Stacy Jo Scott
Ceramics In Relationship to SoftWare: how soft bodies engage with digital bodies
December 2, 2022
Summary:
Select Readings:
*Ephemeral Material, by Stacy Jo Scott. 2019
Digital Fabrication as Magic, Rough Draft by Stacy Jo Scott, 2014
Glitch Feminism, by Legacy Russell, 2020
A Cyborg Manifesto, by Donna Haraway, 1985
To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision, Tom Gunning, 2013
Medieval Robots, by E.R. Truitt, 2015
On Sourcery and Source Code, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2013
Discussion Guide:
Ceramics in Relationship to Software: how soft bodies engage with digital bodies
About the topic
“Clay’s methods are situated in our bodies and mirror our own evolution through time. Clay has always been an evocative scribe of its moment. Its technologies have followed humanity’s every shift. This shifting path is not a record from primary to advanced, but a continually recurring event. The potential of our present moment is that we can reach back and forward through time, through the clay in our hands, and the machines that have evolved with us. In this present, we can find traces of the cyborg in the earliest pinch pots, and folk practices in 3-D prints. Our future isn’t foreign but is already embedded within us.”*
This conversation will explore how our soft bodies engage with the digital softwares that currently surround us. This is not just a one-to-one relationship where one works upon the other; rather, each are malleable mediums through which meaning, making, and communication are channeled and transmitted. The intermediary and active space between digital media and technology and the ancient haptic knowledge of working with clay is an intermingled and tangled pathway to more expansive thinking about our creative process, the field of ceramics, and the agency we have to mark our places in the universe.
In this conversation, we will consider software (ie. Soft Ware) as: Meaning making engines; Languages to bridge the gap between body and machine; Revealer of our expanded body; Systems for understanding our relation to the universe; Games that catalyze our process; Languages to communicate across space and time; Magical scripts.
About the lead artist
Stacy Jo Scott is an artist and educator based in Eugene, OR. She uses ceramic processes as material anchors from which to navigate shifting landscapes of culture, identity, and embodiment through digital processes, trance practices, chance operations, and research. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Galleri ROM, Oslo, Norway; Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Rockelman & Partner, Berlin, Germany; and Thomas Hunter Projects in New York, NY. Her writing has been published in numerous publications online and in books and periodicals. Publications include Bad at Sports, The Studio Potter, and Crafts: Today’s Anthology for Tomorrow’s Crafts. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon.