Abstract
This essay challenges the prevailing conceptual divide between "art" and "technology," arguing that this distinction is rooted more in historical and ideological biases than in the nature of the practices themselves. I propose an alternative analytical framework that considers "artistic" and "technical" modalities as relational aspects present in various practices. By examining two case studies—textile craft and coding—I demonstrate how activities typically labeled as "art" and "technology" each embody both artistic and technical dimensions. The first case, textile craft, often viewed as purely artistic, reveals complex technical skill and embodied knowledge. The second case, coding, typically seen as a purely technical act, showcases artistic expression, social affiliation, and even political subversion. This analysis highlights how both practices transcend their conventional classifications, thus advocating for a more integrated perspective that captures the overlapping and relational qualities of human practices. By moving beyond binary categories, this approach offers a holistic understanding that better reflects the interconnectedness of skill, creativity, and social context in cultural practices.
Introduction
Marcel Mauss, in Manual of Ethnography (2007), argued that “the distinction between techniques and arts… is only a distinction made by collective psychology” (67). Yet today, the frequently-used terms “art” and “technology” cannot be further apart—the former, considered to be the domain of human expression and creativity; the latter, fulfilling practical and rational functions and often seen to sit in tension to human agency.
In this essay, I seek to challenge the difference between these categories. I will firstly trace the historical origins of the distinction between “technology” and “art” and explore the emergence of these terms as vernacular categories with implicit biases. I argue for a consideration of “artistic” and “technical” modalities through which we can analyse practices. I will discuss two ethnographic examples: an activity conventionally-considered “artistic”: textile craft creation; and one conventionally-considered “technical”: coding software. Thus, I aim to demonstrate a holistic understanding of these practices which moves beyond “art” and “technology”.
“Art” and “Technology”
The Greek word techné (τέχνη) reveals the shared etymology of “art” and ‘technology”. Meaning “skills”, “arts”, or “crafts”, and activities of making or doing, in ancient Greece tekhné encapsulated a range of fields that today are considered distinct. Leo Marx (2010) traces the emergence of the word “technology” (tekhné and logos) in the 17th century, initially etymologically indicating the study of tekhné, or the discourse of “arts” (562). He analyses how, with rapid developments in scientific and mechanical innovation, along with ideological shifts following Western modernity, the change in meaning of “technology” came to fill a semantic and conceptual void (563). At the same time, the conceptual division between the “mechanic” or “useful arts” and the “fine arts” in the 19th century (Ingold 2001, 18), along with movements such as the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and Euro-America, pitted the two categories against each other, with opposing connotations of practical and creative, functional and aesthetic, physical and mental, that still endure today.
Thus, “technology”, while associated with the “mechanical arts”, transcended its perceived inferiority to denote a “higher and social intellectual plane” and invoke teleological narratives of progress and power (Marx 2010, 573–574). Yet, in doing so, it conflated multiple phenomena under the concept of “technology”—objects, systems, techniques, knowledge—as well as “infused [it] with forms of essentialising determinisms” (Coupaye 2022, 439) such as objectivity, rationality, and artificiality. At the same time, we can observe a parallel shift in the meaning of “art”, conflating skill, process, and product, yet inscribed with superior aesthetic and intellectual refinement and distinguished from “mere” handicraft or “applied arts” perceived to be concerned with functionality or mechanical execution (Ingold 2001, 18). Both thus emerge as vernacular terms from regimes of value, politics, and norms.
Moving away from “art” and “technology”, we might also consider “arts” and “technics” as potential analytical categories. On one hand, the “arts” connotes a wide range of cultural production across disciplines, attending to both everyday practices and institutionalised ones. Simultaneously, “technics” expands the concept to include technical activities, technical objects, and socio-technical systems. In doing so, they tackle the opacity of the vernacular terms and redirect a focus towards specificity, context, and relations.
In addition, I shift to a discussion of “artistic” and “technical” dimensions as two, among many, modalities of relation. This approach sheds light on the ways which skills, activities, and objects have multiple dimensions and thus neither exclusively belong to either “art” or “technology”. Here, my definition of “technical” follows Mauss ([1935]1979): technical actions are effective to the actor and traditional in its transmission (104). Additionally, technical objects emerge at the interface between living beings and their social, cultural, and historical conditions, or milieu (Leroi-Gourhan [1945]1973, 334–346). “Artistic”, following Gell (1998), derives from intentionality imbued by its maker with efficacy in acting on the world (2–27), and demonstrate “a certain technically-achieved level of excellence”, or what Gell calls “the technology of enchantment” (1994, 43). As we can see, there are shared commonalities, with efficacy, intentionality, and engagement within webs of social relations, being key to both terms.
With this in mind, I will explore two ethnographic examples to challenge their categorisation as “art” or “technology”.
The “technical” dimension of “art”
Firstly, I will discuss textile craft practices conventionally considered to be under the category of “arts” and observe their “technical” dimension.
