[Introduction]
[Chapter 1: Parameters of the Digital]
[Chapter 2: Eruptions into the Physical]
[Chapter 3: Speculative Horizons]
[Conclusion]
This paper was developed as part of my M.A. in Material and Visual Culture (Anthropology) at UCL (2023-2024). It has been edited for publication on Making Material for accessibility to a wider audience. Fieldwork was conducted between April and June 2024 in London (UK), and research was completed in August 2024.
Introduction
∞
Between Two and Three Dimensions
A mechanical whirring fills the room. A plastic nozzle on a metal print head moves frenziedly yet precisely across a glass plate, guided by metal arms on horizontal and vertical axes. Motors activate in unison, pushing soft, wet clay through the nozzle’s narrow opening in thin, stringy lines. The machine’s movements appear erratic at first: darting diagonally, raising and lowering abruptly, and extruding a circular trail of clay in one moment while dropping clay randomly the next. The movements of the machine’s ‘arms’ and ‘head’ seemed to be out of sync—or at least, in sync in a way that was incomprehensible to my eyes.
Yet, as I watched, mesmerised by this whirring machine performing with such surety and confidence, the chaotic lines of clay start to accumulate, forming layers. Contours emerge: the curve of lips, the hollow of an eye socket, the bend of an extended fingertip. A face begins to take shape, merging with an outstretched hand. The still-wet clay wobbles as the machine vibrates on its unstable table. The nose, which is just starting to emerge, sags and collapses.
“That was the nose!” I exclaim. “It’s hanging on for dear life.”
Next to me, enorê, the artist, quietly responds, “Oh, I love that.”
In enorê’s studio, a clay 3D printer hums steadily as it builds a sculptural piece based on a digital model of their face. Enorê, a contemporary artist based in London, pushes the boundaries of sculptural ceramics by using digital tools such as 3D scanning, modelling, and printing to fluidly composite bodily forms. They are one of several London-based contemporary artists loosely connected, not as a coherent social collective, but through their practices and shared concerns emerging independently yet simultaneously, working with digital methods to produce materially-grounded artworks.
This intersection of the digital and physical is at the heart of a fascinating artistic shift. What does it mean to manipulate ‘material’ with digital techniques? And how do these translations into the physical world generate new conceptual and artistic possibilities? Artists like enorê are not just embracing technology; they are deeply engaging with it, harnessing the frictions and slippages between digital and physical techniques to open up speculative worlds deeply connected to the ‘real’. In doing so, they use their practices to engage with contemporary debates on ‘technology’ and generate future-oriented theorisations about techniques and new technological forms.
In my research, I first outline the theoretical fields of ‘craft’, ‘technology’, and ‘art’ that frame this discussion, and contextualise my fieldsite and research methods.
The first chapter, “The Parameters of the Digital”, traces the journey of the ‘art object’ from the digital space of software. I examine how digital tools like computer-aided design software and interfaces shape artistic processes. These tools embody specific logics of working and accelerate creative iteration, enabling artists to achieve greater formal and conceptual complexity.
The second chapter, “Eruptions into the Physical”, considers what happens when digital objects move from the certainty of the digital to the embodied ‘reality’ of the physical. Here, I explore how artists exploit the necessary frictions, gaps, and ‘mistranslations’ that occur when digital objects encounter ‘real-world’ contingencies through acts of creative improvisation and technical self-enchantment. Additionally, a sensitivity to the ‘truth’ of materials, reimagined in a post-digital age, emerges as key to realising their artistic intentions.
Finally, “Speculative Horizons”, focuses on the artistic outputs themselves. I analyse how post-artists use post-digital processes to open up speculative worlds, critically responding to cultural and technological discourse while generating ‘auratic’ encounters with audiences.
Across these chapters, I argue that the artworks produced by these artists—through the interplay of digital and physical techniques—reveal critical tensions between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’. These works not only reflect on today’s technological anxieties but also serve as crucial modes of theorising and imagining potential futures, shaping our understanding of making, materiality and technology.
