craft

Craft Games: Connecting the Head and Hand

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

Reading: Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter

Digital Play’s thought provoking exploration of the interaction of the technology, culture and marketing of digital games through the proposed theoretical model of three circuits—the circuits of technology, culture and marketing—embedded within the all-encompassing circuit of capital brought up questions and interests for me regarding a craft culture of digital games, particularly in the third “Critical Perspectives” section on “Workers and Warez: Labour and Piracy in the Global Game Market”. Last semester I took a class on the Rhetorics of Craft in which we had similar conversations of the effects of mass production and marketing and Fordist models of making on craft and craftsmanship. In this class we read (Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University) Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman—a cultural studies text that looks at how individuals and groups of people “make sense of material facts about where they live and the work they do”. His main argument is that craftsmanship—dedicated,  skilled, good work for its own sake (20)— focuses on achieving quality to standards set by a community (25) has come to be organized in three troubled ways (52):

  • attempts of institutions to motivate people to work well (issues of individual competition, charades of cooperation)
  • developing skill, a trained practice, in environments that deprive people of repetitive, hands on training (a separation of head and hand)
  • conflicting measures of quality in products – one based on correctness and the other on practical experience (pulled between tacit and explicit knowledge)

In that class I raised question of what was possible as an available means of production that reorients itself as craft in a time and global economy of automation and mass production beyond small enclaves of artisinal and craft counter-movements. I realize that it is complicated to equate handcraft products with digital games, but if some game are considered “art” or indie (to counter the mega and mass), and the work of coding can be described as “craftsman’s pride” (Digital Play, 200) and a “digital labour of love” (200), I am curious about how some of the labour and production issues raised in Digital Play might be resonate with similar matters of concern in the history of craft production in terms of issues of economy, gender, skill, exploitation, and technology. I am interested, and this seems to align with the cultural studies emphasis articulated in Digital Play, how digital games as craft (or deeper exploration of indie and its alignment with historical work on craft) could afford some nuance in looking at the design and production of games, the comparison of indie and big title games in consumer behaviors, and establishing an ethics of care/concern/consumption in gaming (the pride in local, small scale). My knowledge of indie games is limited, but I wonder what the rhetoric of production or craftsmanship is in the making of these games and if the communities that create them and grow from them can serve as a space to attend to their materials (their matter, their means of production) and material effect/affect.

Rough Cut: Arts, Crafts, Gifts, Knacks

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

Young, Richard. “Arts, Crafts, Gifts, Knacks: Some Disharmonies in the New Rhetoric”. Visible Language (14)4 341-350.

  • “new rhetoricians” divided over rhetorical art as a vitalist theory of art and composing: a technical theory (theories and pedagogical successes of both groups suggest in some sense that both are right in their approach)
  • glamour and grammar were originally the same word – combining the magical and rationalistic aspects of speech (341)
  • qtd. John Genung (The Practical Elements of Rhetoric, 1892) wrote that it concerns itself with the entire process of making literature, in being/embodying, but that in practical application, creatives acts must be excluded – particularly those of the composing process
  • practical = can be taught
  • which turns into the conventions and mechanics of discourse
  • creative = cannot be taught, of a person (342)
  • for Genung, “rhetoric was a body of information about the forms and norms of competent prose and their uses in the later stages of the composing process – the rhetoric of the finished word” (342)
  • longstanding argument = dynamic of conceptualizing vs. creative discovery
  • “traditional rhetoric” skill in expressing preconceived arguments or points of view
  • “new rhetoric” exploration of ideas: the process of composition is discovery
  • new rhetoric is not homogeneous however…almost as divided as new and traditional rhetoric
  • “new romanticism” (Frank D’Angelo): vitalist philosophy with modern psychology blended approach that stresses the composing process should be relatively free of deliberate control (primacy of imagination) – how is mystery taught?
  • art contrasts with craft: art is magic/mystery (cannot be taught) while craft is skill (can be taught)
  • “the teaching of writing as writing is the teaching of writing as art” (qting. William Coles 343)
  • art cannot be taught: when writing is not taught as art, it is being taught as something else — we must make possible what is impossible to do
  • change the role of the teacher (344): designer of occasions that stimulate the creative process
  • The “new classicists” considered the “art” of teaching writing a little differently.  Young claims that they see art as “the knowledge necessary for producing preconceived results by conscious directed action” (344).  In this sense, the new classicists see the teaching of writing as a “knack” or a habit acquired through repeated practice and experience.
  • art contrasts with craft and knack
  • art: knowledge to produce preconceived results by conscious action
  • craft: experiential
  • knack: habit through repeated experience
  • but knacks can turn into arts when they are isolated and generalized as successful
  • “technical theory of art” – art as grammar (R.G. Collingwood, 1958)
  • new classists teach “heuristics” – strategies for effective guessing (345), not rule governed procedures
  • “heuristic”: series of questions or operations whose results are provisional; not wholly conscisous or mechanical; intuition, relevant knowledge, and skill are necessary
  • each situation isn’t unique, but a kind of situation encountered before
  • some phases can be carried out deliberately and rationally
  • nice distinction between heuristic and rule governed in application/execution (345)
  • “If the creative process has generic features, if some of its phases can be consciously directed, and if heuristic procedures can be developed as aids, then it can be taught. Or to be more precise, certain aspects of the creative process can be taught…” (345-6)
  • tagmemic rhetoric informs rhetoric as heuristic application of principles characteristic of tagmemic linguistics (12 principles) – recognizing, knowing features, understanding variance (346)
  • “we do tricks in order to know” (William Stafford, 1962) – coaxing intuitions of reasonable solutions (347)
  • “But I am concerned here not only with what we do when engaged in intellectual exploration, I am also concerned with what we can do to increase our control over the activity, to make it more effective than it might otherwise be” (347)
  • danger of technical theory of art is the over-rationalization of the composing process (348); heuristics can become rule-goverened procedures by ignoring our non-rational powers
  • balancing reason and imagination: “both-and” or “either-or”

Articulating Making

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

[The following is a project I’m working on for my Rhetorics of Craft seminar. It is far from settled, or even really articulate, but it is articulating. It is an exploration of taking up Ian Bogost’s carpentry, from Alien Phenomenology, through Nathaniel Rivers and Jim Brown’s forward of the concept as rhetorical carpentry. While working with rhetorical carpentry in my own scholarship and pedagogy is thought provoking enough to me, I am working to understand it more on terms of the materiality of objects – that is articulating their agency (affordances and limitations). My questions concern whether or not understanding what happens when objects interact, in terms of techne in making an object, better situate rhetorical carpentry as a method of enacting rhetoric.]

