate the digital with the technological. While our notion of technology requires narratives of linear progress, digital ideas are structural rather than historical. Technological innovations facilitate the implementation of digital culture but digital ideas have been around far longer than our current computer hardware. For example, Alan Turing developed his proofs for “thinking machines” in the 1930s. Guild systems are conceptual cousins of online communities of specialists developing open source software and hardware. And, the formal variation possible in small-scale studio production, where precise yet flexible tools are paired with highly skilled labor, is at the cusp of the new manufacturing made possible through computercontrolled tools and responsive (thinking) machines. The artists and designers in this exhibition were educated in the U.S. and Europe. Some graduated from institutions with strong media-specific and skills-based concentrations. Others come from programs with more inter-media curricula. This range of approaches in contemporary art schools is borne out by the work in the exhibition, through a cross-pollination of ideas germane to both inter-media and media-specific pedagogy. Artists like Unfold and Stephanie Syjuco, who work in a wide range of materials, are accessing the material poetics of clay, along with the rich cultural framework of ceramics history. On the other hand, Andy Brayman and Geoffrey Mann, with their craftbased training and skills, are discovering affinities with the structures of parametric design and are hybridizing traditional processes with computer-aided design and computer-controlled machines. 14

new morphologies

I’ve often heard Andy Brayman described

Stephanie Syjuco Raiders: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the A_____ A___ M______ ), 2011 Digital archival photo prints mounted onto laser cut wood, hardware. Editions of 3 + AP, Edition 3/3 Courtesy of the Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

by other artists as either an inventor or a “mad scientist.” His studio contains his own work as well as The Matter Factory, a company that Brayman founded as a site for collaboration with other artists and designers. He is obsessed with function and performance at every stage of the process. His driving preoccupation is efficiency, although perhaps more conceptual than practical. Rather than this persistent development of processes resolving in a highly rational and productive workflow, his work reveals an aesthetics of process and organization as their own end. Every tool and object in the studio is both a prototype and a real artifact. Anton Reijnders observes relentlessly. His contribution to New Morphologies was made during a residency at the University of Indiana, where he was invited as a visiting artist to experiment with their digital fabrication tools. He chose to produce a series of objects with machines that print 3-d forms from a gypsum-based powder or abs plastic. These objects — referred to as “rapid prototypes”— are typically a step in the process toward producing a final product in another material.

Rather than seeing these objects a prototypes, Reijnders engages the object for the sake of its own specific qualities: the material texture of gypsum, the translucency of plastic, and most significantly, the small scale in combination with incredible detail. While employing the same technology, Reijnders’ work is the opposite of a rapid prototype. It is slow and it is real. The rapid prototype is representative of the subtext of contemporary technology; the idea that what we see here today is just a step on the way to more exciting things to come. This feeds a pervasive psychic discontent or, as the comedian Louis CK puts it, “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” Stephanie Syjuco’s work, “Variety Pack #1 from Raiders: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the A_______ A___ M______ ),” 2011, is related but it is more explicitly a critique. The work was created by downloading publicly available images of specific pots from prominent museum collections, printing these images at their actual size, and mounting them to laser-cut wooden backs. According to the exhibition statement from Catherine Clark gallery, where the piece was first shown, “The vessels now degraded and flattened, have been rendered ineffective, removed from their original usage, and then again from their institutional context.” The work is a critique of decontextualization of both the institution and the internet. I would contend that while the representation of images via the internet could be seen as simply a loss in quality—and the aesthetic experience of these wooden “props” is far different from the original objects—the pixelation also adds a layer of texture and abstraction, a kind of digital ornament. 16

new morphologies

Anton Reijnders Nomen Nescio 135, 2008 – 2012 Gypsum (Z Corp. 3-d print), fired clay and engobe Coke factory (multiple), 2008 Gypsum (Z Corp. 3-d print), fired clay and terra sigillata

