Digital Meets Handmade

"Embraces the problems and solutions posed by the dynamic dance of digital technology with the traditions of craftsmanship and perceived value in jewelry"--

Over the past twenty years, a seismic shift has occurred in jewelry design and manufacturing. As digital design, digital model-making, and prototyping have elbowed their way into common practice, they have proven themselves to be both invaluable and disruptive to the jewelry profession. Bringing together the perspectives of artisans, educators, students, mavens from the realm of fine jewelry, renegades from the Wild West of the maker movement, and innovators from the digital engineering sector, Digital Meets Handmade addresses a wide range of topics in jewelry design, delving into the broad conversation around how digital technologies and virtuoso handcraft can coalesce in jewelry as wearable art. While one might expect a collision of cultures—"fine jewelry" craftspeople versus digital engineers—the result instead is a dazzling array of critical thinking, with stunning illustrations that foretell the future of jewelry.

With Craft Lab for Kids, help your kids tap into the fun and empowerment of creating their own custom designs to wear, decorate with, and give. Spruce Up Your Stuff. Learn fun ways to personalize with a variety of embellishment techniques Express Yourself! Add your personality to all kinds of homemade projects Take Care of YOU. Self-care DIY projects to benefit their well-being Kids Just Wanna Have Fun. Just-for-fun projects to make everyone smile Classic Crafts with a Twist. Tried-and-true crafts updated for today’s kids 15-Minute Makes. Quickie crafts to make in a flash Kindness Crafts. Crafty creations to brighten someone’s day Enjoy the pleasure and satisfaction of making things together with Craft Lab for Kids! The popular Lab for Kids series features a growing list of books that share hands-on activities and projects on a wide host of topics, including art, astronomy, clay, geology, math, and even how to create your own circus—all authored by established experts in their fields. Each lab contains a complete materials list, clear step-by-step photographs of the process, as well as finished samples. The labs can be used as singular projects or as part of a yearlong curriculum of experiential learning. The activities are open-ended, designed to be explored over and over, often with different results. Geared toward being taught or guided by adults, they are enriching for a range of ages and skill levels. Gain firsthand knowledge on your favorite topic with Lab for Kids.

An investigation of independent video games—creative, personal, strange, and experimental—and their claims to handcrafted authenticity in a purely digital medium. Video games are often dismissed as mere entertainment products created by faceless corporations. The last twenty years, however, have seen the rise of independent, or “indie,” video games: a wave of small, cheaply developed, experimental, and personal video games that react against mainstream video game development and culture. In Handmade Pixels, Jesper Juul examine the paradoxical claims of developers, players, and festivals that portray independent games as unique and hand-crafted objects in a globally distributed digital medium. Juul explains that independent video games are presented not as mass market products, but as cultural works created by people, and are promoted as authentic alternatives to mainstream games. Writing as a game player, scholar, developer, and educator, Juul tells the story of how independent games—creative, personal, strange, and experimental—became a historical movement that borrowed the term “independent” from film and music while finding its own kind of independence. Juul describes how the visual style of independent games signals their authenticity—often by referring to older video games or analog visual styles. He shows how developers use strategies for creating games with financial, aesthetic, and cultural independence; discusses the aesthetic innovations of “walking simulator” games; and explains the controversies over what is and what isn't a game. Juul offers examples from independent games ranging from Dys4ia to Firewatch; the text is richly illustrated with many color images.

While the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century diminished the role of the craftsperson in the manufacturing process, the digital revolution has had a less devastating effect. Today's digital technologies have given rise to entirely new working methods, skill sets, and consumer products that don't eliminate, but enrich traditional hand techniques. Digital Handmade presents eighty international designers, artists, and craftsmen who combine the precision and flexibility of computing and digital fabrication with the skill and tactility of the master artisan to create unexpected and desirable objects and products. These pioneers include Louise Lemieux Bérubé, a Canadian artist whose work integrates photography and weaving; Australian jewelry designer Cinnamon Lee, whose designs explore the relationship between hand and machine; and Japanese artists Nendo, who produce ceramic pieces that employ both digital fabrication and ancient traditional methods.

Over the course of the last several years, the DIY market has exploded spawning magazines, books, movies and fueling the growth of the online, handmade marketplace. In Robin Williams Handmade Design Workshop: Create Handmade Elements for Digital Designs, best-selling author Robin Williams and Carmen Sheldon take designers away from their computers and show them, step-by-step, how to use traditional artist's tools to create handmade elements for their digital artwork. The authors provide a wealth of new ideas to jump-start creativity and get graphic designers thinking in new ways. Each how-to is illustrated with tons of photos to show how to use paints, inks, textures, modeling pastes, and more to create handmade materials that can then be scanned in and used to create one-of-a-kind print projects or web sites. Examples of finished projects and Web sites are featured throughout the book to provide both instruction and inspiration for designers to use in their own projects.

The Handmade Silver Gelatin Emulsion Print is a cookbook of simple, basic recipes for making black and white printing paper and paper negatives, along with creative options for printing, toning, and coloring. Author Denise Ross draws from photographic literature from the last 135 years, adapting old recipes to fit modern tools, materials, and work spaces and modern twists have been applied to traditional techniques. The book is divided into three sections: Section One lays the groundwork for this unique alternative process; Section Two provides the recipes; Section Three highlights contemporary silver gelatin artists. The book features over 200 full-color images and covers key topics including: Vocabulary: a list of terms used by traditional photographers and emulsion makers Creating work spaces with the right tools and materials Basic emulsion chemistry and paper coating techniques Working with various negative options, analog and digital Gaslight chloride contact printing paper Kodabromide-type chlorobromide all-purpose paper Bromide enlarging paper Warm tone paper and developers Making and toning your own printing-out paper (POP) Matte surface and baryta coating surface paper Paper negatives and making hand-drawn and digital masks Toning handmade paper Gum printing over handmade paper Troubleshooting handmade paper Artists working with handmade paper The Handmade Silver Gelatin Emulsion Print is for photographers who love the look and creative potential of black and white traditional photography but who want more control over the process and the end product. It is written for the beginner to experienced photographer, with processes initially explained in such a way that anyone will feel comfortable getting started, as well as information in increasing levels of complexity so that experienced photographers who enjoy a challenge will also find one.

Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.