What does it mean to make with objects?

Note: not make texts with objects, but make with objects as a rigorous academic process. My interest in making as rhetoric began in the summer of 2012 in discussing Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing with a reading group in my MA program. Much attention was devoted to his chapter on “Carpentry”; Bogost posits the philosophical practice of making to destabilize the mostly unquestioned practice of producing written texts as products of scholarship. He explains that

“‘carpentry’ borrows from two sources. First, it extends the ordinary sense of woodcraft to any material whatsoever—to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one’s hands, like a cabinetmaker. Second, it folds into this act of construction Graham Harman’s philosophical sense of “the carpentry of things”…to refer to how things fashion one another and the world at large. Blending these two notions, carpentry entails making things that explain how things make the world” (93).

Bogost begins his carpentry chapter by calling attention to the dominance of writing as the work of philosophers, which I would extend to academics, by explaining that its unquestioned dominance comes from convention (89); “writing is only one form of being. The long-standing assumption that we relate to the world only through language is a particularly fetid, if still baffingly popular, opinion. But so long as we pay attention to only language, we underwrite our ignorance of everything else” (90). This is reminiscent of conversations we’ve had about craft  and it’s difficulty communicating knowledge – the knowledge that is embodied in making something doesn’t necessarily render well to written accounts, thus the struggle in legitimizing craftsmanship (making objects) as valuable. Bogost defines carpentry as the “practice of constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice” (92) that “entail making things that explain how things make their world” (93). He borrows carpentry from woodcraft (perhaps a bit too easily) and extends it to any material – “to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one’s own hands” (93), and combines it with the philosophical sense of “the carpentry of things” (from Graham Harman and Alphonso Lingis) that refers to “how things fashion one another and the world at large” (93). To Bogost, making things (with things) remakes us in the making by opening a “non-human, alien perspective onto everyday activity” (106) (maybe this is where his use of carpentry becomes odd). This is his work toward representing practice as theory – moving beyond putting theory into practice (111).

In preparation for one of the discussion meetings of Bogost’s text, Derek Mueller posed the following questions on his blog post  – “The OOOist Writer and the Great Outdoors”

“ Instead of “Why do you write instead of doing something else?”, I would rather consider “How is your writing and making and doing entangled?”, whether gardening, drinking beer, or even welding (the second slide here suggests that writing and welding are compatible, though paper-based dossiers are already heavy enough; also weld-writing does not correspond to slideshow-encoding).”

What we discussed, summarized here succinctly by Mueller, was an enthusiasm, but also a  hesitation to embrace the making of objects totally – as scholars (students and faculty) situated within a writing program. While carpentry seemed rich in potential, enacting would take theoretical and methodological work. After reading, Bogost’s notion of carpentry as legitimate practice in scholarship is something that has lingered. What if objects could be made with other objects in earnest that were accepted as rhetorical texts? What would those look like? And moreover, how would they be made? In enacting carpentry at greater depth than metaphor (like concepts of craft are sometimes appropriated to describe the process of making something, while not accounting for interacting with the materials in making), what does it mean to make?

Making as Techne

Before I can work toward an understanding of making, the concept must be made specific by giving it a definitional frame. I borrow from the work of Kelly Pender in Techne: From Neoclassicim to Postcolonialism to situate making in terms of techne, specifically Pender’s definition of techne as a form of poeisis, or the act of bringing something into being. Althought Pender works through techne as poeisis in a number of definitions that she provides meticulous historical accounts of, I take interest in her use of techne as a non-instrumental mode of bringing forth – the bringing forth of something, an object, from concealment to unconcealment (35). Making framed in this way builds from Martin Heidegger’s work (particularly An Introduction to Metaphysics, The Origin of the Work of Art, and The Question concerning Technology) that argues that techne is a kind of knowledge that has nothing to do with technique or skill. Techne cannot be reduced to any kind of action or practical performance that results in a product; it is knowledge that provides an opening through which the being of a work can come into appearance in the world (35). Heidegger’s framing of techne reconciles its opposition to nature in terms of physis – or emergence from an object. Physis, often translated as nature, referring to the natural world, opposes techne as instrumentality – conceived not of nature, but upon it (the example Pender refers to is seeing a forest not for the trees but for a housing development). But Heidegger frames techne as complicit with physis, producing something in the sense of techne is to allow for its own way of presencing (36). In rhetoric and composition, this is what has been taken up as post-techne, particularly in the work of Byron Hawk. Techne as a non-instrumental mode of bringing forth locates writers in complex, ambient situations that reveal constellations that thus allow them to invent or see something as something else. We are not acting on nature, but with it in embeddedness (37). What is of importance are the relationships among elements in a situation – what exists between objects. But how can these relationships become noticeable? They must be articulated.

Articulation as Making

In Pandora’s Hope,  Bruno Latour defines articulation outside of human privilege (human as dominate over mute objects) as a common property of propositions, in which many kinds of entities can participate. As a ontological property of the universe of objects, not a property of human speech, articulation occupies the position between the object and the subject (303). He states that propositions are not positions, things, substances, or essences pertaining to a nature made up of mute objects facing a talkative human mind, but occasions given to different entities to enter into contact (141). Many differences exist between propositions, and there isn’t a knowing in advance of what these are; “Whereas statements aim at a correspondence they can never achieve, propositions rely on the articulation of differences that make new phenomena visible in the cracks that distinguish them” (143). Articulation isn’t a description of one object in terms of another, but the consideration of objects in their relation to one another. He explains,

“The point to be made now is that, in practice, it is never the case that we utter these statements by using only the resources of language and then check to see if there is a corresponding thing that will verify or falsify our utterances…our involvement with things we speak about is at once much more intimate and much less direct than that of the traditional picture; we are allowed to say new, original things when we enter well-articulated settings like good laboratories. Articulation between propositions goes much deeper than speech. We speak because the propositions of the world are themselves articulated, not the other way around. More exactly, we are allowed to speak interestingly by what we allow to speak interestingly” (144).