∞
Understanding how creative practice has shifted with the use of digital tools requires unpacking the concepts of ‘technology’ and ‘art’. Popular discourse often celebrates the merger of these notions under terms like ‘art-tech intersections’ [1], suggests a radical and seamless integration of these two historically-opposed domains. However, critically examining their intersections and divergences will move us away from ‘art’, ‘technology’, and ‘craft’ as we conventionally understand them.
Techné, Craft, and Making.
The Greek concept of techné (τέχνη) offers a foundational perspective. In ancient Greece, techné originally referred to techniques of doing or making, encompassing everything from skills to craftsmanship to art. Unlike epistêmê, or theoretical knowledge [2], techné, was grounded in material practice. This shared etymological root of ‘art’ and ‘technology’ reflects an intertwined history, later reshaped by modernity. The term ‘technology’—the combination of techné and logos—in the 17th century initially indicated the study of techniques or the ‘arts’.
Historian Leo Marx ([1997]2010, 571-572) notes that the meaning of ‘technology’ radically shifted in the 20th century due to scientific and mechanical innovation, along with ideological transformations following Western modernity. ‘Technology’ evolved from an earlier association with the ‘mechanic’ arts [3] to fill a semantic and conceptual void, encompassing complex sociotechnical systems, teleological narratives of progress and power, and superior intellectual and social capability (ibid., 563).
Meanwhile, ‘useful arts’ have also been historically distinguished from ‘fine arts’, with the former seen as skilled artisanal handiwork relegated to ‘mere’ utility (Marx [1997]2010, 573)—essentially, ‘craft’. As art historian Glenn Adamson highlights how, by the 19th century, ‘craft’ evolved into a dialectical term, defined through difference: “only when artisanal labour is placed in explicit contrast with other means of production (chiefly, mechanisation, fine art and technological mediation) that craft itself becomes a locus for discourse” (2010, 5). However, revisiting techné allows us to locate the original, expansive category of craft, as a fundamental process that involves “the application of skill and material-based knowledge to relatively small-scale production” (ibid., 2).
Making, central to this inquiry, integrates not just physical techniques but also knowledge, senses, and skills. Skilled action is produced as a technique of the body (Mauss [1935]1979), but even more importantly emerges when humans are “grounded in an attentive, perceptual involvement” with complex environments (Ingold 2001, 21). The gradual “exteriorisation” of technical operations from hand-manipulation to automation, as André Leroi-Gourhan ([1964]1993) posits, complicates this relationship, displacing the technical gesture from immediate sensory participation. “Tool and gesture are now embodied in the machine” (ibid., 237-238), where making as skilled manipulation intertwine the combined activity of brain and body in a synergy between the maker, tool, and raw material. This triangulation reshapes both making and its outcomes. Following Adamson’s reading (2010) of Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics (1948), I adopt this conceptualisation of making and craft as a ‘cybernetic’ mode of interaction which enables mechanisms of feedback, iteration, and recursivity, and interweaves people, machines, objects, and environments in relation [4].
Objects, too, exist within relational systems. A focus on the materiality of objects is thus core to my inquiry—particularly in understanding “how persons make things and things make persons” (Tilley et al. 2006, 4). Social relations are anchored in the material world; at the same time, matter is never outside of cultural, economic, and historical systems of production, but always inscribed within it. When artists make decisions to work with particular tools or materials, these objects are indelibly bound up in relational networks, carrying meanings shaped by social contexts (Appadurai 1986). Concurrently, I explore an emergent understanding of things: the process of making an object is not simply about imposing form but involves co-responding with the agency of materials, as Tim Ingold suggests (2012, 437)—urging us to think from materials, rather than merely about them”, and engaging with the “field of forces” that constitute the world.
“Technology” and the Digital.
Historical debates on the nature of technology (Latour 1992; Lemonnier 1992; Pfaffenberger 1992) have sought to unravel its complex social and cultural origins. However, the contemporary use of the term ‘technology’ encompasses such a sprawling range of objects, systems, techniques, and knowledge that it becomes challenging to analyse critically (Coupaye 2022, 439). This conflation of multiple phenomena has “infused [it] with forms of essentialising determinisms” (ibid.) such as rationality, objectivity, and artificiality.
