a call for caring

Social media has created an interesting generational gap about its purpose or necessity in our lives. The American community has changed dramatically in the past few generation with the onset of the automobile and global economy having the most dramatic resonance. A community from tribes to a town contained a variety of people that had different jobs and skills to contribute to the survival of one another. Technology has separated this relationship so much the relationship between us so stretched that we hardly understand what draws us togeather as human beings. Technology has done such a good job providing the necessities such as cloths, food and water that we have allowed its ugliness to surround and dictate our existence. This is difficult because reason gives us no relief because it is reason that brought us to this point. We need to shift away from what is reasonable and instead invest into what is quality. Our lifestyle need to include things that are created with care. Every aspect of our life need to be taken the right piece of mind, their is no task too mundane for caring. Quality may not necessarily have an improvement on function but instead pull us togeather as a community. Social networking is filling a niche for people who's community has left them without culture or human relationship to sustain them.

Greeken Urns that held wine or Hopi vases that carried corn were everyday object then but are now in museums as pieces of art. Do you think in a hundred of years from now they will put beer bottles or McDonald Styrofoam cups in museum (even though they will last forever as trash)? In the past art and technology shared the same purpose: to connect and contribute to your community. We have allowed technology has separated us so much that we feel helpless to effect or change our relationship with the community. The ugliness of technology can no longer be forgiven for its convenience. Every aspect of life needs to take a more artful approach. We will use less if we share a personal connection with everything we touch. Would you waste a plate of food if you knew the name of the chicken? or would you be more willing to maintain your car if your neighbor built it for you? Everything that is made by man can be a piece of art if the person who was creating it took the attention, time and sensitivity to give it a soul. I want the chair I am sitting in to be sculpted not manufactured, i want the chicken that I am eating to be nurtured not grown. Can we still care?

intellectual relocalization

I believe that intellectual property requires the same social change of relocalization as commodities. As a society we need to re-examine the result of the copyright on our community on a very local level. Prior to recorded music, movies and television you had to go into your community and interact with people and go to a theater, bar or town center to see a live act. Most of the money that you spent went to the musician himself or a business owner in your community. In “The tragedy of suburbia” James Howard Kunstlern described a community worth caring about. It included space in which people were expected to gather and interact with one another. One of the biggest complaints about suburbia is that it is filled with box stores with large parking lots that separate humanity. What do they sell in those box stores? Copy righted goods, the result of America’s best intellectual property then outsourced to other countries to be produced in factories exploiting workers and the environment. The intellectual industry has centralized most of our brightest most ambitious people to essentially two U.S. cities. This funnels money away from local communities into the hands of the most connected. The rest of the country has become so bleak of culture that the only way to experience entertainment at a high quality is on the television, movie theater or ipod. This creates a much my high stakes competition for access and control of this intellectual capital. Some of the biggest American cooperation particularly movie studios, record labels and television networks are in the business of controlling and manipulating creativity. The most affluent consumers are determining this culture. If these corporations fail I don’t believe that it will be the end of music, art or entertainment. It will instead be created on a local level.
The intellectual property of woodworking is design. A designer doesn’t need tools or skill the same way a recording artist can use auto tune music or pre-recorded samples. If I only drew the design and then paid a manufacturer in China to produce my product, distribute with trucking and sold in a lot store in suburban America then I would be much closer to a recording artist. Live music is much closer to a craftsman who is capable of both create and produce his good on a local level. Recording when done well shows a direction in music the same way an unpractical but stunning dress on the runway; it is capable showing a direction and promoting an idea but its not something you would wear walking down the street. The evidence of this is the direction modern recording towards auto tune music and mouthing lyrics at living performances. They both rely heavily the looks of the recording artist and dancing to distract you from the absence of musicianship.
The internet may have ruined the old intellectual economic paradigm but I believe the open source model which relies on advertising, upgrades and cross promotion for its revenue can be economically successful on a micro level. A writer used to have to rely on a publisher to distribute their work. If I person instead gives this information away and create a large enough followership people related business which produce product will place ads on the site because an online followership is much more loyal than your typical consumer. You can then sell related products or physical copies of your work. This can be profitable on a smaller level because you cut out all of the middlemen and manipulators of information.
The current economics of intellectual property is a tournament system in which most people attempting to make a living with creativity fail but the ones who do succeed make absurd amount of money. This is caused by our copyright system in which money is made by controlling the flow of creativity and promoting heavily creative capital with makes them money. A movie studio ceo makes much more money than an actor or a director. If we relocalize intellectual property it will allow more people to make a modest living in the intellectual economy that stays within the community. If relocalization is going to happen it has to change on all levels of society, even yours.

Turn it UP!