It is particularly apt to consider textiles given the connection between the ancient Greek tekhné and the Latin texere, signifying “to weave”, linking the creation of woven fabric to craft and skill. One would typically consider such activities drawing on creativity, expression, and judgement, and the production of visually aesthetic and symbolic objects bearing rich cultural meaning, to fall squarely within “the arts”. Following my previous definition of “artistic” modalities, we can also consider how these textile objects powerfully embody complex intentionalities and generate important social effects. For example, Chilkat blankets, woven by Native communities of northwestern North America, are not only highly complex tapestries encoding creative agency, but are also used in ceremonial dances of socio-cultural significance (O’Connell 2023, 219–220).
On the other hand, we can examine the “technical” dimension in order to trace its transmission as skilled and embodied practice, its internal logics of efficacy, and its enrolment in larger assemblages of activities, objects, and social phenomena.
Firstly, the “technical” activity of textile creation involves embodied techniques that act on and with materials to produce textile objects. Stephanie Bunn, in her study of basketry (2022), draws on Pfaffenberger (1988) and Ingold (2000) to observe how the hand-making of baskets emerge from a fundamentally social “human-material-tool-machine-artefact” interface, where people, materials, collective skill, and the environment come into relation (64). Such making draws on body techniques (Mauss 1979, 97) and tactile learning transmitted through verbal and non-verbal articulations. In addition, it requires makers to intuitively respond to forces of tension and friction generated in the basket’s structure and form, making continual adjustments in order to efficaciously produce a sturdy basket (Bunn 2002, 70–71).
Furthermore, such textile objects reflect particular “knowledge technologies” (Levinson 1991, 6) as they contain spatialised understandings of non-spatial concepts. Loom-weaving, produced by alternating sheds, is fundamentally “a binary art” (Harlizius-Klück 2017, 178); plaited basketry techniques reveal “acts of intelligence, from symmetrical understandings to angular creations of surface curvature” (Bunn 2022, 77); knotting and twining constitute decentred, topological systems of spatial cognition (Küchler 2001, 59–61). In turn, studying the “technical” dimension of such objects can unfold complex relational fields and cosmological links underlying their material and spatial forms.
Küchler (2017) extends these ideas into an analysis of how patchwork coverlets from Oceania (tivaivai) encode the logic of complex social systems through the technical creation of surface and pattern. She observes the mathematical patterns of the tivaivai’s construction through communal acts of stitching, iteratively replicated which are recalled and communicated to others via sewing bees (87–92). The core motif is both collectively stitched and individually made by women. The patterns thus follow core metric rules which are transformations of existing relations, deploying distinct elements to generate locally-specific, discrete versions. Küchler suggests that such a relation—of shared yet differentiated activity—ties both the material surfaces of the tivaivai and their symbolic exchange to the complex social systems of hierarchy in the Cook Islands, where multiple intersecting persons and households mark competing relations and social differentiation, yet join groups in collective economic and political activity (91).
As such, incorporating an analysis of both “artistic” and “technical” modalities could generate a more holistic study of textile practices. For example, Denise Y Arnold’s study of Andean weaving practices (2018) observes interrelations between weaving gestures, their material traces in weaving instruments, and other objects and beings in the social milieu, to understand how textiles are “made into ‘persons’ through the agency of Andean weavers” (241–243) and as “total social phenomena”, after Mauss ([1923-1924]2002, 7, quoted in Arnold 2018, 242). Arnold analyses how the transformation of materials by Qaqachak weavers at various stages in the operational sequence of weaving reveal how objects are imbued with vitality and life via the weaver’s mind and body (243–247). Woven clothes are not only considered extensions of their body and soul (247), but the activities and objects involved in weaving—shearing fleece from live sheep, spinning thread into yarn, staking loom poles into soil—form the vital process of “introducing life force and hence personhood” (246) into a non-human entity. The resultant object thus is both a product of “artistic” processes through which the weaver extends agency and personhood into material indexes (Gell 1998, 23), and a “technical” assemblage producing ontological relations of growth and creation, and transmitting knowledge through a community of weaving practice (Arnold 2018, 248).
In studying the “artistic” and “technical” dimension of textile craft practices as different modalities of relation, they yield multiple analytical insights that contribute to a holistic understanding.
The “artistic” dimension of “technology”
Next, I will examine an activity conventionally considered “technology”, coding and programming, and suggest a consideration of its “artistic” dimension.
Code is perhaps the most obvious contemporary “technology”. As it concerns the communication of information, code appears to be objective, utilitarian, and “merely technical”, abstracted from its applications and contexts. However, as we have observed, technical objects cannot be separated from their social dimension. Following our definition of “technical”, coding is efficacious in its communication of instructions (to a server, device, computer processing system or otherwise), and traditional, in following shared programming languages and systems, and operating as instituted practices within a contemporary coding landscape. Consequently, coding is permeated with “all the forms of contestation, feeling, identification, intensity, contextualisations and decontextualisations, signification, power relations, imaginings and embodiments that comprise any cultural object” (Mackenzie 2006, 5).