Sharan Elran’s project, “Unlimited Edition – 1 of 6,227,020,800,” also deals with issues of identity and the individual, both of humans and manufactured objects. The piece achieves its incredible variety through a relatively simple device, a mold with interchangeable parts. The number 6,227,020,800 refers to both the number of humans on earth and the possible number of unique forms that can be produced with this one mold. Elran plans to produce these pieces for the rest of his life, in a gesture that feels optimistic, even spiritual, like a form of prayer. The work calls to mind Allan McCollum’s “The Shapes Project” and also Marcel Duchamp’s “3 Standard Stoppages.” While the piece utilized cnc technology in the fabrication of the mold, this tooling doesn’t feel essential to its morphology. But the piece is still digital in structure. The mold itself can be understood as a matrix or a rectangular array of variables that is a central concept in computation. The project feels akin to ideas of the digital even older than Alan Turing’s proofs, more analogous to Charles Babbage’s adding machine than Turing’s thinking machine. Stratigraphic Manufactury is an ongoing collaborative project by Unfold is a design studio the Belgian design group, Unfold, which produces ceramic objects founded in 2002 by with truly morphological variation by circumventing the mold entirely. Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen. Unfold states that “Stratigraphic Manufactury is a new model for the distribution of digital manufacturing of porcelain, which includes local small manufacturing units that are globally connected.” The project consists of a low cost, open source 3-d printer that has been modified to print with a porcelain paste. Rather than using a material that will most easily and reliably take form through the printing process, this project follows more recent trends in 3-d printing, using the final material, and is referred to as rapid manufacturing rather than rapid prototyping. Rapid manufacturing is already being implemented in biomedical applications, printing geometrically and chemically precise replacement organs or bone fragments. Finally, Geoffrey Mann uses glass, ceramics, and metal, all of which share rich craft traditions. Mann employs computationally intensive software and rapid prototyping technology to create objects that combine traditional forms with complex fluid movement. His “Blown” series uses 3-d computer simulations to create an interactive 18

new morphologies

Sharan Elran Unlimited Edition, 1 of 6,227,020,800, 2012 Porcelain, glazed (Installation with video from Kickstarter project)

model of a teacup. With his accompanying iPad application, the user can blow into a microphone and the geometry of the cup will ripple like the surface of tea. The work is aligned with practices within the field of architecture; for example, the work of Frei Otto, finding form for large-scale tensile structures using soap films and, even more specifically, to projects by Lars Spuybroek (among others) executed in the 1990s during the early years of sophisticated 3-d computer modeling and physics simulation. But Mann’s work departs from these monumental architectural precedents; the rippling surface of the teacups might feel like a superficial decoration, but the ripples, which float between structure and surface, are instead a kind of poetic ornament, evoking the tactile experience of blowing to cool a hot liquid. This technically sophisticated embellishment of a traditional form amplifies the sense of temporality and intimacy that are intrinsic to the experience of craft. π 19

Geoffrey Mann BLOWN, Natural Occurrence Series, 2005â&#x20AC;&#x2030;/2012 iPad App, Bone china, glazed

new morphologies

echolocation Jovencio de la Paz I. Essentially, the Real World As much as we may speak of the digital and the virtual as new terrain, and as much as the idea of data represents an amorphous expanse incomprehensible to most of us, we often forget that we live our lives riding upon a vast ocean of clay. In slow, geological flux and buried below our huddled humanity, it is in clay’s formlessness, its malleability and mutability that we have wrought much of our species’ material imaginings. In the ceramics studios of human history, mounds of clay have given shape to ancient gods and amulets of fertility, to vessels both utilitarian and sacrosanct, to visions of indescribable beauty and to the weird and mesmerizing figures of a child’s interior world. Clay may even carry us to the beyond we have always imagined, lining the engine components of new developments in aero-space technologies. Clay has always accepted the many shapes and forms of our imagination, our reflections of ourselves, our needs, our desires and our physical realities. As idols or bowls or new technology, through clay we have constructed many essential forms, and in pursuit of form, we have used clay to describe our ideals, essentially. As site for such formation, clay is our first virtuality.