Turning is distinctly set apart from the rest of the woodworking world, spinning off into a entirely different way to make sawdust. In line with a society of specialization, turning has splintered a group of woodworkers who see everything in the round. I was excited to have an opportunity to turn on a regular basis to create enough of a skill mastery of turning so that I could begin to experiment with style, aesthetics in the art of turning.
Turning green bowls is a high risk, high reward, instantly gratifying display of skill and confidence. Green bowls are constantly in a state of movement as they change shape and warp within a few hours of beginning stages of turning. Green lumber is in abundance particularly in a state like Vermont in which wood is still a major source of heat. I found almost all of my turning stock from the firewood stack, beautifully spalted supper tiger logs that were condemned for the stove. One burl in particular, I actually pulled out of a burning stove pouring my morning coffee on a few glowing embers before I brought it in to show Jannet Collins my next project. When you begin cutting unseasoned green lumber you expose new wood surfaces that have a high moisture content the deeper you dive to the center of the bowl. The variation in moisture content forces the wood to move as wood fibers contract along the grain of the wood. This turns a perfectly round bowl into oval and if the expansion is left unchecked the bowl will crack turning a piece of art into firewood in a matter of hours. I turned three different bowls from green wood found in the wood stack distinctly different in shape and size.

Turning is completely back wards from other woodworking because you are presenting a stationary tool to a spinning piece of wood. The wood itself is under power not your tools. Since your stock is moving at high speeds it requires more of a steady touch rather than brute force. There are a few techniques to hedge you bets when turning such as turning bowls with thick walls, heavy bases and heavily relying on sand paper which reduce the risk of cracking or blow out. To be honest these precautions keep your bowl from possessing the aesthetic of risk. Thin walls, large air time, difficult shapes create bowls that are beautiful because their fragility proves the skill of the craftsman. The only way to achieve this standard is confidence and a willingness to fail. After sending a few of my preliminary attempts into the furnace I turned a small bowl vertical walls, a wing shaped serving platter with a live edge and a thin bowl with a spalted rim.

Connectedness

If one were capable of bypassing the privacy security of Facebook would it be possible to click a pathway of inter-connectedness with every person that is logged into an account? Is there a thread of commonality? Further, if everyone was required to have a Facebook page would it then be possible to weave yourself through every thread of the human fabric revealing the connectedness that we all share? It is true that Twitter, Facebook, Myspace all reveal the trivial, dramatic and mundane details of our life but what we also forget that the very surface of things is what makes up our everyday life. Instead of understanding the concepts of a book, you instead focus only on one page, one paragraph, one sentence, one word, one letter and then become so focused on just the shape of a letter it will also become trivial. If all you did was try to concentrate on only the shape of each letter your lens of focus would be so small that you could never understand the bigger picture. I feel that our focus of these technologies is too small and we have to take the blade of grass out of the microscope and instead take in the infinity of the landscape.

It is true that spanning the globe with the ability to communicate immediately has brought us information that is trivial and useless. It has created an even larger evil, by making unreachable people and places more important then our immediate neighbors, family and friends. These people then become objects since they are not important enough to make it in the media. This is probably why America is so obsessed with the personal lives of celebrities. They must be important since they are on T.V. This can cloud our vision to the beautiful world around us, our connection with nature, family, friends and created strangers out of people that we share even the closest spaces with.

Technology, particularly the more immediate technologies of television, internet, fast food and super highways, is blamed for this loneliness that people feel in our modern world. I have been trying to claim that these technologies are only a symptom but not the cause of our social predicament. These technologies are also capable of destroying this objectivity that they are created with quality. Even if we were capable of de-evolution you would also have to throw out the very best with the worst. Would you want to un-watch the most influential movie of your life? When something is made with quality it destroys objectivity because it connects you with humanity.

I do not think this problem requires grand organization or large social planning because this removes our capability of personal quality. We will only become an object of this organization. There may be a need for this kind of uniting in the future but at this time I believe we need to focus on building a foundation of personal quality. Organization would only make us believe that the solutions to our problems are somehow too big for us to take on and too chaotic for our control.

This course has forced me to examine the idea of progress more closely. So my first tweet was “Phordfactory: Progress is the quantitative measurement of cause and effect over time. It is not qualitative and is inevitable.” It was exactly 160 characters. There is no way to somehow go back to the time of before, we can only use the wave of the past to push us forward to the future. To ensure that we are going in the right direction I believe the best way is for each individual to search for quality in their lives. It is an attitude in which you must bring to the most mundane tasks and everyday occurrences. The understanding of quality is inherent in humanity and has been with us from the very first cave painting that Neolithic human scratched on cave wall. Quality is contagious and spreads much faster than objectivity and if each individual brings quality to their lives without the ego or expectation of others it will bring much more fulfillment. Then people will take notice of this quality and see how it has made their dull objective day more connected to humanness. They too will start making choices of quality and the cycle will continue. This is essentially the driving force of art and the reason for its existence. Unfortunately in the age of graphic design art too has become an object. The need for quality is dire.

