Between Craft and Code

Between Craft and Code - Investigating Systems in Practice

The exhibition seeks to explore the human embodied experience in a world of data. All three creative contributors to this exhibition were working with the same live industrial data sample provided by the Centre of Intelligent Data Solutions (CIDS). A set of instructions, akin to an algorithm, determined the rules as to how these skilled individuals responded to the data sample. This process allowed a mapping of the data into different material forms – animated shapes, vibration and textile art. Some patterns may be perceivable across the different media, although they may not. It is expected that the results will have considerable variation, highlighting the individual human experience in producing and consuming these works. This process is also a statement around the tradition of system art, and allows us to question the tensions between commonly held perceptions around craft making as a generative, complex, messy, intuitive process, and commonly held perceptions around code making (programming) as a predictable, linear, constrained, logical process – practitioners of either medium often report having to follow self-imposed rules and adapting their ‘system’ (approach) at times, and at other times just following a hunch / intuition. We want to explore the following themes around craft and code: • Systems, rules/constraints, chance/randomness, interruption/hacking, re-iteration/loops, notation/codification and re-mediation – in what ways do these matter to your practice? • How are analogue and digital processes experienced by practitioners of varying fields within creative practice? • What emerges when an imposed set of rules and systems is enforced on that practice?