At first, combining the amorphous digital medium with a more “rigid” medium like metal may seem antithetical to both mediums. To some, the mere idea may seem contentious. In fact, the place of digital intervention in the metalworks and jewelry-making arts was the subject of FIT’s 2018 international symposium “Digital Meets Handmade: Jewelry in the 21st Century”. Some of the lectures presented during the symposium include “Materializing Human Beingness through Digital Transformation” by Christine Ludeke and “Fabricated Bodies: Jewelry Prosthetic and Cyborg Identities” by Caitlin Skelcey, emphasizing an increasing interest amongst jewelry-making artists in the interaction between traditional handcrafting techniques and digitization, between “the perfect and the imperfect”, “the machine [and] the human being” (Richards & Yothers 30). As of late, many metalworks and jewelry artists have been experimenting with including more digital technology in their processes. For many artists, this integration of traditional and technological processes allows for new ways to explore and to express the complex and increasingly symbiotic relationship between self and the machine in the twenty-first century.
An innovation that has really spurred interest in greater integration of technological and traditional crafting techniques is 3D printing. Some notable, contemporary metalworks and jewelry artists who incorporate 3D printing and related CAD (computer aided design) processes with traditional handcrafting techniques are: Caitlin Skelcey, Annika Pettersson, Maria Eife, Joe Wood, and Joshua Ryan Demonte. Eife and Demonte explore the use of 3D printing technology as a tool through which to generate their own unique bodies of work while artists like Skelcey, Wood, and Pettersson experiment with incorporating digital technology into their art-making processes in order to propel self-discovery, promote self-renewal, or provide commentary on how emergent technologies affect reproduction of art.
CAD processes like 3D printing have revolutionized jewelry-making and metalworks in both technical and procedural ways. These processes have allowed for the streamlining of traditionally time-consuming yet integral tasks such as model/mold-making, forming, soldering, etc. Some jewelry artists have transitioned entirely to creating works through 3D printing. Demonte is a jewelry artist who challenges traditional jewelry-making techniques by making works out of non-traditional more industrial materials such as gypsum, 33% glass-filled polyamide, and cyanoacrylate. The use of these more industrial materials allows Demonte to connect his work to his conceptual purpose which is connecting people more to the structures they inhabit in their daily lives. In his online statement, Demonte asserts that, through an integration of digital and industrial processes, he is able to create, “objects that speak about the world and structures around our bodies.” Works like Cathedral Collar (2008) and Aqueduct Collar (2009) place the wearers within a traditional space (like a cathedral or an aqueduct) but in a reimagined context (i.e. as a collar) which asks wearers and viewers to reconsider their relationship to these spaces. Demonte’s “virtual” works like Arches and Coil similarly ask viewers to reconsider notions of space, particularly of 3D objects in space, and to reconsider the relationship of the virtual to the physical by combining elements of both to create objects like arches and coils which are often used to represent concepts like “transitions” and “layering”. These virtual works represent an interim phase in design and artistic creation. More, Demonte’s works demonstrate that interpolation of digital technology and traditional handcrafting techniques does not have to result in a reduction of either method of creation and can, in fact, result in meaningful work that challenges viewers in new and compelling ways.
Eife is another artist who uses CAD programs to design her jewelry and 3D printing and laser cutting technology to create it. Eife designs jewelry molds using CAD software, prints these molds out in a powdered nylon material with a 3D printer, and then paints these molds by hand (Dinoto 20). Similarly to Demonte, Eife uses her work to challenge traditional notions about what jewelry can/cannot be as well as challenge the relationship between a piece of jewelry and its environment. Eife’s Binary I Necklace (2009) is a work made from laser-cut materials that spells out the word “WHAT?” in binary code, challenging the very language in which messages are not only embedded in a work but also presented to viewers to interpret. This work is made almost entirely through digital means and yet is presented in a traditional necklace context, complicating viewer understanding of the piece and also asking viewers and wearers to perhaps reconsider their own perceptions of traditional formats and the the ability of these formats to convey meaning with the onset of advanced technology. Eife’s work literally asks us to question what–what makes this work jewelry? What does this piece mean? What is our relation to this piece? Eife’s work is a question and our response to it may be where meaning lies.