new morphologies

II. The Bats of Oregon In rural Oregon, at the start of Autumn and the first turning of the leaves, I would walk outside at dusk in the still warm air of late September. High above me, between the noble firs and tidal crests of their swaying, Lasiurus cinereus, the Horay Bat, would sing for her dinner. Her song is a kind of sight, a way to seek out form beyond perception, beyond the horizon of tangibility. Each call and chirp into the abyss returns to her ever more detail of the shape she cannot see, as echolocation is a process towards the shaping of what is otherwise invisible, of a phantom moving in the night. The sensory experience of echolocation confounds our comprehension as it is process not amongst our given sensesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we can only begin to dream up the shape of the fruit-fly or mosquito the Horay Bat sees through her song. Likewise, the artists included in New Morphologies: Studio Ceramics and Digital Processes, seek the shaping of things outside the terrain of our given perception of ceramic process and ceramic form. The objects in this exhibition were made in part by familiar organs, the sense of the hand and the body and the language of touch. But they were found through technologies and data processing that have allowed these artists to peer into a digital, virtual, ethereal beyond and make manifest the shape of things typically immaterial. Each of these works represent a calling into a dark unknown opened up to the ceramics studio by new, digital processes. They are as of yet suggestions and glimmers of forms, amongst the first echoes, the first impressions returned to us by new technological senses of clay.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Ď&#x20AC;

new morphologies

Production Porosity: A New Taxonomy of Texture Joshua G. Stein Sequences & Patterns Just as strings of coded information drive the digital techniques that are increasingly employed in ceramics, the physical artifacts that they produce are, by necessity, sequential assemblies of repetitive processes. The intricately striated nature of this mechanical logic meticulously parses through the (seemingly) homogenous smoothness of clay—of earth—whose thick massiness seems to suggest a material more shaped or formed than assembled. But this assumption is challenged by new technologies as earth is now increasingly tilled by cnc routers and RepRaps. While there are several veins of inquiry in the New Morphologies show—the semiotic questioning that the virtual demands, the role of big data within artistic authorship, and the new social interactivity made possible through technology—perhaps it is still important to address the exhibition title in the most technical way possible: How does this texture of repetitive motions relate to morphology, and what new space does it open for exploration within ceramic traditions? The textures produced by mechanical procedures unite a number of the various digital techniques under exploration within ceramics. In 3-d printing and slip lay-up, texture emerges through successive layers of clay strata built one on top of the next. In digital mold-making, the machining tool sculpts the mold (or contra mold) through a choreographed pattern of repetitive passes (tooling paths), each carving a contour through space adjacent to the previous cut. Added to this three-dimensional striation is the matrix of seam lines indexing the assembly of multiple mold parts. In ceramic component aggregations, the collection, arrangement, and attachment of individual modules build texture across a field of units. Of course, each of these has its corollary in the known techniques of coil building, turning plaster molds, mold-parting, and brick-laying. However, in the traditions associated with these practices, conventions and standards homogenize and subjugate fine-grained textures in favor of the object gestalt: the brick assembly rarely questions the shape of the wall. With the proliferation of digital techniques, the orchestration of microconstructions becomes a new terrain of exploration, capable of building a coherent logic and intention distinct from that of formmaking. Like any new technique, the specific questions within digital 26

new morphologies

fabrication begin to train the ceramicist to conceive of work in a new way. In this case, the strings of data translated into assemblies of material are so fundamental to the process that it is impossible to imagine form separate from its facture. Sequencing, timing, and precision, already hallmarks of traditional ceramic craft, occupy the central focus in scripting the motions of production, and this preoccupation becomes manifest in an intensity of texture. The primacy of texture derives in part from the inversion of the typical cost-to-complexity relationship, which in the past implied that higher complexity demanded more labor and therefore a higher price tag. However, with digital fabrication, these textures exist as integral to the most basic fabrication job, and to edit out this complexity demands more time and expense. It is therefore often more difficult and costly to produce “pure” or “smooth” geometry than intricately textured forms. In the case of additive production (3-d printing and slip lay-up), in addition to the grain produced through successive layering of material strata, the development of texture also provides a key component of structure. Rather than producing a vessel with solid, heavy walls, with these emerging techniques, it is much more structurally efficient and 27