To address its opacity, we must view ‘technology’ as a category vernacular to Euro-American modernity, and consider instead the ‘technical’, in order to redirect analytical focus to fundamental modes of action and making. This perspective also reveals artistic outputs as “the historical convergence of a [technical] gesture (or several operations) and material[s]” emerging from specific milieus (ibid., 446). This distinction helps demystify technology, emphasising its embeddedness in sociocultural contexts rather than treating it as a transformative force unto itself. In this study, I use ‘technological’ or ‘technology’ as my interlocutors do in everyday vernacular but with this critical understanding.
Beyond technical processes, I aim to uncover the exact nature of digital tools and how they shift artistic practice and material relationships. The constant negotiation between digital and physical worlds characterises digital mediation as a way of “being in the world” today (Merleau-Ponty [1945]2002) [5]. The digital is both “a constitutive part of what makes us human” (Horst and Miller 2012, 4) and fundamentally intertwined with the material world (Dourish 2017).
Scholars have examined the tools and infrastructures underpinning the production and maintenance of digital systems (Kelty 2008; Knox et al. 2006; Starosielski 2015; Vonderau 2017); the material properties of information, data, and digital representations (Dourish 2017; Dourish and Mazamanian 2013); and digital media in everyday life (Horst and Miller 2012; Pink et al. 2016). I seek to understand how, following Paul Dourish (2017, 5), a “reflective conversation with materials” in creative production applies equally to both traditional art materials, as well as the specific properties of digital materiality that condition and constrain the creative encounter.
The ‘digital’ can refer to everything developed by or reducible to binary code (Horst & Miller 2012, 3). In implicating all electronic technology, however, this definition is not particularly useful, given that almost all aspects of life are already digital. A more effective perspective focuses on the fundamentally representational aspect of the digital, in encoding or denoting something else. Digital anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2021, 45) suggests rethinking the digital as fundamentally linked to indexicality, where the digital “points to” the physical world, like the ‘digits’ of a hand. He maintains that while the distinct nature of digital and physical worlds asserts the constitutive gap between the two, they are inherently linked through similitude and difference (ibid., 60).
Similarly, Dourish (2016, 31) demonstrates how, as opposed to ‘digitality’, digital things themselves take on material forms that shape their use. Thus, digital materiality lies in “the gap between what is denoted and what is expressed”, or the slippage between notation and enaction (ibid., 33). This understanding of the digital is key to my interlocutors’ approach to artistic creation, where these gaps and slippage create space for creative exploration, and I adopt a processual understanding of digital materiality that takes digital and physical realms to be indexically intertwined.
Here, Boellstorff’s (2008, 21) discussion of ‘real’ and ‘actual’ versus ‘digital’ and ‘virtual’ is helpful for ethnographic analysis. Many of my interlocutors refer to the ‘real’ or ‘real world’ in contrast to the digital; however, the ‘virtual’ is opposed not to the ‘real’ but to the ‘actual’, given that the ‘virtual’ can have equally ‘real-life’ effects. For clarity, I take their mentions of the ‘real world’ to indicate the ‘actual’ or ‘physical’. In my analysis, I primarily use the term ‘physical’ to underscore the materialised outputs and oppose them to ‘digital’ computer-aided processes. While virtual worlds are not my main focus, the ‘virtual’, as colloquially meaning ‘almost’ or ‘in essence’ (ibid., 19), involves perception, mediation, and potentiality (Massumi 2002, 30), indicating a multitude of possible states that can be experienced—or as Brian Massumi puts it, “Experience is our virtual reality” ([1997]2021, 149). Thus, physical objects and worlds can also have ‘virtual’ effects in their experience or reception.
Art in a Post-Digital Age.
I now examine the role of digital tools in contemporary art practice, as part of a broader historical continuum of digitally-informed experimentation.