In allowing for the articulation of objects, we are in the workshop of carpentry. In Composing the Carpenter’s Workshop, Jim Brown and Nathaniel Rivers construct their concept of rhetorical carpentry, building from the work of Ian Bogost. They summarize Bogost’s carpentry as both a description of how objects make one another and a practice of doing philosophy (2), they extend carpentry one step further “suggesting that such making can be undertaken in an effort to do rhetoric” (2). In doing rhetorical carpentry, we would be engaged with “how we might ‘construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us’” (quoting Brown) (2). Rivers and Brown carefully work to show rhetoric and composition as not only a hospitable space for carpentry, but a vital space –

“The field’s interest in ecologies of writing and its pedagogical commitment to making strongly indicates that it can be yet another place to explore how objects carpenter one another and the world. An ecological approach to rhetoric and writing can fold together the work of making and relating, while keeping in place the withdrawn actuality of all objects” (3).

They work to establish connections between rhetorical carpentry and innovative work being done in the field that is considering the rhetoric of objects in composing – working with and against the agency of objects. They are careful to account for the usefulness in this speculation of objects in explaining that

“Rhetoric is always speculative: about its objects, practices, effects, and, importantly, audiences. Rhetoric’s audience is always withdrawn, and this means that issues of race, class, and gender might also call for a speculative approach. Rhetorical instruction again and again drives home the key claim that a rhetor can never fully know or understand an audience” (2).

The end of their article sets the scene of a classroom enacting rhetorical carpentry as methodology from the perspective of an outside onlooker entering the alien environment of working with objects. They narrate, “Part of what throws visitors and colleagues alike is that the class is not about the objects; the objects under composition are part of the class (they are what the students work on, of course), but, more importantly, the objects are also what the students work with” (5). Rhetorical carpentry is made possible through the articulation of objects in working with them to craft rhetorical texts that account for the complex relations of political actors both human and nonhuman. But in crafting texts through rhetorical carpentry, how are the objects articulated? What is the action that brings forth objects?

Articulation of Objects

Exploring what articulates objects in making is speculation on my part – informed both by theory as techne and rhetorical carpentry, and as methodology borrowed from Bruno Latour’s  “A List of Situations Where an Object’s Activity is Made Easily Visible” (80-81 Reassembling the Social) and from Laurie Gries’ processes for conducting object analyses from her “Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research Method for Visual Rhetorics and Circulation Studies” (by way of Nathaniel Rivers’ course syllabus for Problems in Rhetoric: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral). Davies explains that “Too often, we miss the opportunity to acknowledge the force of things because we assume they are inert tools used by human agents to whom we typically credit with full-blown agency” (Rivers “Methodology”). I hope to establish these methodoligcal approaches as ways of doing rhetorical carpentry that is more focuse don making at the level of object and their articulations. Latour’s means of bringing forth objects are as follows:

  • study innovations in the artisan’s workshop, the engineer’s design department, the scientist’s laboratory, the marketer’s trial panels, the user’s home, the many socio-technical controversies – object’s multiple, complex life
  • approach through/with distance – in time as in archeology, distance in space as in ethnology, distance in skills as in learning – make the normal course of action novel/strange
  • accidents, breakdowns, and strikes – objects that were automatic, autonomous, and devoid of human agents are now frantically moving humans with heavy equipment
  • bring objects back through archives, memoirs, museum collections, documents to artificially produce through historian accounts the state of crisis in which machines, devices, and implements were born
  • use of fiction can bring the solid objects of today into fluid states where their connections with humans may make sense – use of counterfactual history, thought experiments, and ‘scientification’

Each of these works to account for objects through different articulations – relations between objects and what they have contributed or thwarted. To study innovations is to follow an object through its making, use, and circulation to take note of its situatedness as it (re)articulates itself. Approaching an object through distance changes the scale at which an object is interacted with, therefore rendering it strange enough to notice its action. In breakdowns, accidents, or strikes, an object once muted in its action is noted in tis failure to continue on in concealment. In creating account of an object’s articulation, elements can be better documented through tracing to speculate factors of objects. Lastly, fiction can destabilize objects that are no longer noticed because they are accepted as unwavering facts.

Rhetoric scholar Laurie Gries describes “seven different yet overlapping rhetorical processes: composition, production, distribution, assemblage, circulation, transformation, and consequentiality.” These seven processes provide the framework for constructing object analyses that “empirically discover how this thing becomes eventful and rhetorical as it circulates with time, enters into new associations, transforms, and affects a multiplicity of consequences.” The seven processes are exemplified by the following definitions (Rivers):

  • Composition can best be understood as the design of an object
  • Production indicates the techno-human labor devoted to create or bring an object to life, to reality.
  • Distribution is the way in which objects get to where they are intended, by the designer, to get
  • Assemblage, perhaps a process more readily recognizable to traditional understandings of rhetoric, captures how objects bring other objects (humans and nonhumans) together
  • Circulation describes the movement between and within assemblages irrespective of the designer’s or producer’s intent
  • Transformation is a particularly interesting process, and it’s constantly overlapping the other processes. How are objects changed by and through their distribution, circulation, and assemblages?
  • Consequentiality is where we can find meaning from and in an object. Meaning, in other words, is a consequence of (re)composition, (re)production, (re)assemblage, (re)circulation, and (re)transformation

Like Latour’s situations, these processes work to articulate objects. While I see this as useful conceptual work in terms of definition, I would like to apply them to an example from recent coursework. I employ these methodologies to make noticeable the articulation of objects in a screenprinting project for a seminar course. My focus is not on the process of screenprinting, but in the failure to clean the screen after producing a print. The relationship between objects, and the articulation of them, while not an action of making, seek only to notice – to bring objects forth – at a small scale.

Articuable Objects of Screenprinting

For the Rhetorics of Craft: Techne to DIY seminar with Dr. Krista Kennedy, part of our understanding of craft came from selecting a craft skill to develop, its focus described in the course syllabus as

“Your work on this project will involve learning and taking auto-ethnographic notes on your progress, as well as re-search into pragmatic and theoretical aspects of the craft that you are working on. Field notes should be posted to your blog weekly. The end result will be an essay that incorporates situated experiential knowledge within a well-researched theoretical framework that is drawn from course readings as well as your own reading.”

I selected screenprinting to develop my skillset in, particularly in the drawing fluid and/or screen filler method. To produce a screenprint using this method, one must have (at minimum) the following:

  • a nylon screen
  • a squeegee
  • screen filler
  • acrylic ink
  • paintbrush
  • something to print onto

The print is created by first planning a design. The design (and this is one that is only of a single layer) must consider what the ink should pass through on the screen and what will serve as negative in the print – that is blocked with the painted on screen filler. “White space” is painted around with screen filler to create the parameters of the print; think of the opposite of painting to create an image; space is what creates the image for the print. The ink is applied to the screen on one edge and is dragged across with the squeegee. I arrived at enacting this process through a combination of watching and reading expressive instruction sets posted on the web by both amateur and professional printers, as well as in reading the instructional labels on the jars of the printing materials. The written instructions nor the accounts on the labels account for amount of materials (ink, screen filler, and drawing fluid, if used – something that can help control the creation of the “white space” in the print for sharper lines using the screen filler that has the consistency of watered down acrylic paint), nor the drying times of the materials (the screen filler must be dried before ink can be pulled through the design) or what the material looks like when it is ready for printing, nor the technique for pulling the squeegee across the screen to distribute the ink to produce the print. This is to say that language falls short in this process; much of the action that producing a print requires necessitates an attention to the materials, or objects, that are being used to print – what the screen filler looks and feels like when dry, how much is enough ink to create a design that is evenly coated without bleeding from over saturation, what type of brush will produce the cleanest lines of screen filler for the image. The objects in this process of printing articulated themselves – moving from mute characteristics to determining agents in the action. And as a fellow object, I worked with and against them to produce a screenprint. No part of the printing process, from design to production, could be enacted without the articulated relationship between objects and the characteristics, affordances, and limitations of each.

While accounts for process of printing were available, they mostly account for the process in terms of steps and lacked the same robust explanations in accounting for the objects themselves. Nowhere was this more articulated to me than by the process of cleaning a screen after the print has been made.

From reading expressive accounts of screenprinting on the web before beginning my midterm project, I noticed a cleaning agent was mentioned that removed screen filler. When I purchased the materials to print at a local art store, the cleaning agent was carried. Most of my concern was on working with the materials during the printing; little thought was given to cleaning. Assuming the cleaner, designed for the purpose of dissolving screen filler, would act in this way, I read and followed the instructions. However, the cleaner did not clean the screen. In reading the instructions again, an account of the process that does not focus on making the objects involved accountable, I could only look at the objects that were involved in cleaning (all of these could be broke down further into constituent items, but for my purposes I will highlight the following):

  • myself – the source of scrubbing pressure
  • the screen
  • the screen filler
  • ink
  • the bathtub
  • the faucet
  • water – water pressure and temperature (this could get reduced further)
  • a paintbrush
  • a nylon brush

These were not accountable beyond my speculation on water temperature, water depth, water pressure, amount of cleaner, type of brush based on experiences interacting with like objects before in cleaning situations. While these helped me to approximate, they did not make the objects in this situation accountable. I sought articulation through language and action on the web by means of tutorials in videos and forums. The following are three accounts of cleaning: one from the bottle of the cleaner, one from a DIY web community, and one from a screen supplies website. The process and objects of cleaning are highlighted.

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Slide One: Instructions on cleaning screens from Speedball using their Speed Clean

Objects: cleaner, paint brush, nylon brush, (pressurized) hot water

Slide Two: Instructions on cleaning screens from a user in the Instructables dot com community

Objects: garden hose, pressurized water, hand, scratchy side of a kitchen sponge

Slide Three: Instructions on cleaning screens from Silk Screening Supplies dot com

Objects: small pressure washer of 1000-1500 PSI

These cleaning accounts highlight different objects, and even describe articulations of the objects in terms of water – it is pressurized. But knowing what the objects are, even some conditions of them, does not fully encompass the action (they why and the how) taking place with the objects.

Screen: Object Articulation

To better make visible the articulation of objects involved in cleaning, I created a short video that explores articulation through the methodical definition work of Bruno Latour, in relation to working toward an understanding of objects through the theory/methodology of rhetorical carpentry. The focus of the video is not on me cleaning the screen as a human controlling nonhumans, but as a situation of complexly articulated objects interacting with one another. The screen doesn’t come clean. In addition to the cleaner, other household cleaners were used (bleach based degreasers for tile, soapscum, glass), as well as paint thinner, before the pressure washing tool at the drive thru car wash was brought into interaction. What is left is not the screen imagined through the written account of the cleaning process, but blood knuckles, a bathroom full of swirling cleanser vapors, and a screen weathered by water.

Contemplating Articulation

In looking at the objects involved in the cleaning process, I wonder what is articulated. Employing the methodologies of Latour and Gries, I can see application of the following to this situation:

From Latour: a breakdown between the cleaner, the brushes, the screen, and the water in the process of cleaning, as articulated in written instructions, did not act as expressed. Although written to describe the characteristics of the objects in the process, they could not articulate the objects in this situation.

From Gries: the assemblage created between the cleaner, the brushes, the screen, the water (bathtub and car wash), and myself. This was articulated through different object failures – the cleaner and brush and me, other household cleaners and brush and me, the power washer and screen and me, and so on.

What does this articulate? Although this is a small scale, a very close examination of objects, and is more focused on unmaking than making with objects, the emphasis is on the exploration of articulating objects. In contemplating what it means to make with objects, to do rhetorical carpentry, the ability of objects is something to be considered. Understanding these abilities through methodologies that work to make objects and the relations between them knowable, speculatable, articuable, might help further build these concepts.

Makers: What to Make

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

In finishing the second half of Chris Anderson’s Makers I’m left wondering what to make of it. Anderson ends the book with an appendix, “The 21st Century Workshop”, with a tagline that reads “How to Become a Digital Maker.” The emphasis is on digital tools – 2 D and 3 D drawing programs, 3 D printing and scanning, laser cutting, CNC machines, and electronics gear (soldering iron, multimeter, and a starter Arduino kit). What I value from it is potential – potential in people viewing themselves as designers/inventors/tinkerers, in curiosity, in attention to materials, in agency (human and nonhuman), in how we conceptualize tools, and in envisioning spaces of opportunity. While my interest as a scholar and teacher is not so much on the emphasis of manufacturing and entrepreneurship, I find value in imagining possibility, and at a different scale, adopting this (maybe my students aren’t making robots that can execute oratory hand gestures of classical rhetors but Twitter bots that re-mediate rhetorical tropes and composition commonplaces we discuss in class).

