Manifesto

The Power of Craft in the Digital Age

I’ve always been a craftsperson. I see the world that way, as a process of iterative making and creating.

Crafting is fundamentally tied to what makes us human. It’s vital to our ability to shape our own destinies and to determine who we want to be.

We are not widgets. We all possess the power to craft our futures.

In our increasingly connected world, I believe we have a once-in-a-civilization opportunity, maybe even an imperative, to try to be masters of our own destiny in the face of algorithms and AI.

The connection between traditional and digital crafting is central to my ceramics. While it’s interesting to have witnessed first-hand how digital business design, code and data can drive innovation, it’s clay that I’m drawn to as the most essential of materials.

Ceramic works have proven their durability through millennia and are likely to last longer than a .pdf.

That said, working with ceramics parallels the experience of working with code in fascinating ways.

Both materials – the design of clay and of computer code – can only be truly understood through deep, hands-on experience. One must immerse oneself fully in working with them and thoroughly wrangle with them to appreciate their true nature and become aware of the extent of their possibilities.

I see a concerning trend ahead in the Digital Era - that with the ease and convenience of pre-programmed technology, human beings today are becoming alienated from their intuitive and life-affirming ability to create art and craft, to express themselves and to develop and display the thing that is another kind of AI - artistic initiative - which is what makes us most human.

As Artificial Intelligence increasingly captures and analyzes our every interaction as data, the risk is we become mere points or pixels in a bigger system, rather than active creators of our own desired states of existence in the digital world.

We can build something remarkable with today's technology: A global network where everyone maintains their unique voice and independence while collectively contributing to humanity's shared wisdom and progress.

The first clay tablets and cuneiform writings enabled record-keeping, and that gave rise to the formation of states and organized societies. Today, we hold different kinds of tablets in our hands, the digital ones that connect us to vast networks of knowledge and super-intelligence, but their purpose is no different to that from millennia ago.

Today’s tablets are the means by which we expose ourselves to the inventory of information that influences who we are today and who we may be tomorrow.

Ceramics have been a powerful carrier of social narrative from the beginning of recorded time, and clay has been proven as humanity's prime medium for recording stories and knowledge from around the world.

We are at a ‘programme or be programmed’ crossroads in human civilisation, I believe, one where we can collectively communicate and ask what kind of society we want to build in the Digital Era.

I make pots and ceramic figures with the ‘Ascent of Man’ metaphor in mind, largely in sets, to express these ideas. I also make decorative pots and vases with other metaphors - including thoughts on the nature of the ‘digital soup’ we are immersed in and nods to ancient wisdoms and Indigenous culture, building on the skills and craft of our provenance, instead of replacing it. I like to call them ‘early Digital Era artefacts’.

I do this at The Gaolyard Studios in St Ives.

You can see some of my work on Instagram.