Why does such a ridiculous notion get any play at all? Because it has been profitable to those who would like to carve off as much of the spoils for themselves at the price of just about everything. If we can have our attention overwhelmed by this sort of crap, we are less likely to see through the motives of those who promote it. “Disregard the man behind the curtain!”

What if we looked at technology and Craft from a different perspective?

Techne, is how we do things. Techne is part of Craft. Within any Craft tradition there is a fount of technical information that is passed down and evolves over time.

The break came with industrial production. As ownership and control of the making of things went from the person making things to parties who could profit off the making of things the focus shifted from how to do things better to how to get by with cheaper, and convince people they wanted what you made anyway. This was the birth of what we call technology. It was founded on the rule of the bottom-line as a way to funnel off value from the parties involved in a relationship of making and use so that another party, the owner of production, would profit. To accomplish this it was necessary to dis-empower the maker and the user and subsume their needs under the demand for profit. This required the infantilization of both maker and user. They became worker and consumer. The gap between the former positions and the latter roles says everything about the final stage of our system’s over-reach.

The factory was the way to deskill makers and turn them into workers. The robotic CAD/CAM revolution was the push to eliminate workers from the equation in the sort of monomaniacal blinkered logic of any linear and reductive enterprise.

My father used to tell the story of the Spaniard and his horse. In Portugal the Spaniard is the equivalent of the Pole in northern European lore…. He was complaining that just as he’d finally gotten the cost of upkeep for his horse down to nothing, the damned thing up and died on him! That has been the logic behind what drives technology.

We are all natural. There is no more nature.

This equation has a result. Multiplying by zero leads us to a null result.

]]> http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/no-more-natural-world/feed/ 0 antoniodias http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/a-technique-can-be-written-down-and-replicated-from-directions-a-craft-cannot/ http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/a-technique-can-be-written-down-and-replicated-from-directions-a-craft-cannot/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:33:00 +0000 Antonio Dias http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/?p=561 ]]>

A Technique can be written down and replicated from directions, a Craft cannot.

Unless we can learn to appreciate the difference we continue to do damage to ourselves and destroying our world.

Technique is limited and destructive because it sets something in motion according to a plan and puts power behind it to force some particular change on what is around it. There is a series of intentions and “corrections” applied to the process. These are supposed to refine the intention and direct the outcome, but they much more often create cascades of unintended consequences and a state of confusion that leads us to apply even more powerful techniques in ever-broader domains to supposedly clean up the mess! This cannot work, It does not work. It is the result of a delusional state proliferating outward as it applies more and more effort for a worsening series of results.

Craft is something else again! It utilizes techniques, but it is not just a compilation of techniques. Just as we’ve fetishized technique, we’ve caricatured Craft. Craft isn’t what we tend to think it is. It’s probably the case that few people alive today even have an inkling of what Craft can be when it is a vibrant part of a living culture. Craft is not a series of techniques, but is an approach to connecting action with meaning. This is something else entirely! It can adjust itself incrementally as a practitioner confronts a changing set of circumstances. The results are not limited to what was put down in the plan.

Professionalism and the proliferation of institutionalizing learning as a distinct activity separate, and somehow superior to doing, has eroded our ability to even imagine what Craft is about, let alone to practice it. This process of turning Craft into a curriculum has reduced it to a shoddy and old-fashioned imitation of technology which seems so fresh and vibrant by comparison. This is a false comparison, like many of the other parallel false comparisons that influence how we persist in doubling down on worse choices after bad.

To begin we do need to let go this mistaken conflation that technique and technology is the umbrella over all that is possible for human activity in relating to the material world. It isn’t, not even close!

Craft, like Art, has been in exile for a long time, put in a ghetto where it’s been held at the mercy of wealth. In a way I suppose we should be grateful, they might have disappeared entirely without patronage; but on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the creation of poverty and its spread due to the predations of “wealth generation,” Art and Craft might have remained vibrant, integrated aspects of life.

One of the most dispiriting concerns I have – in a time of plenty in this regard! – has been the way so many who should know better continue to confound Craft and Technology. The epitome of this might just be the halleluiahs surrounding the advent of the 3-d printer. I don’t share in this enthusiasm.

I suspect that the extremes of our mania for the easy have to do with our fatigue at the level of futility we are faced with today. Still, it’s precisely the wrong response. If we are confronted with the futility of so many of the “opportunities” we confront then we need to learn from that and turn our attention elsewhere, not beat ourselves to death against what our organism recognizes as a dead end. The worst thing to do when confronted with futility is to push ahead! The spirit we break is our own. Then, exhausted, we crave easy. At that point we’ve given up. Welcome to the Zombie Horde!