But this doesn’t feel like it accounts for making well enough – it doesn’t get at rhetorical carpentry (Brown and Rivers) or craft. I sit here now, mind a buzz with the energy that’s typically associated with being onto something – that is to say, the frenzy that comes with working through an idea. Except I don’t know what idea to make, but I find myself gathering materials.

  • OO Frequency: An Object Oriented Media Channel (from Ozone Journal)
  • Two blog posts from Nathaniel Rivers on rhetorical carpentry:

composition, production, distribution, assemblage, circulation, transformation, and consequentiality

  • A blog post from Derek Mueller on reading Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology:

What does this make? These aren’t blueprint or schematic, more inspiration – the bend of that arch, this pattern of embroidery, that emphasis of the natural wood grain. What does it mean to make with materials/objects (digital or not)? Not as hobby, but earnest practice, invention, awareness (mindfulness, or maybe materialness), curiosity, potential.

Carpentry

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

This week we read “Carpentry” from Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing by Ian Bogost (I almost typed Alien Bogost…) and “Composing the Carpenter’s Workshop” by James J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers, which have left my brain in a state of

in a good way! (gif shoutout to the Rhetoric of Craft Collaborative) Having read Bogost before with the Optatio Reading Group at EMU, it was a lot to think about. I took interest in his “Carpentry” chapter before, even making attempts to work with it, but I feel like this revisiting in the context of a seminar on rhetorics of craft, and in relation to the Rivers and Brown piece, brought new possibility to the work (that I would like to turn into a project…) While I don’t see carpentry as synonymous with craft, there’s a relation there that I am deeply curious about (in relation to rhetoric and composition).

Bogost begins his carpentry chapter by calling attention to the dominance of writing as the work of philosophers, which I would extend to academics, by explaining that its unquestioned dominance comes from convention (89); “writing is only one form of being. The long-standing assumption that we relate to the world only through language is a particularly fetid, if still baffingly popular, opinion. But so long as we pay attention to only language, we underwrite our ignorance of everything else” (90). This is reminiscent of conversations we’ve had about craft  and it’s difficulty communicating knowledge – the knowledge that is embodied in making something doesn’t necessarily render well to written accounts, thus the struggle in legitimizing craftsmanship (making objects) as valuable. Bogost defines carpentry as the “practice of constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice” (92) that “entail making things that explain how things make their world” (93). He borrows carpentry from woodcraft (perhaps a bit too easily) and extends it to any material – “to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one’s own hands” (93), and combines it with the philosophical sense of “the carpentry of things” (from Graham Harman and Alphonso Lingis) that refers to “how things fashion one another and the world at large” (93). To Bogost, making things (with things) remakes us in the making by opening a “non-human, alien perspective onto everyday activity” (106) (maybe this is where his use of carpentry becomes odd). This is his work toward representing practice as theory – moving beyond putting theory into practice (111).

While I think there are some issues with how Bogost utilizes carpentry (even though it is smartly done), I see this chapter as material potential for situating rhetoric and composition in objects, which Rivers and Brown take up.

Rivers and Brown look at how rhetoric and composition (“R/C”) have taken up ecologies in scholarship that have focused on human to human relationships or human to world relationships, as compared to object oriented ontology’s consideration of ecology. But by highlighting the work of Collin Gifford Brooke, Marilyn Cooper, Jenny Edbauer, and Jody Shipka, they demonstrate “that R/C can be hospitable to various projects that take up the agency and existence of objects” (1). They state “the composition classroom presents a promising space for what we call, by way of Ian Bogost, rhetorical carpentry. The field’s recent focus on ecology is one that is mostly concerned with making and with production. This is in keeping with R/C’s long tradition of focusing on rhetorical invention (1)”. Building from Bogost’s carpentry, which they summarize as both a description of how objects make one another and a practice of doing philosophy (2), they extend carpentry one step further “suggesting that such making can be undertaken in an effort to do rhetoric” (2). In doing rhetorical carpentry, we would be engaged with “how we might ‘construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us’” (quoting Brown) (2). Rivers and Brown carefully work to show R/C as not only a hospitable space for carpentry, but a vital space –

“The field’s interest in ecologies of writing and its pedagogical commitment to making strongly indicates that it can be yet another place to explore how objects carpenter one another and the world. An ecological approach to rhetoric and writing can fold together the work of making and relating, while keeping in place the withdrawn actuality of all objects” (3).

material scraps

audience as object (working from Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics) because “rhetoric is always speculative” (3) – shifting our scale to “in media res, in the middle of the thing and things” (3)

what this looks like/does in the composition classroom: While I can say that my pedagogy is an attempt at employing this theory as methodology, I have much room to improve. Rivers and Brown end their article with a description of a classroom as carpenter’s workshop from the view of an outside observer – “Part of what throws visitors and colleagues alike is that the class is not about the objects; the objects under composition are part of the class (they are what the students work on, of course), but, more importantly, the objects are also what the students work with” (5). I realize in the FYC classroom I inherit certain burdens (not all necessarily negative) about what I am expected to engage with in terms of textual materiality. But what I keep returning to is what makes the concept of working with/against objects in making material texts that account for and acknowledge their ecological situatedness so alien? What keeps us lingering in the theorizing about something that they are not doing in earnest?

“This range of compositions enacted ecologically introduces students to a multiplicity of composing skills, moves them to many scholarly activities across campus, weaves in an object-oriented approach, and positions rhetoric not simply as humans changing the minds of other humans, but as the work of relations, relations that remain strange and sometimes strained” (6) [bold emphasis my own] The idea of the alien or made strange-d classroom is something I’m thinking about…”rhetorical carpentry is focused on how we might “construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us” (2)

The Smart Machine: Man, Machine, or Man-Machine?

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“In many cases, machinery was used to re­place humans in supplying the motive power for various subprocesses of production. In most trades, though, labor-saving machinery developed slowly, and many factors inhibited its progress. Sometimes the new machinery, in amplifying the capacity of the human body to perform a given operation and thus increasing output, could also intensify the human participation that was required and thus exacerbate the prob­lems of physical depletion” (39). I can recall tours and visits to my dad’s plant, huge loud machinery. But there were people alongside the machines at different stages of process, people working and repairing the machines, the machines as extensions of people to build.