Artists have always swiftly adopting and engaged with technological change, adopting and adapting tools to expand their practices. Well before the ‘digital revolution’ of the 1990s, they were already experimenting with electronic media and computational systems. Initially termed ‘computer art’, these efforts evolved from ‘multimedia art’ and ‘cyberarts’ in the 1960s–1990s to more expansive practices like ‘new media art’ by the late 20th century [6] (Paul 2016, 1). Each phase reflected broader cultural shifts in their terminologies and concepts. They can be traced back to instruction or rule-based conceptual art; algorithmic works establishing generative systems; kinetic and op art harnessing motion, light, and interaction; and immersive cinematic environments (ibid., 5-6) [7]. WWhile recognising the complexities of periodising movements, the ‘digital revolution’ introduced “abstract relations of numeration” (mathematical computation) and the power of “invocation”, enabling artists to manifest ideas and transform media (Dixon 2015, 181).
The term, the ‘post-digital’, has surfaced to characterise contemporary art’s critical approach towards the penetration of the digital into daily life today. It attempts to capture the deep embeddedness of the digital in nearly every aspect of human existence, and its conceptual and practical influence on art-making. Rather than implying a temporal condition after the digital, ‘post-digital’ describes a configuration that goes beyond the digital, characterised by an entanglement of different media and materialities.
Sculpture, with its inherent physicality, offers a rich site for exploring these intersections. While ‘digital-born’ artworks that exist as software have been extensively studied, I explore how digital technologies are integrated into sculptural processes, crossing traditional medium boundaries with profound implications. Art theorist Rosalind Krauss’s concept of the sculptural in a post-medium condition (1979, 42-43) highlights this shift, arguing that contemporary sculpture after postmodernism is defined by a structural set of cultural logics that employ any medium rather than adhering to specific mediums.
This interplay redefines material qualities like texture, scale, and weight, which remain central to sculpture even in digital forms. In the intermediality of contemporary art, we see a return to reflection on medium-specificity in digital works, seeking to reinvent and emphasise their distinct characteristics (Schröter 2023, 228). At the core of my inquiry is hence a question of how my interlocutors use medium-specific characteristics to explore the tactile and conceptual potentials of their work , and how digital parameters shape their artistic strategies and decisions.
My interlocutors also explore the sustained power of the contemporary art object despite new conditions of production. Walter Benjamin famously argued that technological reproducibility disrupts the “aura” of art—its unique aesthetic authority ([1935]1969, 4). In doing so, it detaches art from tradition and cult value for broader collective reception. Esther Leslie ([1998]2010, 391) notes that Benjamin’s non-auratic technical multiple “does not squash out authentic experience but translates it into object forms and forms of experience appropriate for a modern age”. Even in modern forms like photography or “montage” art, the incorporation of traces of the objective world serves as imprints of authenticity rather than market value.
Despite these shifts, the works of my interlocutors demonstrate that art acts not just as indexes to actuality, but also to intentionality. Following Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art (1998, 2-27), which shifts focus from aesthetics, hermeneutics, and semiology to action and agency, artworks are reframed as active agents. Rather than passive objects, they act as material “indexes” of the maker’s intentionality, possessing efficacy to act on the world. Art objects, as made objects and products of techniques, perform what Gell calls “the technology of enchantment” through their “coming-into-being”, underscoring ways in which creative processes transcend our technical understanding and are construed as “magical” (1992, 49). Notions of intentionality and enchantment will be revisited in the following chapters.
Lastly, at the heart of artistic practice is a spirit of improvisation and experimentation. Unlike other forms of making, art resists fixed definitions, privileging over-ended exploration. This freedom allows artists to push the boundaries of tools, materials, and concepts, creating works that engage deeply with the complexities of digital and physical worlds. At the same time, I am cautious not to over-idealise the artist’s role in ‘fine’ art and aim to adopt expansive definitions of art while honing in on what specific modes of practice afford.
Fieldwork and Methodology
Scoping the field.
This inquiry emerges from my dual positionality as a contemporary visual art curator in Singapore and a researcher embedded in London’s globally connected art ecosystem. My observations have centred on a proliferation of artistic practices that engage with ‘technology’ in ways that challenge the mystifying “rupture-talk” (Hecht 2002) dominating popular ‘art-tech’ discourse. This extends beyond the Singaporean contemporary art scene, especially within the context of globally-connected “artworlds” (Danto 1964). London provides a compelling fieldwork site due to its prominence in the global art scene, rich in art institutions, galleries, and diverse practices, in addition to being the site of my Master’s programme.
