While “AI is stealing our jobs” is not nearly as scary as it sounded maybe a few years ago, it is simultaneously way more realistic now than a few years ago. I will not go into the specifics on anything AI related since there is way too much to be said about that, but I do feel like the resurrection of crafts like knitting definitely happened in response to the growing capabilities of AI. As we know, what happens today is nothing but a repetition of what has happened before, so the resemblance to the Arts and Crafts Movement is not a far reach.
The Arts and Craft movement originated in England around 1860 as “Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society.” (https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acam/hd_acam.htm) While there was also a corresponding Arts and Crafts Movement in the USA, the English were far more outspoken about their aversion to machinery and industrialization. The movement in England was lead by William Morris, textile designer and active socialist – the movement therefore entangled from the start with political and democratic causes. Mostly it was concerned with labour practices, workers’ lives and the decreasing value of produced objects, in addition to the growing capitalist ideas about design that worried Morries and others.
It was mostly the works that were remembered in art history, not necessarily the political ideas, but they were integral to creating the movement and its works. Now as workers are increasingly worried with the possibility of being replaced, it seems that the search for manual labor that seems too intricate to be digitalized and automated has once again started. So again, “as our world becomes increasingly digital and automated,we find ourselves more enchanted than ever by artisanal craft goods and time-honored traditional methods.“
Krzysztof Pelcfor coined the term “William Morris Effect” in an article for WIRED, where he relates the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the current situation with art and AI. He proposes that not only will there be reactions to AI similar to William Morris’, but additionally there will be higher value put on the process behind a product, and human makers will be preferred to machines.
“Today, the William Morris effect is once more upon us. The first-wave craft revival that Morris brought about was the precursor to our current yearning for “authenticity” in every guise. Just as an unprecedented expansion of international trade has made cheap goods manufactured abroad widely accessible, the Western consumer has become enamored of locally made small-batch mustard with handwritten labels. The distinction comes down to the presumptive identity of the maker, and what we like to assume of their intent.“ (https://www.wired.com/story/art-artificial-intelligence-history/)
Not only seeing a process, and knowing that a person made something will be more important, but also the person themselves; Their ideas, their motivation and their biography. “We will demand works that can be attributed to an identifiable individual vision. The AI age will lead to a doubling down on biography, which happens to be another thing robots are notably short on.” He proposes that the acclimation process to AI in Art and Design has been happening for some time, and what is appreciated in the art world has changed with it, in favor of human artists, not AI.
Relating this theory to the uproar in textile arts, ultimately one of the most tangibly physical, handmade crafts, there seems to be a connection in where we have grown to place our values. But can these newly valued aesthetics and processes be transformed to other disciplines? Can the tangibility of a process be shown in a work of design, and if yes, how can it create additional value?