“Proponents of scientific management believed that observing and ex­plicating workers’ activity was nothing less than scientific research. Their goal was to slice to the core of an action, preserving what was necessary and discarding the rest as the sedimentation of tradition or, worse, artifice spawned by laziness” (42). The cushy position of the auto worker is something that is talked about with disdain by some outside of the auto industry; these unskilled laborers are given wages and benefits that their work doesn’t justify. Then I think of the layoffs, the forced shutdowns, the worrying of my mom and dad on and off again that they would be replaced or released in the name of efficiency, production, cost-effectiveness, and progress.

Reading Shoshana Zuboff this week I couldn’t help but think of my family – my mom, dad, and brother all work in auto factories back home in Michigan. My mom and brother work in warehouses and pick parts to be shipped to assembly plants, while my dad is a Tool and Process Engineer (by training in an apprenticeship) in an engine plant; he moves from the office working on the phone/computer to find machines and parts needed for production to the floor of the factory to work on machines and with the people who run the machines. They have each told me stories that illustrate the tension examined by Zuboff in the know-how of the body (implicit) vs. the scientification of work as logically constructed they are subjected to by supervisiors.

My mom and my brother’s work is done by their bodies mostly – that is they hand pick parts (from small washers to much larger components of a car) – they bend, twist, lift, pinch, grab, pull. Recently, my mom was chosen to try a new cart/container design (she drives a buggy with a container attached to the front to put parts she picks in) by supervision that was created to make picking more efficient and safe in the workplace. The cart/container was moved to the back of the machine so that the buggy was towing it like a trailer. She reported that she didn’t like the design because it changed the way that she picked parts, and added extra movement and strain to be turning behind herself all the time. Supervision implemented the new cart design because it, on paper/design, was more efficient for work. Productivity went down in the warehouse because of the change in how my mom and other pickers worked; this turned into a larger and more complicated exchange between workers and supervision that took Union involvement to reconcile.

My dad’s plant was one severely impacted by the auto industry crisis in Michigan/Metro Detroit. Because of this, the number of Tool and Process Engineers my dad used to work with/amongst was greatly reduced. Workers were brought in as replacements for the more skilled labor of the Engineers, but it wasn’t an equal exchange, even though on paper it was. While the workers know how to work with their machines well to do work, they do not know the machines.

I realize this are very specific examples and are limited to auto manufacturing. But I couldn’t ignore the connection Zuboff made not only to the auto industry, but to plants and factories I know well (they’re by my house, my friends and family and neighbors have worked in them, they form the landscape/the architecture of the city(s)) because of growing up around them and through them with my family’s work and the absolute prevalence of the auto manufacturing industry in and around the Motor City. Reading Zuboff sparked a curiosity to find old film footage from around the time automation was becoming the standard in manufacturing. I’m sure there are better examples, but I found two old films that depict automation in ways that echo Zuboff’s argument and the experience of the workers in her research.

(particularly first 1:40 and last 1:00)

(particularly first 1:25 and last 30 seconds)

I’m left questioning automation. It is obvious to me the ways in which it can remove human agency that used to be present in work as a means of translation, but it is equally obvious that machines function as extension. And again, with a personal example, my brother was (and I hope is soon again) going to school to design programs and systems that orchestrate manufacturing processes. Where is craft? What is craft? Is it, in this context, diminished? Translated? Extended? Invented?

And Latour! What of Latour? Is this a matter of either-or? Or can it be a matter of with?

In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power

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Zuboff, S. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Shoshana Zuboff (profile from Harvard Business School site) is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (retired), where she joined the faculty in 1981.  One of the first tenured women at the Harvard Business School and the youngest woman to receive an endowed chair, she earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. She has been a featured columnist for BusinessWeek.com and for Fast Company Magazine.

This video is more geared toward her computer-mediated work – “the relationship between information technology and work: 1) technology is not neutral, but embodies intrinsic characteristics that enable new human experiences and foreclose others,2) within these new “horizons of the possible” individuals and groups construct meaning and make choices, further shaping the situation, and 3) the interplay of intrinsic qualities and human choices is further shaped by social, political, and economic interests that inscribe the situation with their own intended and unintended opportunities and limitations” (from Wikipedia dot org).

Overview of Argument

We read two chapters from the book – “The Laboring Body: Suffering and Skill in Production Work” and “The Abstraction of Industrial Work”. In “The Laboring Body”, Zuboff sets out to construct better understanding of the relationship between automation technology and the body in the industrial/manufacturing setting.On the one hand, industrial technology have simplified and reduced physical effort of work, and Zuboff discusses work as effort and skill, but because of the relationship that exists between effort (doing) and skill in work, technology have tended to eliminate knowledge, or know-how, that is implicit/intuitive in the physical working if the sentient body. In “The Abstraction of Industrial Work”, Zuboff looks at computerization and its impact on intellective skills and action-centered skills. Zuboff summarizes the tensions associated with the body as interface versus data as interface -“Ac­complishing work came to depend more upon thinking about and responding to an electronically presented symbolic medium than upon acting out know-how derived from sentient experience” (95).