I employed a ‘snowball sampling’ methodology to identify participants, leveraging online research (exhibition and residency archives, artist websites, and social media) and recommendations from existing participants. This approach aligns with my embedded position as a partial and subjective researcher with existing insight and potential bias towards artists working in particular modalities, acknowledging the interconnectivity of the art world, and allowed me to “trace social networks rather than artificially isolate members of a culture through randomisation” (Boellstorff 2008, 76).
Between April to June 2024, I reached out to visual artists whose practices employ digital tools as an key rather than subsidiary element in their techniques, aesthetics, and content, emphasising those with physical outputs. This scope excludes purely digital practices, such as digital animation and virtual or augmented reality, to focus on the interplay between digital and physical domains. Due to the limited nature of this study, it cannot and does not encompass the extensive and inventive use of digital technologies across the fields of performance, theatre, music, film, and architecture.
Artists and Studios.
The 10 interlocutors in this study represent a spectrum of experience and backgrounds within London’s contemporary art ecosystem. They include the following artists and artist-collectives: Amba Sayal-Bennett, Duncan Carter, enorê, Kumbirai Makumbe, MARIA (Maria Joranko), Natasha Eves, Rebeca Romero, Sam Carvosso, Sian Fan, and art collective Troika (Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer, Sebastian Noel) [8].
Their practices, though varied, share a common thread of engaging with digital tools as integral, rather than ancillary, to their creative processes. They are connected not by formal affiliation but by shared modalities of practice working between digital and physical realms. They participate in a London contemporary art ecosystem [9], and range from recent graduates to those with over 20 years of practice; a handful were peers in university, while others work in different artistic circles. They can be generally characterised as “digital natives”, broadly having grown up with a familiarity with digital media, devices, and platforms, and thus actively engage in dialogue with digital culture [10]. My interlocutors were not located in a single fieldsite but in studios scattered across London, ranging from studios rented from studio providers such as Cell Studios or Acme and home studios to temporary spaces as part of residency programmes.
Art-making is relatively idiosyncratic—artists work on erratic schedules, often balancing multiple projects and jobs, and may go to the studio at odd hours or have peak periods of production. Some primarily work on computers with digital software, or use external workshops for tools and machines; others outsource their fabrication or work with external technical experts and only render finishing elements in the studio. Rarely do they exclusively work in the studio. Hence, while it was important for me to observe their studio processes, it was not always possible to be with artists as they made their works, nor spend extended periods of time in their studios. This was also affected by the conventions of ‘studio visits’ [11].
Despite these challenges, the studio remains my primary site where artistic practice can be studied, supplemented by observations in fabrication workshops, exhibition spaces, and with mediators like 3D-printing studios or technical experts who act as fabricators for artists but also are often artists themselves, thus facilitating the translation of ideas between practicality and creativity. Observing the fluid and decentralized nature of their practices provided insights into how contemporary art-making unfolds across multiple, interconnected sites.
Figure 1. Examples of artist studios and workspaces. Left: Studio of artist Kumbirai Makumbe. Right: Studio of artist enorê.
Ethics and Anonymity.
The ethical framework for this research is rooted in respecting the artists’ creative authorship while acknowledging my positionality as both a scholar and a curator. Written consent was obtained to name artists, ensuring transparency in crediting their work. Contextual accuracy in quoting and interpreting their practices was prioritised to preserve the specificity and meaning of their insights. Where appropriate, I combine quotations and observations to highlight broader cultural logics.
Transparency about my curatorial background helped mitigate potential power dynamics and facilitate understanding of my study’s purpose. My distance from London’s art scene, as a curator whose professional context was based in Singapore, also allowed me to approach the research with a degree of impartiality. My pre-existing knowledge of the subject matter and my familiarity with working with artists contributed positively to the fieldwork and enabled me to rapidly draw out insights from our conversations.
Methods.