The response to futility is to find meaning and then express it. This is never easy. At a time like this when we are losing traditions and entire bodies of practice are disappearing, we need to be direct and focused in our search for ways to accomplish this. We will not simply fall into a chance!

What we do have in our favor is, paradoxically, the extremity of our situation. There has never been a time when people have faced a situation like this with so much evidence of how deep the flaws go. The visibility of global collapse means that we cannot fall into knee-jerk responses that throw us right back into the same mess once again without succumbing to a willful blindness concerning what is at stake. Of course this means that many will do just that! But we have a chance, no previous generation has had, to see how much is broken and reach so far afield in making connections regarding what can be done. I’d just like to warn that chasing after 3-d printing, or any technological fix, is missing the point by a long shot!

Craft is Technology in Context. This sentence came to me last night on hitting the pillow. It strikes at the heart of what may seem a complex and overly-subtle distinction between these two terms and what they represent. When we look at what we know how to do as simply technology, we are missing a significant point. By this declaration alone we are abdicating any possibility for meaning in what we do and have already fallen into the trap of the prison of desire. Consumerism is one possible end for this path, at least it’s been the one we’ve taken. Technology on its own has no context. It fills that void in two ways. It plants efficiency, a circular logic that claims there is rigor in doing things in as ruthless and monomaniacal a manner as possible, in the place of meaning as an organizing principal. Then, casting about for a reason to do what it does, it elevates desire to take the place of meaning.

If there is no reason for doing something beyond wanting to, then we get what we have so much of. We get atomization which drives us to distinguish each tiny variation of possible desires and then allow their holders unlimited justification for whatever costs accrue simply because they want it. This mechanism is elevated to the level of a simulation of virtue. Banners on both ends of our political sea-saw proclaim the nobility of one aspect of desire over its “opposite.” Righteousness and justifications abound!

This complex distraction is not surprising given the circumstances. We need meaning, and if the pathways to it are blocked we will compensate. The trouble is whenever we compensate reflexively for a true loss we tend to replace what is missing with some form of addiction. Intoxication takes the place of satisfaction and the whole process is self-propelled.

Meaning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It cannot be formed outside of a context. When we are stressed and sick from a lack of meaning we are ill-equipped to deal with our lack of context. Even in the best of circumstances it requires disciplined attention to wrest meaning from our roiling perceptions and our propensity to fall into delusion.

How do we find and develop and maintain a relationship with meaning and its contextual container? The short answer is through practices that focus our attention and build our strengths.

These fall into three broad categories. There are practices that focus internally on how we can strengthen our organism and integrate our bodies, mind, and spirit. There are practices that give us an arena in which to confront creativity directly and generate and share meaning, and there are practices that connect what we do with the other two. The first type may be lumped together under personal hygiene or health. The second deals with Art, and the third is the realm of Craft.

Seen in this way a Craft is a practice in which we deal with questions of physical needs and how we meet them within the contexts of our ambient environment and its constraints, while connecting what we do to the context of meanings derived from our organism’s requirements, including our need to have and express deep meaning in what we do.

This cuts through all the accumulation of crap justifications for doing things well that have built-up over time. We don’t “Live to work out!” We don’t make Art to “Get rich and famous!” We don’t follow a Craft either “As a hobby!” or to “Make money.” We pursue these paths because in combination they fulfill us and make our lives worth living. In this, each aspect presents an awesome responsibility. When we approach Craft we are dealing with the realm of what is physically needed in confrontation with what is possible. We cannot know either of these well without the benefits of all three forms of practice. Within Craft itself we wrestle technology into context.

]]> http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/craft-is-technique-with-context/feed/ 2 antoniodias The Egg http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/from-windmills-to-wind-turbines-and-back-to-windmills/ http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/from-windmills-to-wind-turbines-and-back-to-windmills/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:45:08 +0000 Antonio Dias http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/?p=518 ]]> Let’s get one thing clear. Wind Turbines are not an alternative, appropriate technology. They are the last gasp of all the arrogance behind business-as-usual. They take the violence hidden in the mine, the oil well, behind power plant walls; and set it defiantly against the sky. They present the form of whirling knife blades, or scissors, ready to cut-down anything that resists their demand that post-industrial Narcissism must flourish at any cost.

They attempt to appropriate the imagery of the windmill – only made “efficient.”

There is the key! They are fully immersed in, and may mercifully be the last gasp of, efficiency as an organizing principle. They have nothing in common with windmills except for sharing the driving force of the wind. In every significant way they are something else.