  • “Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic limits of the body; it compensates for the body’s fragility and vulnera­bility” (22)
  • “Information technology, however, does have the potential to redirect the historical trajectory of automation. The intrinsic power of its informating capacity can change the basis upon which knowledge is developed and applied in the industrial production process by lifting knowledge entirely out of the body’s domain” (23)
  • “work was above all the problem of the laboring body” (24)
  • bodies as instruments for acting-on: body as instrument for producing calculated effects on material and equipment and acting-with: body as instrument for interpersonal influence (30)
  • paradox of the body:
    • “But the body as the scene of effort, the body to be protected, held a special paradox. For it was also through the body’s exertions that learning occurred, and for those who were to become skilled workers, long years of physically demanding experience were an unavoidable require­ment…Where the skilled worker was con­cerned, the body’s sentience was also highly structured by a felt knowledge of materials and procedure” (36)
  • “Skill and effort finally seemed to be uncoupled” (51)
  • “As long as their knowledge is concrete and specific rather than conceptual and technical, workers will tend to be confined to a certain set of roles” (55)
  • “knowledge was first transferred from one quality of knowing to another-from knowing that was sentient, embedded, and experience-based to know­ing that was explicit and thus subject to rational analysis and perpetual reformulation” (56)
  • action-centered skill (61):
    • Sentience. Action-centered skill is based upon sentient information derived from physical cues.
    • Action-dependence. Action-centered skill is developed in physical perfor­mance. Although in principle it may be made explicit in language, it typi­cally remains unexplicated-implicit in action.
    • Context-dependence. Action-centered skill only has meaning within the con­ text in which its associated physical activities can occur.
    • Personalism. It is the individual body that takes in the situation and an indi­vidual’s actions that display the required competence. There is a felt link­ age between the knower and the known. The implicit quality of knowledge provides it with a sense of interiority, much like physical experience.
  • “Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence in the possibility of certain knowledge” (61)
  • “Accomplish­ing work depended upon the ability to manipulate symbolic, electroni­cally presented data. Instead of using their bodies as instruments of acting-on equipment and materials, the task relationship became medi­ated by the information system” (62)
  • “It is as if one’s job had vanished into a two-dimensional space of abstractions, where digital symbols replace a concrete reality” (63)
  • “”We are simply providing you with new tools to do your job. Your job is to operate the equipment, and this is a new tool to operate the equipment with.”” (65)
  • embodied knowledge to “scientific inference” (72)
  • in mind vs. in body (embodied)
  • “Intellective skills are necessary when action is refracted by a sym­bolic medium. They are used to construct appropriate linkages between a symbol and the reality it means to convey” (79) – external and referential worlds
  • “new control technology had the parallel effect of informating the operators’ task environment. Accomplishing work came to depend more upon thinking about and re­sponding to an electronically presented symbolic medium than upon acting out know-how derived from sentient experience” (95)

Questions

Zuboff poses the question “Will effort and skill, indeed the very presence of the worker, be wiped out altogether?”, going on a few sentences later to pose the question “While it is true that computer-based automation continues to displace the human body and its know-how (a process that has come to be known as deskilling), the informating power of the technology simultaneously creates pressure for a profound reskilling. How are these new skills to be understood?” at the end of “The Laboring Body”.  Zuboff’s work with this text was conducted in the 1980s, do we understand these skills now? Has the context changed ?

Do the selections we read from Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope about the action that is made possible by human and nonhuman actants, and about the influence of actants on each other – how they change because of their interaction (mediation) – allow us to approach Zuboff’s computerization, from action-centered to intellective skill, differently?

Where is craftsmanship/what is craftsmanship in this context?

Bruno Latour: Pandora’s Hope

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Reading “Do You Believe in Reality? News From The Trenches of the Science Wars” and “From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment”, I am reminded of why I am drawn to Latour’s work (although I haven’t read much, nor have I read this) – (from) what he composes, his delivery, and the desire to dwell within small nodes of the text (but moving within it). With this last characteristic, I will mention, that Latour is someone I would like to read slowly as an attempt at understanding at different scales. For now, I am thinking about the section from “From Fabrication to Reality” , “In Search of a Figure of Speech: Articulation and Proposition”, as I try to pull threads from our conversations in class, as well as Patricia H. Smith’s account of science as new philosophy in The Body of the Artisan as a way of constructing knowledge through human interactions with objects in nature as observation and representation as means to get closer to knowing objects and nature (really oversimplified and reductionist account on my part, but something I’m working with in threading Latour into what we are weaving as our class conversations). Reading Latour made me wonder about the construction of knowledge through understanding nature (would it be considered “out there”?) as something fixed, as something that is worked toward, established as knowledge, and recorded. What would the relationship between humans and nonhumans be in this period of the beginning of science? Is it like what Latour describes in Pasteur’s working with lactic acid ferment? Can the object exist as a discrete entity articulated in so many settings (evoked as knowledge?)? What does this mean for craft? I’m wondering about both the affordances and constraints to craftspeople in the relationship between them (their hands and bodied knowledge that create objects that reflect this) and their materials (objects for working) where the objects might stand apart from the maker. I’m struggling to articulate this, but is there a parallel to scientists, laboratories, science, and craftspeople, workshops, and craft at the level of objects? At the relationship between human and nonhuman (objects)?

In the moment, I am stuck on:

Latour states “What I have been groping toward, from the beginning of this book, is an alternative to the model of statements that posits a world “out there” which language tries to reach through a correspondence across the yawning gap separating the two…I am attempting to redistribute the capacity of speech between humans and nonhumans” (141).

And

“Our involvement with the things we speak about is at once much more intimate and much less direct than that of the traditional picture: we are allowed to say new, original things when we enter well-articulated setting like good laboratories. Articulation between propositions goes much deeper than speech. We speak because the propositions of the world are themselves articulated, not the other way around. More exactly, we are allowed to speak interestingly by what we allow to speak interestingly” (144).

For material to make something else, I found this talk Latour gave at Dublin City University, which I would like to listen to while rereading his “Steps Toward the Writing of a ‘Compositionist Manifesto'”. The abstract, from his website:

In this paper, written in the outmoded style of a “manifesto”, an attempt is made to use the word “composition” as an alternative to critique and “compositionism” as an alternative to modernism. The idea is that once the two organizing principles of nature and society are gone, one of the remaining solutions is to “compose” the common world. Such a position allows an alternative view of the strange connection of modernity with the arrow of time: the Moderns might have been future-centered but there is a huge difference between the future of people fleeing their past in horror and the “shape of things to come”, that, strangely enough, now appears suddenly in the back of humans surprised by their ecological crisis.

The Workshop

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In Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, he says of the workshop that the “workshop is the craftsman’s home. Traditionally and literally so” (53). In previous posts, I have mentioned the not so desirable workspace I have for printing – my (low) kitchen table in my kitchen.

"workshop"

My last round of prints, which were of two small designs, took a total of seven hours from start to finish: sketching, painting drawing fluid, drying, painting screen filler, drying, making the prints, washing the screen (this doesn’t include the amount of time it takes for me to convert my “workshop” back into my kitchen, or my “washing station” into my shower. Both spaces need to be cleaned and reassembled after this process.) During this time I am on my feet. I’m not sure of the physical/body reasons for this, but sitting to print seems improbable to me. Here is where a technical account should occur, but I haven’t the language for it, so put crudely: I don’t have the same control and dexterity of my hands (and what they’re doing is remarkable in range) and arms sitting, especially at my low table. And given that this workshop is actually my kitchen and is small (and occupied by two curious cats that watch on), I am back and forth washing my limited amount of tools, my hands so as to not sully the process or product, and the screen as it advances in the process.