Conversely, we can consider coding’s “artistic” property in order to defamiliarise and challenge associated assumptions. Firstly, following code’s definition as a “rule for transforming a message from one symbolic form (the source alphabet) into another (the target alphabet)” (Oxford Reference), we can understand code akin to art as material “indexes” permitting the “abduction of agency” (Gell 1998, 13); in other words, through which agency can be inferred. Code, as a type of transformation between a source and target symbolic form (programming languages, hardware platforms, functions and operations), operates within “a wider software nexus of social relations” (Mackenzie 2006, 12). Thus, just as an artwork indexes the artist’s agency and points towards viewers as intended recipients, code indexes its producers’ agency and directs it towards end-users—whether as open-source software, proprietary applications, or other communities of reception. Just as how the anthropological study of art objects moves away from the study of signification and meaning, a focus on the relations that constitute code objects can unravel assumptions about its abstract nature.
Secondly, observing the material practices of writing code can shed light on the diverse ways which programmers work. Bergström and Blackwell (2016) suggest that focusing on the “practice” of programming code situates it within a social and material world, considering it as a “‘craftwork’ in which knowledge is constructed and transformed in use” (1). At the same time, a study of both “technical” and “artistic” dimensions of coding can illuminate their intersections, in what Piñero calls “the beauty of the code” (2003, 95), and the ways which coders themselves consider the act of coding as “art”. Case & Piñeiro (2006), in a case study of computer programmers, analyses the desire to use code as expressions of resistance and subversion running parallel to the “technical” production of functional programs under commercial constraints seen to compromise their “craft” (775). Such actions entangle concerns about the “aesthetic” / “intrinsic” value of the code with its “instrumental” / “technical” value, where they cannot be so easily separated. In enrolling ambitions of beauty and quality, “the art of programming for its own sake” (765) also serves as a mode of performing meaningful social identities, demonstrating membership within communities and expressing ideological values aligning with the “hacker ethic” (776).
Furthermore, certain approaches to coding allow for creative collaboration and the articulation of political projects. For example, the Free and Open Software (F/OSS) project distributes code as accessible digital objects, encouraging collaboration and re-mixing: “the creative act of sampling pre-existing materials to create new forms” (Knochel and Patton 2015, 29). By allowing users to freely learn from, appropriate, and innovate on existing code, such acts both extend the capabilities of creators through collaborative potentials, and echo postmodern art movements in conceptual art and socially-engaged practice which critique art-world systems and emphasise participatory outputs that seek to undermine the singular dominance of the artist (Bourriaud [1998]2002, Bishop 2012).
Simultaneously, code is asserted as a form of speech, challenging the dominance of proprietary software. Coleman (2009) discusses how a collective commitment to F/OSS and the assertion of source code as free speech intertwines “not only hackers’ productive freedom but also the very meaning of democratic citizenship” (449). Coleman uses a key example of a 456-stanza haiku-poem written by Seth Schoen (2001) which encodes both political critique and a description of the DeCSS program’s code, at the heart of a legal controversy. Crafting “poetic” code which achieved both functionality and expression, and subsequently is worthy of free speech protection, powerfully allowed Schoen to both symbolically assert and politically demonstrate his argument (439–444). The act of coding is therefore not merely “technical”, but can take on compelling creative dimensions and be invested with political meaning.
Thus, in studying the “technical” and “artistic” dimensions, we can observe how code is not only enrolled in larger socio-technical systems, but can also act as indexes of agency, expressions of subversive resistance, performative modes of social affiliation, collaborative modes of creation, and political speech.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have sought to interrogate the difference between the terms “art” and “technology”. I first explored how they emerged from historical contexts with certain value regimes and assumptions tied to the development of Western modernity. I then suggested shifting towards “artistic” and “technical” dimensions and explored two ethnographic examples to demonstrate its application.
In my discussion of textile craft practices, I studied how the “artistic” activities of textile creation such as basketry, weaving, and patchwork have “technical” dimensions. These reveal how textile techniques draw on embodied skill and knowledge practices; encode internal logics and social relations; and interrelate “artistic” and “technical” aspects to generate a complementary and holistic understanding of textile practice.
I then examined the act of coding, problematising its apparent “merely technical” nature. In applying Gell’s anthropological theory of art, I suggested that understanding code as material indexes extending agency can defamiliarise its assumed properties. I observed how the pursuit of “the beauty of the code” by coders merges both “technical” and “artistic” dimensions, as modes of expression, resistance, and social legitimacy within their communities. I finally explored how approaches to writing and distribution of code, such as the F/OSS movement, allow both creative re-mixing and assertion of the freedom to speech.
Consequently, these case studies variously demonstrate the value of studying both “artistic” and “technical” dimensions of practices. Going beyond “art” and “technology” can yield a more holistic approach to understanding social practices and phenomena.
This essay was written for "Anthropology of Technics and Technology" as part of MA in Material and Visual Culture (Anthropology) at UCL.
Cover image: From left to right, Denise Y Arnold (2018), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
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