LUDD was here: Technology and Innovation

Luddite! is a term used polemically to imply an irrational fear or hatred of technology, a violent and destructive impulse towards the new. Historically however, the Luddites can be seen to protest the conditions rather than the means of production. King Ludd led tactics of ‘direct action’ against the enclosure of the commons and the division of labour; divisions that prepared the ground for many separations: arts and crafts, technical and academic.

Our imperative in the projects we will describe here was to address and understand how as artists we might work with new 3D visualisation technologies. To do this we unpicked some historical precedents including an early ancestor of 3D fabrication technology: a device from 1863 for turning photographs into sculpture. As a collective of students and staff we figured out how to hack and build a bastard apparatus. We produced a monster. In so doing we found that we were generating paradata: exploring the systems of the institution, the building of discipline and the vectors of control. We threw some spanners into the machine.

‘We tried a type of… performance that could influence the thinking of all the people engaged in it. It was, so to speak, art for the producer, not art for the consumer.’ (Brecht, 1964)

It seems apt in the light of the current ICA show which displays a reconstruction of Richard Hamilton’s ‘Man Machine Motion’, to discuss our own reconstruction of ‘This is Tomorrow’ from 1956, where The Independent Group worked to create a series of expanded artworks. This project is a further example of our methodology in practice: a kind of material historiography with energies aimed very much at the future.