Additionally, Eife’s work is meant to be a wearable story. In this way, Eife’s jewelry is meant to extend beyond its material components as well as ask the wearer to transcend beyond their own preconceived limits. Skelcey’s Fabricated Bodies series (2016-17) seems to similarly ask viewers and wearers to consider the seemingly imposed “limits” of our bodies. More, this series, inspired by Skelcey’s own experience of having a metal rod surgically attached to her spine with metal screws in order to correct a severe case of scoliosis, seems to ask viewers to consider how technological intervention can affect self in a very visceral way. In Skelcey’s work, the digital manifests as an implantation meant to modify the body in ways that promote healing and reinforce a sense of self. In her 2017 artist’s statement, Skelcey states:
By focusing on the relationship I have with my own body and my relationship to making, I learn and grow…These bone forms contort and fragment with the fusion of the hand and machine, creating a site of trauma fragmentation, reassembly, disassembly, healing and growth. Underlying this bending the body to our will is the desire to create a better or more functional version of ourselves-a more whole self.
Like Davis in Pieces of Herself, Skelcey’s work explores the idea of the fragmented self in the digital age and attempts to construct a meaningful narrative from the pieces. In their portrayals of personal experience, both Davis’ and Skelcey’s works, become almost palimpsests, bits and pieces of self overtaking an original context that still bleeds through and, in fact, acts as a kind of stabilizing force for the superimposed layer. Though not a work of Eliterature proper, Skelcey’s Fabricated Bodies series seems to capture the “partiality” of self Page identifies as a necessary component for any work that seeks to express the experience of self in the twenty-first century. Again, the incorporation of digital/technological components provides creators with the means to convey many levels of self and explore how they function in an interactive and dynamic way.
In contrast to artists who have explored the ways in which CAD technologies can enrich quality and production, Annika Pettersson’s Glitch in the Copy (2016-17) project investigates what can be diminished in the translation of traditional jewelry making practices to digital ones. This project was conducted at Konstfack University in Stockholm, Sweden and sought to better understand the effects that occurred in the process of copying and digitally reproducing jewelry. 3D scanning and 3D printing were the primary methods of digital reproduction used. What Pettersson discovered is that there is a degree of degradation that occurs in the copying process that has a measurable effect on the quality and integrity of the reproduction. These “glitches”, as Pettersson refers to them in her online statement on the project, can “be understood as noise within the copy process.” This noise can best be understood as a “generational distortion” (Richards & Yothers 28). Essentially, these inherent glitches in the digital software used to generate reproductions have a profound effect on the final products and are an inescapable byproduct of using CAD technologies. These glitches are the “tool marks” of CAD technologies (Richards & Yothers 28). Rather than be what distinguishes a work as “hand-made” though, these marks are often viewed as mars and serve to emphasize an irregularity that is somehow less “endearing”. For example, in Pettersson’s Glitch in the Copy project, the molds used to create a brooch out of aluminum demonstrate this degradation as they become increasingly distorted and less distinguished with each scan, the twentieth scan resulting in a mold that is little more than an amorphous shape.
Similarly to other artists in the field, Pettersson connects this project to the seeming culture shift from the analog to the digital. In her statement on the project, Pettersson says, “Today we live in a copy paste culture” which she believes affects societal “concepts like the original and the copy” as well as trade concepts of “value, authenticity, technique, and production”. This project, then, becomes an inquiry into how digital intervention affects the presentation of authenticity in craft. Does it enlighten or diminish authentic expression? And, what does it mean to be authentic in a digital world? What is the relationship between authenticity and the digital? These are just some of the questions Pettersson’s work asks viewers to consider.
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Degenerates' Gallery 
