Heller, L, D. Millerson and K. Morris. Shiny New Toys: A History of Digital Technology in Canadian Post-Secondary Craft, Craft History Workshop, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, 2022
This talk draws from the findings of an in-progress Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant titled Thinking Through Craft and the Digital Turn (CDT). We are investigating the history, implications and emergent futures of digital technology in post-secondary craft studios and curriculum as well as community engagement and perception of the digital turn. Students, faculty, and technicians in craft-based programs explore the relationship of handwork to digital technologies daily with varying degrees of access to tools and facilities. Due to a lack of research available on craft and digital pedagogy in Canada, our project is tasked with furthering our understanding of the history and present conditions of the adoption of digital technologies—tools, methodologies and networks—and how they intersect with traditional processes. This talk focuses particularly on embodied pedagogy and digital technology through the lens of precariousness. With the advent of an international pandemic and distance teaching, makers and educators have been catapulted into digital immersion. This development has lent further urgency to our project. By offering up both historical and current insights from across Canada, through research findings and data captured from surveys of faculty, students and technicians at post-secondary institutions, we look in depth at aspects of precariousness and precarity, differentiate between the two and relate these concepts to craft and digital ubiquity. We speak specifically about the practices of Downloading Risk and Responsibility from institutions onto individuals; Loss and Opportunity within digital ubiquity; the issue of Shiny New Toys destabilizing traditional craft practices; and the Seismic Shift Online as a response to the threat of the pandemic.
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