This study employs a triangulated methodological approach. My primary method involved semi-structured interviews and conversations during studio visits, which provided opportunities to engage in in-depth discussions. Artists were prompted to articulate the role of digital tools in their practices. Artistic processes can be intuitive and subconscious, but also hinge on intentionality and decision-making. Thus, artists are often the best interpreters of their creative choices. Due to the technical complexity of both physical and digital processes, I found it extremely helpful to ask my interlocutors to explain or narrate their process as they were working. This provided insight into why they made certain choices and revealed technical details that my lack of knowledge might have overlooked. This dialogue also revealed their conceptual intentions in relation to contemporary debates on “technology” and socio-cultural issues as connected to their artistic decisions.
Secondly, participant observation was also employed, although observational opportunities were limited by the idiosyncratic and decentralised nature of artistic work. However, events like exhibition openings and open studios facilitated extended interactions, such as my particularly insightful extended observation with enorê during an exhibition installation.
I also analysed artworks as “epistemic objects” (Rheinberger 2014)—“discourse-objects” embodying concepts and arguments in their material forms. Artworks provide valuable ethnographic insight into cultural change and critiques. By examining artworks, one can gain “para-ethnographic access to changing worlds, anticipating change as much as registering them”, and achieve this as much through their artistic strategies as their evident content (Fischer 2023, 2).
Through the triangulation of these methods—interviews, participant observation, and artwork analysis—I explore the nuanced ways in which contemporary artists integrate digital tools into their practice and the broader implications on our understanding of making, materiality, and technology in a post-digital age.
↪Next chapter [Chapter 1: The Parameters of the Digital]
Footnotes
[1] “The intersection of art and technology” is a commonly-used phrase to refer to everything from the use of data-sets in generative image production (World Economic Forum, 2024) to visual effects and cloud computing (Microsoft, 2024). We can also observe the rise of ‘art-tech’ discourse through the emergence of university programmes such as UCL’s Art and Technology BA (starting in 2025) and conferences such as Christie’s Art+Tech Summit in New York (2024).
[2] This opposition between theory and practice, however, is also a modern one; in ancient philosophy, epistêmê was keenly tied to technê, where practice was grounded in theoretical knowledge, or the two terms were seen to be indistinguishable (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003).
[3] Or ‘useful’, ‘practical’, ‘industrial’ arts, which aligned with an early understanding of techné but failed to adequately describe these novel and drastic changes.
[4] Today, ‘making’ can also be tied to the rising popularity of the ‘Maker Movement’ as a contemporary subculture, especially with the heightened accessibility of technologies like 3D printing and robotics. The ‘Maker Movement’ unites the art of tinkering with collectivist and collaborative ambitions tied to political transformation, social organisation, and sensual, creative interaction with materials. See Bogers and Chiappini (2019).
[5] While access to digital technologies is unevenly distributed globally, digital devices, media, and infrastructures arguably have become integral to the everyday experience of majority of the world’s population. For a larger discussion on digital diversity, see Barendregt (2021).
[6] In doing so, it co-opted the label previously used for video, sound, and hybrid media forms. The use of the qualifier ‘new’ in ‘new media art’, however, also problematically implies notions of technological progress, and its own integration, datedness, and potential obsolescence, despite the fact that concepts and methods used in ‘new’ media art had roots in earlier art movements (Paul 2016).
[7] For an extensive analysis of this history, see Dixon (2015) and Paul (2016).
[8] Full artist biographies in Appendix (Bibliography & Artist Biographies).
[9] While many of my interlocutors exhibit internationally and participate in programmes abroad, all have their studios and thus their key working bases sited in London, and primarily engage with a local ecosystem of art institutions, galleries, and organisations.
[10] The term “digital native” is highly contested which pits concepts of the “digital native” and “digital immigrant” against each other to characterise generational technological gaps between individuals born after the year 1980 and prior to that. For a more nuanced debate, see Bennett et al. (2008). However, for the purposes of this paper, it is worth noting that my interlocutors generally identify with a fluency and literacy with digital media and have a close affinity with digital technology.
[11] Typically a format through which curators, gallerists, and collectors can learn more about artists’ works, studio visits tend to be tinged with formality and expectation that it could lead to future opportunities for the artist. As a result, it can be a heightened environment where artists feel pressured to perform a particular presentation of their practice.