cost-effective to produce more depth with less material, leading to an investigation of miniature three-dimensional structural matrices. Much as in nature, wall thickness is achieved through the lightweight hexagonal matrix of a honeycomb or the multiple chambers of a nautilus shell. In reductive machining, where a tool repeatedly carves away material to produce either a mold, contra-mold, or positive, the number of required passes to sculpt a particular geometry directly affects the “resolution” of the form. Again, it becomes time-consuming and costly to increase these passes simply to produce a smoother geometry. Instead, accommodating the increased texture of machining becomes a fundamental aspect of object-making. Indeed, the texture of these new techniques structures geometry, and could therefore be understood to exist prior to form — perforation prior to surface. Porosity & Scale If sequential addition is the new language of digital material, the pauses and gaps between these assembled parts gain new importance as they are translated into physical space. The relationship between aggregate and void offers a new type of porosity to the material of clay. Somehow smaller than a mug handle hole, yet larger than the voids made by air bubbles, the precise calibration of openings, apertures, pockets, and fissures produced in the processes of sequenced operations has remained just beyond the reach of most ceramicists. While in the past, porosity in ceramics would be produced through either chemical techniques restricted to the domain of material science (such as foamed ceramics) or reductive techniques that operate on an already existing form (much like applied decoration), now a new level of control makes innovation within perforation an integral part of experimentation with clay. But beyond the precision of a new scale of form-making, this emerging territory of exploration creates a more abstract species of porosity: the permeability of scale and procedure. This offers a powerful nexus between two modes of creative production that have traditionally remained distinct within ceramics. Whereas the alchemy of mixing a glaze or clay body is typically an entirely different type of process from throwing, building, or even casting objects, the control of form at the scale of material through digital techniques creates a middle ground, a 28

new morphologies

space for synthesis and collaboration between the scalar domains above and below. As textures become inflected by the precision of technology, this new scale of inquiry expands to occupy the gap between cooking and crafting — bridging the chemical paradigm of material science and the compositional/visual paradigm of form-making. This shift is not unlike the baroque investigation of ornament that supplanted the geometric obsessions of the renaissance, allowing the scale of decoration to inform and negotiate that of spatial structure and vice versa. Instead of ornamental detail understood as an embellishment of geometry, these layered crenellations integrally construct the geometry previously seen as primary. This development offers another reading of the term morphology, in which the vessel form outline is no longer the sole measure of morphology. Instead, the morphology of pattern technique integrates with that of profile, each holding equal influence. Pattern begins to consume profile, providing a strong foil against easy formalism. Figuration becomes embedded within the matrix of matter while being the resultant of its manipulation. Aberration & Evolution “Morphology,” in Philip Rawson’s 1984 book Ceramics, offers a taxonomy of ceramic profiles that he likens to genealogical evolution. While he at first seems to be interested in employing this classification to assess the aesthetics of ceramics, he goes on to spend the bulk of this chapter describing the specific functions associated with each varietal of primary vessel shape-sets. Although he admits that examining only the pot form as the base profile has its limits, Rawson’s discussion of ceramic typologies creates a strong link between form and fitness that is still relevant today. He also extends the connection between form and function to the technique of production, stating that object “image” is “a natural consequence of that interrelationship between hand, material, and intended function.” Rawson’s discussion of vessel typologies examines how variation in throwing techniques exerts direct influence on an object’s use; as techniques become increasingly complex, so does an object’s functionality. Most exciting is what this connection implies: that the advent of newly available techniques necessarily entails the emergence of new functions. If we trust Rawson’s evolutionary analogy, it is key to 29

