The Manufactured Society in 3-D

 More and more breakthroughs in 3-D manufacturing.

3-D manufacturing technology is so powerful because it is proving cheaper as well - and what I think it means, beyond its truly remarkable creative possibilities, is the beginning of the end of human craft knowledge. I suspect that -coupled to green energy manufacturing -it might just save our bacon.  But when everything from jewelry to human organs to entire buildings can be made this way with ever increasing automation, what, precisely, are we to do with ourselves? Is our future an endless abusdity of preaching and marketing to each other?

In developing a sculpture recently, the choice has already become clear: it would be far easier and cheaper to use CAD and manufacturing-20 years old now - and send the manufacturing to China. So why not? The value, or vanity, of changing what I think about by working with my hands in clay and wax and metal: the material in working process with my hands and conscious mind changes what I will conceive.
Art critics sometimes ghettoize this as "the handmade," a deeply dismissive phrase that assumes, from an over-extrapolation of Marcel Duchamp, that serious human ideas exist only in written language. I believe that is not only an intellectual failure, particularly in art, but demonstrably false.

I have learned a great deal about my subject by working with traditional methods. I have changed what it is, and what it expresses and discovers.

Much of who we are is created by the dyamic of our minds working with our bodies working with material, not only in art, or folk craft, or say, gardening, but in substantive work: everything from mechanics to construction to agriculture.

What is rising with this technology is I think the automated production of virtually all ordinary commodities, at huge and small scales alike, indeed, completely individual scales. The idea of making an amazing variety of stuff on your own 3-d printer is on the horizon.  Much of the effect may be very good indeed - I was struck a while back by the odd ring of a title of small 1940 art piece at UW: "Mankind Liberated by Machinery."

But because so much of people do and are depends on the interaction of material, minds, and bodies, technology which threatens to eradicate the economic value of most of what humans do should be regarded with real deliberation:

More and more, it seems that expressive art-making as an example of all creative and constructive human activities, most defines what human nature is. When technology furthers this I embrace. But lets not pretend that technological changes to our lives are ficitous or only beneficial. 

Writing this here in a cafe which ten years ago was full of conversation, and is now full but silent as a library, the irony of social media technology is not lost on me. 

Before the predictable reaction to the suggestion that a laissez-faire approach to technological development may hurt us more than help us, a brief word about the Luddites: they weren't opposed to technology as much as to their starvation when made redundant.  It was ultimately an economic argument: the test of powerful technology should be does it benefit most people, not simply enable greater and greater concentrations of private wealth. They fought back, against people like Mill Owner William Horsfall, who famously declared "he would ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood."  They were beaten, shot and hanged en masse (although not before a group of three shot Horsfall in the groin). And indeed, many starved.

It is not wrong to question the impact of technology, to organize changes to its development when its impact may be hugely negatively, to try to make deliberate and balanced policy decisions.  In the late 1800s, the two things most likely to destroy the earth were invented: the electric lightbulb and the internal combustion engine. In the 50s, we figured out how to plug wires into the pleasure centers of the brain and leave them on. This latter, like many other technologies, we don't use because the social costs are too high.  And we are invented powerful technologies at an incredible rate. Proceed please, but with great caution.