When I print, I am enjoying myself. I am listening to Radiolab or music and I get absorbed into the process, that is until physically I am pulled out of my head and made aware of my body: back ache. Printing in my workshop space is grueling on my back, but for the most part I do not focus on this, I instead focus on the progress of the print. I typically take a break about halfway through the move to the living room to stretch and lie on the floor a minute to give my back a break. This last time though, despite feeling just about everything that is able to crack in my neck, shoulders, back and wrists pop, one side of my back and neck went into a state of cold numbness and I was forced in that moment to think about my workspace. Printing requires much from my body for the process, not just my hands, but movements that involve my arms, wrists, shoulders, and back. Craft does require the body as an integral part of the making, and I had never been made so aware of my own body then I was in this moment. I thought, this is why space matters, this is why workshops aren’t often transferable to any space – there are conditions that must be attended to. Craftspersons have established workplaces because the process is involves and requires certain material conditions. While I have been able to make without some of these elements, if I am to continue doing this (and I would like to) I have to envision the space and conditions of doing it as I view the process of making – with care. While I don’t think this quite gets to the naturalism of John Ruskin, I do find myself uninspired by my transitory kitchen workshop, which I feel in my craft. Each part of the process becomes felt, no longer embodied, I am aware of time  passing and time left to take, and begin thinking about the transformation back into cooking and eating space and the scrubbing of paint and Speedball Cleaner from my bathtub before it can be used again. This is hardly the imagination necessary for designing and making.

A parting word on ventilation: it’s critical. I think about my dad’s workshop in the garage – “industrial” surfaces that are easy to clean, high ceilings, many windows and or/door to open, waist high and lower chest high work surfaces. It’s part in the garage because we don’t have room in our tiny house for a workshop, partly because of the nature of much of my dad’s work – wood work, welding, working on cars and the like, and part because of the materials and solvents he’s working with. Printing itself, although using chemical materials, isn’t as noticeable, but the cleaner is. In my tiny bathroom with a functionless (it lets some light in) window, the steam created from cleaning the screen fills the room. I have yet to clean a screen without getting a headache, and I think it’s attributed to the cleaning agent. While this isn’t a universal requirement of printing, I think there is a reason many print workshops are in more open industrial settings aside from space to set up the many materials – air circulation and ventilation. This, like my workshop space, has been something I’m dealing with because I don’t have other resources available, but it is not sustainable space.

Next apartment criteria: a workshop space (and a taller table) so I can live in my living space and in my working space and not an uncomfortable transitory space in between that seems to be at odds with both.

Screen Printing: Experimenting with Layers

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I decided to experiment with technique before committing to designing and making a new print that relied on layering, in case it failed. I tried to divide my screen this time to utilize the space, and consequently time it takes to print. The screen is much larger than any of the prints I’ve made, so I thought for a multi-layered print, I would lay out each of the components on one screen. I’ve seen this division of the screen surface before in images and video of people printing, but they use painter’s tape, which I didn’t have. I tried using Scotch brand washi tape, which didn’t quite do the job of painter’s tape (which I’ve subsequently bought). I made a pond design (really an oval) on one part of the screen and simple tree shapes on the other part using drawing fluid. This was the first time I used my new brush set, and while it gave me better variance to choose from, ultimately, the medium of the drawing fluid is difficult to control (it is sort of like painting with Elmer’s white glue – it oozes and doesn’t allow for very fine detail). I printed the pond base on paper using red ink and printed my first layer of trees using black ink. I let this dry and put on another layer of the pond print, but this time I mixed transparent base in with the ink so that the first layer of black trees would show through. After the second pond layer (with transparency) dried, I added another layer of trees in between the first layer.

The transparency kind of worked, that is, the first layer of trees can be seen through the red pond layer, but the experiment print looked rough in the sense that I didn’t have control over what I was doing while making the print. I feel conflicted about this, especially realizing at the Salt Market that I am comparing my prints to prints made with another technique that is not dictated by the precision (or lack thereof) of one’s design capabilities done by hand. I have no doubt that people who are skilled graphic artists can create fine detailed prints with drawing fluid by hand, but it feels a little like comparing a handmade (and thus rough for lacking machine controlled “perfection”) thing with something that has been largely made by machine, though still handmade. Screen prints using the photo emulsion technique still need to be designed on the computer or whatever before they are set onto a screen to be printer, but they use tools and techniques (photo programs or photo images) that I cannot make on my own. My lacking design skills are keeping me from making the prints I want; my designing must improve. I found myself thinking of Ruskin and the imagination of the craftsman – maybe I need to be in an environment where I can be inspired by nature. Instead of trying to develop design skills of hand that work with computer programs, I need to find material that I can represent (and appreciate it as having charm in its roughness).

While this print brought new perspective to my process, it also killed my screen. This is my fault entirely as a neglect for my tools; I let the screen sit an entire busy day without cleaning it. I worked on it, but to no avail. The ghost of my last print lingers on he screen. I thought about continuing to print with it, but this screen is now “art” for the apartment. As a means of laying out a design, it obscures too much. And as is evident in the field of the pond, taking it to the car wash destroyed the network of the screen leaving gaps that disrupted the even distribution of ink. I bought a different screen at The Art Store that I look forward to using in making my midterm project. I’m still looking into what makes it feel different – it is not a Speedball brand, the screen is of different mesh size, is yellow, and seems to have a more rigid taut nylon feel (more like plastic) than the soft screen I was using. While purchasing the new screen, I asked advice of an artist there that printed on how to clean screens, since I continue to have trouble. She seemed baffled by this, as seems to be the attitude of seeking answers to this issue, responding that she’s never had trouble cleaning screens. I’m left in the dark. I don’t know what the mystery is behind cleaning a screen, but I’m at a loss for any other elements I can change in my work and material environment. This makes me feel a different type of failure than that of my design capabilities – who would have thought that cleaning up would be the most difficult part of making? It leaves me wondering what I don’t understand about my materials, primarily time it takes for them to set, how long they can sit, and how long it should take to care for them in cleaning. What I wouldn’t give to be able to observe a master printer in their own workshop and washtub.