Dries Verbruggen of Unfold, demonstrating the 3-d porcelain printing process from the Stratigraphic Manufactury project

new morphologies

remember that in biology, genetic mutation or variation occurs first and uses are “discovered” only afterwards. While the directionality of this causal relationship is clear in evolutionary biology, it is more ambiguous in ceramic history. However, if we take seriously the potential for function implied within the void of a simple pinch pot, then the developing trajectory of intense perforation patterns creates an expanding plethora of potential sites of habitation or use, however minute in scale. Perhaps the most valuable application of these new technologies is to produce as many new branches and bifurcations along our new family tree of texture as possible. Intensifying the feed rate or pressure in slip lay-up forces strands of clay vermicelli to transgress the volume of a vessel. If the intended form of this vessel has a purpose, then these deviations beg the question of how they too might become useful. However forced this initial mutation may be, once a match for human habitation, occupation, or imagination is made, the exaggerated “mistake” is consolidated into a new branch ready to bear more fruit. The crafting of part-assemblies, tool paths, matrices, and strata becomes the fundamental parameter of a new taxonomy within ceramics. Rather than undermining Rawson’s taxonomy, this new ordering system simply adds another dimension to his original matrix — another set of techniques and trajectories that become available to the contemporary ceramicist. Honeycombs, loops, lattices, and striations become the new links between the realms of the visual and the functional. The challenge for the ceramicist is to tweak, hack, and reassemble these operations, generating new genealogies while expanding texture and perforation to offer new typologies, new functions. Although this new taxonomy of pattern morphology has yet to be mapped, the primitive patterns seem already to be established, awaiting new propagations and aberrations. π

Unfold, Jonathan Keep, Eran Gal-Or and Mustafa Canyurt Stratigraphic Manufactury, 2012 Glazed and unglazed clays from various countries, modified Bits from Bytes 3-d Printer Commissioned for Istanbul Design Biennial, with support of Bits from Bytes

new morphologies

Various clays and forms produced during Verbruggenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s workshop, demonstrating the 3-d printing process.

new morphologies

The Matter with the Digital and Clay Hybrid Gerar Edizel New Morphologies confronts and proposes the liquidation of two broad, conflicting but related myths in art: the search for an ideal state through dematerialization versus the revelation of truth via material specificity. In this thought-provoking exhibit, the two stances effectively combat and cancel each other out. The description of artistic processes often involves the art-school commonplace of a presumed polarity between the material and the digital. As if, the former messed with substance while the latter configured with ether. The ease of setting such seemingly clear oppositions for resolving complex issues with dualist binary thought has the dubious virtues of speed and ephemeral shine. The effect is insidious, for it perpetuates unhelpful mythologies about artistic work and its significance. An unfortunate bias of idealist thought ingrained in Western culture downgrades materiality to better highlight admiration for the immaterial. In Plato’s formulation, an inaccessible reality casts its shadows in the form of materiality. Matter’s changeability and corruptibility makes it unreliable at best and a falsehood at worst. However, true reality exists in the form of ideas, the immateriality of which insures their eternal constancy. While we are mired in earthly life, thought allows us to access the constancy of the immaterial and to recognize entities even in their shadowy existence. As a result, immateriality presents itself as a desirable state that can be reached only if materiality can be effectively overcome. Matter then appears as a grounding weight, preventing access to ethereal truth in the form of ideas in their pure state: essences. We also find this idealist kernel replicated in Christian dogmas and metaphysical principles. Idealist thinking can result in a dissociative view of the material universe, seen as a veil that must be cast aside to gain true vision. A universe structured in idealist terms favors not only dualist thought that progresses by setting up opposites but also the production of hierarchies, whereby events may be ranked according to their presumed closeness to ideal states of immateriality. The enduring difference in status between the work of liberal artists and manual laborers, and between artistic and artisanal production, for instance, has its foundation in idealist hierarchies. The cultural bias toward idealism asserts itself subliminally but repeatedly in daily language 36

