Data Clay Symposium: Digital Strategies for Parsing the Earth
California College of the Arts
Saturday February 7, 2015

The Data Clay Network unites a loose web of international artists, designers and architects exploring relationships between digital tools and ceramic materials. In recent years, a renewed interest in the potential transformation of basic materials into complex hybrid systems has pushed ceramics to the forefront of innovation in the allied design fields. Rather than relying on the abstract data of numerically controlled production to distance themselves from the material world, these researchers employ deeply-rooted craft techniques to re-engage the world of matter, paying keen attention to material parameters and behaviors, and positioning the ceramic process as a powerful challenge to the image of slick, immaterial virtuality so often associated with the digital world.

Armed with technologies of advanced modeling, 3D printing, and digital machining techniques, today’s designer and artists are able to explore complex relationships that have always been critical within the ceramic tradition with renewed vigor: interiority and exteriority, porosity and containment, surface and figuration, singularity and multiplicity. Through this symposium, leading artists, researchers, and critics will seek to define the relationship between the precision of digital technologies, craft sensibilities, and earthen materials.

Participants:

• Andy Brayman
• Jason Kelly Johnson
• Ron Rael
• Jenny Sabin
• Jenni Sorkin
• Michael Swaine
• Stephanie Syjuco
• Dries Verbruggen

Moderators:

• Del Harrow
• Joshua G. Stein