A windmill is a locus of community. A turbine is there to power “e”-living, “i-life,” to use Jobs’ unambiguous ode to self-absorption aided by electronic mirrors and shiny talismans, an ersatz way of life reduced to a life-style, and a virtual one at that, which purports to connect people while it tunes atomization and Narcissistic self-regard to the point of an exquisitely commodified worship of the self.

A windmill, or its cousin the small watermill, extracts power from nature at a scale that fits its source and the needs of a locale. Turbines are there to harvest a maximum level of power wholesale and send it off where its concentration feeds the mechanisms of impoverishment.

A windmill, or watermill, is at the heart of a micro-environment that nourishes non-human life as it generates benefits for the people who live there. Turbines are sterile. They stress with ultrasound what they don’t kill outright.

Windmills and watermills are built as a communal effort led by people committed to Craft. Turbines are financed as the latest in a series of Ponzi-schemes to harvest capital and enrich a parasitic financial sector. They are built within a technocratic hierarchy in an industrial process that strips people of skills and understanding and autonomy to put it all into the hands of a distant, oligarchic elite. They don’t support a micro-environment. They shatter their local environment by disrupting and killing any life they encounter. As with any result of the arrogance of efficiency they do this not as an unintended consequence, but in fulfilling the imperative to dominate and destroy anything that does not meet their narrow goals.

The skyscraper is an objectification of Ego’s striving. It attempts to provide a toxic simulacra of our primeval urge for a high prospect from which to gain a wide vista. Antenna towers and wind turbines, micro-wave arrays; have a different ancestral imagery. Are they totems? Are they signals announcing our presence and prestige?

They do share with the skyscraper, evident in that term itself, an aggression towards the sky. They are sharp violent gestures aimed at the realm above the horizon that had been out of reach before. It’s easy to see them as masculine talismans. Their predominance over feminine symbologies in our built environment joins our expectations that these are not paired forces as a symptom of our worship of power.

Forms have meaning. We cannot avoid this by ascribing our responses to what we encounter as merely reflections of taste. When we abdicate our responsibility for the forms we inhabit, from social systems to the automobiles or buildings we put ourselves into, treating their forms as irrelevant or simply as decoration to satisfy whim, we are deliberately throwing away a significant avenue, not just for expression, but of the entire process by which we shape and hone our way of life. We fail to avoid abusive constructs and lose opportunities to bring our lives into closer alignment with the well of compassion underlying being.

Choosing to ignore the meanings of our artifacts is a sign of how far we have strayed from any conception of a meaningful life. Considering these matters extraneous to what we consider essential is the final degree of our impoverishment.

All forms are eloquent if we but allow them to speak to us. The forms we have chosen to surround ourselves with are damningly eloquent. They speak clearly of violence and willful disregard for anything outside of the perpetuation of interpenetrating cycles of violence, abuse, and destruction.

Some are the result of bureaucracy run-amok, regulatory micro-managing, as if to insist that this is a horrible way to organize our endeavors while it crushes all endeavor to fit its cretinous mold. This is a “civic” problem. In this we are all complicit.

But in the vanguard, and with the largest budgets, have been the leading lights of architecture, the Olympians of our Star System of winner-take-all competitions. These architects, have, for the past – closing on a century give or take – been at the forefront of the machine that first championed and then normalized the insanity Kunstler lays out for us to see.

Two things stand out from my recent inspection of atrocities. First, his assessment that,

“Contemporary architecture eagerly thrusts us into a dehumanized robotic future. The good news is, that is not our true destination. These redundant monumental gestures are the last gasps of the cheap energy fiesta. The closer we get to the end, the more soulless they get.”

This is good news, of a kind we need to develop a taste for, since it is the most abundant these days; and a potential source for clarity.

The other came to me as the result of the accumulation of instances, like this one, where an architect with all the money and success in the world couldn’t resist and took on the desecration of an earlier structure simply because he could not say, “NO!”

How can architecture redeem itself as an art? By beginning to say no.

This is directed primarily at the “Stars,” the one’s least likely to ever come across these words! But it is made in the light of a need we all must face of removing ourselves from complicity whenever we can.

For these stars, in one way that would be easiest, they can “afford it.” In another it is harder for them than for anyone. “Passing through the eye of needle…,” and all that.

For the rest of us, caught much more openly in the particulars of decline and the effects of collapse, it is reciprocally harder AND easier.

It is an opportunity to lead. An opportunity to pick up a responsibility that has been abdicated. It requires trading on our reputations, but doing it in a way that will not lead to “success.”