It is not the technology that is at fault, if it is not useful it will naturally decompose like other trivial inventions only to be remembered nostalgically like 8-tracks, bellbottoms, or tri-point hats for that matter. But I think our arguments about technology’s morality is a false path. Technology is only a reflection of our own humanity and it is nihilistic to think it can be done away with.

A table for the Internet

Creating a piece of original furniture from my own design was at the heart of my goals upon embarking on my formal training as a furniture maker. Although you can find great insight into recreating furniture of the past, creating your own project from conception to finish breeds something of a creative revelation for someone that has only been a woodworking employee. When designing your own piece, without the expectations of a customer, it forces you to make several personal choices as to how you want the furniture to represent you personally, esthetically and as a craftsman. These decisions became more daunting than I had expected which slowed my usual pace of production.
For my furniture design project, I wanted to explore a variation of a side table or sofa table. Technological development far exceeds the pace of furniture development. Most recently laptops have become part of most peoples lives and moved computing out of the office and into the living room but yet have a furniture counterpart. I wanted to make relatively small piece of furniture which can easily be moved that gives a place to set your laptop while lying on the couch. To achieve this I designed I developed a side table with an extended leaf shaped almost like a painter pallet. I then incorporated a steam bent leg under the leaf so that it would have support but allow the table to pull close to the couch. I chose to use Birdseye maple and set the curved leg apart by painting it black.
I wanted to build this table as a companion in color and wood selection to the shaker hall table, which I built in my introduction to furniture class, but also as a stylistic foil to the simple traditional shaker design. I felt that since the table has a modern function it also required modern style. The shaker style table used thin tapered legs that are simple and allow access to easy floor cleaning stressed in shaker aesthetic. I choose a much heavier leg design that flourished outward with an inset foot; this design provided the legs with the heavy duty utility allowing it to be moved around without concern of damaging the legs. I was able to keep consistency between the two styles by utilizing similar proportions and construction with mortise and tenon aprons. I tried to incorporate the function of the table into the design by snaking a power cord into the black steam bent leg allowing for a power source on the table top without compromising the beauty of the woodworking.
The creative process was a liberating but also mentally taxing in which every detail became an introspective question of my personal beliefs of aesthetics and quality. Ones taste and conviction on quality or extremely difficult to define and pin down but it is something that you can always identify. Designing from conception takes you away from the role of a critic and instills a sense of accomplishment and the bravery to stand behind your work with pride.

The Devil is in the Details

Television is often blamed for the lack of culture, reason and discourse in our culture today. I have just read Neil Postman's "Amusing ourselves to Death" where vilifies television and nostalgically recalls an American age of reason that existed before mass media.The issue I have with this theory is causality. He claims that our shift in culture is caused by television because it is our new resource for knowledge. My issue with this is that Television is only how we entertain ourselves it is not how we provide for our way of life. Most people cannot watch T.V. at work and the most important knowledge and the knowledge that we generally seek is at the workplace. This is the knowledge that we need to survive providing food, cloths and shelter. The shift that Postman is describing has much more to do with the change of industrialization replacing the craftsman in the workplace. Industrialization has replaced craftsman attitude of quality and has replaced it with repetition and drudgery. If you think that your college education is going to save you from industrialization you only need to look at our new modern factory, it is a cubical office. A college education may keep your from getting your hand dirty but they are still factories mass producing products of thought.

When Henry Ford was first building car's he found the best craftsman in related fields to build car's with the same approach of quality that they had developed making things with the cognitive demands of a craftsman. When he began to develop the assembly line most of these craftsman simply walked off the job. in Ford's biography he wrote "So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963" The new people that they were now hiring we far less skilled and had to be paid twice what the old craftsman were being paid. The difference is quality, the attitude that one takes when he is doing a job.(Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, New York:Rinehart, 1948, p. 49.)
So what happens to a person when has to do the same receptive task over and over again. He shuts down, its a survival tactic that eventually happens to everyone, quality is replaced with obedience and a personality that fits within the system of a corporate culture. Television is what people do to fill this void. Television may be the soma described in "A Brave New World" but it is only a symptom of a much larger cultural shift that requires human's to abandon quality. Television is only a coping mechanism because without we would all have to deal with how empty and unrewarding our jobs are. The evil is we can no longer care for the details of our lives.