new morphologies

every time “up” stands for good and “down” for bad and “essence” for truth and “matter” for problematic mire. In the minds of many, the term “digital” and the prefix “cyber” mean “immaterial” because they seem linked to a promise: the achievement of the long-sought overcoming of matter that would allow the subject access to immateriality. Digital processes provide the user with an effect of immediacy and demiurgic capability. Depressing the return button on the slick surface of the wafer-thin laptop by a user with lessthan-average skills wirelessly activates a printer that dutifully prints a draft of this essay in an adjacent building; another click of the same button opens the stacks of the Vatican archives, while a freeware just downloaded from the internet rearranges a sequence of sound bits into a tango that will play in the background, while a call awakens a friend many time zones away and visual contact gets established on the same screen. All the above occurs in amazing speed at the cost of insignificant effort. However, characterizing the events as “immediate” ignores the marshaling of seemingly interminable and extraordinarily complex integrated series of automated actions, the detailed description of which would fill a tome for every click of the return button. Although invisible, the actions are not mysterious and certainly not immediate in the sense of being accomplished without recourse to a medium or an intervening matter. At a distant point of the art-mythical spectrum, the approach that subscribes to medium specificity as a portal to truth may, at first, appear to contradict the idealist downgrading of matter. But finding truth in the medium amounts to denying the medium its existence as such. For, when the medium becomes its own end, it ceases to function as a material carrier for the production of something additional that points beyond itself: an information surplus. Medium, as that which “comes in between,” ceases to be a medium when it becomes its own point or points specifically to itself. Conducting art as research for exploring the possibilities inherent to a medium still points to the production of a desired “surplus.” This surplus points away from the medium toward its potential use for the demonstration of something else: a form for delectation, an object for interfering in the environment, or, a situation for provoking thought. Thus, approaching the medium as its own end reveals a desire for immediacy via its erasure as medium. 37

Thinking of the clay-based and digital processes in terms of a spectral opposition between materiality and immateriality generates the false perception of an unbridgeable distance between them. Digital processes rely on the operations achieved through computer-controlled machines. These machines are activated by a flow of information structured by discrete pulses coded according to the binary logical structure of Boolean algebra. The information has a material substrate; gated and released electrons produce a pulsating discontinuity regulated in binary code and, hence, generate decodable signals. A controlled flow of electrons trigger other physical events that may appear as letters organized on the computer screen or determine the exact coordinates for depositing a ceramic powder granule on a fabricated object. Traditional ceramic production involves forms of continuous play with electrons that activate controlled molecular reconfigurations. The difference between digital and ceramic artistic processes cannot be determined by degrees of materiality, as both involve manipulations of matter/energy. The difference can be located in the strategic use of systems for processing information to form machinic assemblages, human-machine partnerships, of various sorts and complexities. In their hybridity, the systems allow for increased opportunities in setting and tuning parameters for control. The works selected for New Morphologies demonstrate that digital systems and ceramic processes can be integrated to articulate a range of works critically reflecting on the weight of tradition, re-conceptualizing design, and finding singular ways for materializing the indexical signs of the body. In the new assemblages, it may be breath that signs the work rather than the thumb. The barriers are only mythical. π 38

new morphologies

Andy Brayman Wood Fire Capture, 2013 Video projection, MacBook Pro, plywood and metal worktable, USB and external hard drives with glazed porcelain enclosures

new morphologies

Del Harrow is a sculptor and educator based in Fort Collins, Colorado and an Assistant Professor of Art at Colorado State University. He is an mfa graduate of the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He has taught and lectured at Penn State University, The University of Colorado, Alfred University, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His work has been shown recently at the nceca conference, The Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Denver Art Museum. Stacy Jo Scott is an artist based in Oakland, California. She is an mfa graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and a member of the Craft Mystery Cult performance collaborative. Her work has been shown recently at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago, The Sculpture Center in Cleveland and Dalgleish Cadillac in Detroit. Publications include the Journal of Modern Craft Blog, Ox-Bow School of the Arts Blog and an interview with Bad at Sports Contemporary Art Talk.

new morphologies

Andy Brayman b. 1972 Alton, il, usa Mustafa Canyurt b. 1967 Turkey Jovencio De La Paz b. 1986 Singapore Gerar Edizel b. 1956 Izmir, Turkey Eran Gal-Or b. 1984 Jerusalem / Tel Aviv, Israel Jonathan Keep b. 1958 Suffolk, uk Geoffrey Mann b. 1980 Kircaldy, Scotland Anton Reijnders b. 1955 Venray, The Netherlands Joshua Stein b. 1972 Milwaukee, wi, usa Stephanie Syjuco b. 1974 Manila, Philippines Dries Verbruggen * b. 1979 Brasschaat, Belgium Claire Warnier * b. 1978 Maastricht, The Netherlands * unfold design

new morphologies