This connects with the dynamics of our moment of clarity. It is part of the Gift we receive from living in difficult times. It becomes more obvious that certain things are wrong. The ambiguity and cognitive dissonance that leads us to maintain a suspension of disbelief in insane approaches that withers away under the onslaught of the repetitiously appalling.

We are already straightened! This is itself a difficult transition, but harder in its expectation than in its execution. This is part of our advantage over the “Giants” now toppling over into irrelevance. They are afraid to lose what they imagine they have, and are willing to be complicit in any atrocity to stay there. We can afford to say, “What the Hell!”

What happens if we say no?

It might give pause. Here there is strength in numbers. One homeless person sleeping in a park is invisible. Eight hundred supposedly “normal” people sleeping in a park is a threat and a promise! Awareness shines on threads of responsibility that had been in deepest shadow.

We will get poorer? Yes, and no. This part should be relatively clear….

“No, and, before you run off to find someone who will just do what you ask, let me tell you why.”

What if we had that conversation?

Sanity cannot be regulated. It cannot be specified. It must be chosen.

I’m sparked to write this after seeing this headline: Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on hold. The latest in Frank Ghery’s franchise of build-it-and-they-will-come seems to be hanging fire. Interesting how this is happening at the center of the Neo-Liberal Utopia of consumer delights that is Abu Dhabi. Funny how chimeras and mirages are always connected with deserts, look at Las Vegas, the closest thing we have, equally built on the back of unfiltered yearning and naked wish-fulfillment. On the Arabian Peninsula this is literally fueled by oil. In Vegas it’s indirectly fueled by oil underneath another form of mining, the strip mining of anyone they can lure into their caverns and seduce into giving up their lives, measured both in their time and their dreams, as well as in taking their money.

That architecture as the public expenditure of great sums to build monuments to an individual’s fancy celebrated as the pinnacle of freedom and expected to pay for itself by being packaged as a commodified experience would falter in this place is telling. On the heels of the stagnation of other monuments to sheer hubris that have faltered in the Gulf States and elsewhere, this notes a watershed moment. Let’s hope.

But if architecture isn’t about “self-expression” drummed up to a fever pitch and marketed as a form of spectacle, then what is it? This question spreads out to cover all aspects of design.

There is a certain gnashing of teeth surrounding our current inability to do anything on a grand scale. Nostalgia for the Space Age. That most recent embodiment of the death worship that built the pyramids, on the edge of yet another desert…. It’s blamed on “bottom-line” and next-quarter-thinking that has dominated financial and business planning. That every part of this equation, from our assessments of what constitutes a bottom line to what financial and business and even planning have to do with organizing a way of life; are all questionable, and past their due date, is not often considered. What does “doing something big” mean? Is it always tied to the grandiloquent gesture? Does it always mean enslaving life to dreams of cheating death that ultimately destroy life on a grand scale? If that is so, then it’s nothing to be mourned over to see its day passing. But is this the only way we can think of doing something important, worthwhile, something that would change things in a substantial way that isn’t tied to fallacies of judgement that lead inevitably to destruction?

Innovation. It has become synonymous with the Good. Is this necessarily so? In a recent thought experiment over at Boats for difficult times, I’ve mentioned that there is little of what passes for innovation in the design I’m proposing. That perhaps even that little bit may be too clever and unwise. This does leave a broad emptiness where our common expectations of design would have been.

I’m reminded of a conversation many years ago with a bright and successful woman who was interested in discussing a boat design. When I told her that what she was proposing was impossible, she said,”Isn’t that your job?” She went on, “After all, if I wanted what could be done, there must already be a design for that. Why should I pay you for it?”

I’ve struggled with this question for decades. Not that I’ve tried to follow her advice, but that I’ve struggled to communicate that what I offer is not the fulfillment of ill-considered fantasies, but a filter and a mode of judgement. That this process might steer someone’s yearnings towards what is not only possible, but what may bring their expectations into alignment with reality in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. That if there is innovation involved in this, very little of it is technical innovation. That very little of it is looking for clever gadgets to shift problems from one place to another, but that instead there be an innovative use of synergies and an application of judgement to transform what had been expected to be a result into a beginning, the opening of an ongoing process, that could benefit them and provide an example, some sort of Joy, to everyone who comes in contact with it.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that this has led me down paths more closely related to the efforts of strategic thinking and of applied philosophy than to what most people expect from a boat designer – my own little insistence that I am not, nor do I want to be seen as, a Naval Architect or Yacht Designer. This distinction, probably looms much larger in my own mind than for most of the people I come across. It has been a little defiance and a sign of rebellion against what I’ve long perceived as the failed expertise of these, and all other professional experts. The result has been a series of comedies of errors, in which incompatible expectations have sailed past each other in the night.

