Air and Mimetics: Making Form, Playing Form and Form in Motion’

Form and form-making are central to every craft practice, therefore the impact of emerging technologies on craft processes which start on-screen as an approach to form-giving becomes relevant to the fabrication of contemporary objects.

This study investigates the performative role of digital forming in ceramic craft, focusing on the possibilities of generating three-dimensional digital models by using 3D motion scanning and imaging. The research, initiated and developed at the FabLab Made@EU Programme (Plymouth College of Art, 2016) attempted to assimilate digital-making into the physicality of hand-making through a process of metonymy/mimetics. The concept of mimetics (digital metonymy) as a method of form-making in ceramics is approached from the perspective of bodily experience.
Through a ‘photographic’ approach the process of forming is enabled by a reiteration of modelling movements (a graphic embodiment of these), a mimesis. It is argued that through performative actions like curving-splitting-trimming-rotating-slicing, digital representations translate on-screen the three-dimensional, tactile, sensory performance of hand-making. In ‘Sense’, the screen is a performative space where form-giving is a process of form-tracing and form-finding; a series of transcriptions from surface to solid, from form to object. In this visual context, the process of forming reveals the kinetic, performative, experiential nature of clay-modelling. As the hand-modelling process is captured and made cinematically visible into the on-screen context of the image, is translated through code into a digitally-controlled fabrication.

In addressing the possibilities of ‘different kinds of making’, the paper questions the connections between the languages of visual programming and the physicality of making proposing a model of proprioceptive making. The paper was presented at the EKSIG DRS, Experiential Knowledge International Conference (‘Alive. Active. Adaptive - Experiential Knowledge’), Delft University of Technology and the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. 2017 (19-20 June) and published on-line.