It does come down to these questions, What is design? What is it for? It’s why I started this site, as a forum to discuss these questions and find ways to clarify what might be at stake.

I think it’s James Howard Kunstler who has provocatively said that the American Suburb and our highway infrastructure, that the entire Post-war boom, was the largest miss-allocation of funds in history. He may not have aimed his critique widely enough! The entire enterprise of treating dreams as an imperative and dominating everything else by an insistence on the primacy of wish-fulfillment could be said to be the mechanism that has driven every case of this kind of miss-allocation throughout history. In a way this misunderstanding of what design is for could be seen as being at the heart of this confusion.

Design is neither Art, nor is it Engineering. It is confused with both. Art is too broad to cover what design does. Engineering too narrow. Art is a pursuit of meaning that takes place outside the realm of physical necessity, beyond the most basic requirements for holding its artifacts together – though even this requirement can be superseded by Art’s internal necessities. Engineering is a reductive practice that focuses technique on specific structural questions and that establishes what are meant to be simple and efficient answers to practical questions.  Each word in that sentence sets off alarms in anyone familiar with my writing! Each denies more than it covers. Simplicity is an imposition of will in the face of unbounded complexity. Efficiency is a fallacy. Answers are too often rushed short-circuits in which we choose to avoid recognizing that we are dealing with predicaments and not problems. Practical is an example of the reductive oversimplification of complexity to arrive at and justify our “answers.” And Questions are what we spend too little time on in our rush after answers. They are too often crippled as we hack away at their thorny complexity just because we wish they were easier to solve.

Design is somewhere in between. To design is to designate, to make distinctions, but also to recognize that there are no simple answers and that the sources of value are equally complex and come out of our deepest connections with what it means to be alive. In this way design is no “industry’s” handmaid. It exists to maintain a pressure on the escape valves of expediency and of willful misunderstanding.

Seen in this light, the incompatibility of design with current paradigms is a good sign! No matter how much we are driven to sanctify the Jobsian example of high-tech innovation coupled with cut-throat industrial policy as the epitome of design, it is only the latest dead-end. The latest abdication of the responsibility inherent in questions of design.

Clearing away the mass of “what it ain’t!” is only a start at inhabiting the question, What is design? It’s just that there is so much in the way! More on this to come….

]]> http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/what-is-design-whats-it-for/feed/ 4 antoniodias Quannapowatt detail http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/simplicity-complexity/ http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/simplicity-complexity/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:11:04 +0000 Antonio Dias http://finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com/?p=467 ]]>

Just found this quote on Johnnie Moore’s Blog,

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Oliver Wendel Holmes

In the spirit of his words, let’s leave it at that!

This came to me while thinking about painting – while actually painting.

We forget that tools are obstacles as often as they are helpful.

They introduce agendas that can easily lead us astray. Joy, creativity, dialogue require us to keep tools in their places – as well as avoiding those attributes of striving, following means towards their ends, and fixating on goals, all attitudes that tool use tends to support.

In painting we use tools, but not only as they are intended. We use them as much to get in our way as to facilitate. In either direction, tools help and hinder us.

Mastery is the development of a relationship with tools that moves us through this continuum of their possibilities without tying us to their limitations.

*

Another thought relating tools to intention and from there to striving:

Tools are sharpened intention.

They heighten focus and direct what had been a mere intention. In this way they generate momentum. This can be useful, but it is also why tools carry us over into overreach. When collapse would be a better option; tools, their use, our habits of turning to them for results, even our assumption that a loop of intention, striving, results, repeat is beneficial, no matter what; tools hold us on a course we’d be better off abandoning. This applies equally to “resistance” as it does to reactionary action.

It’s no wonder they appeal. Along with plans of all sorts they provide comfort. They promise to eliminate uncertainty. They set us on courses so we don’t have to keep thinking, we can just “execute.”

Too bad life isn’t like that, no matter how much we conspire to believe it can be.

When we deal with models we are pretending. We are playing. We often forget that. We prefer to forget it. So many factors push us to conspire in the fiction that it isn’t true.

But it is.

Models are for pretending, for playing.

We need to grow up some time.

That’s not to say we stop playing. We can’t create without play. It does mean we stop pretending that our toys let us do whatever our childish imaginations want us to believe is possible.

There’s tremendous violence unleashed on the world when we do. On the world, on each other, and on us.

We need models, but let’s understand how dangerous they are. Let’s be clear where imagination and play end and where dealing with reality begins. It’s at a point where we are not clutching at models and wishing to be able to stop thinking, choosing, deciding; before we act – or as we act.