March 15, 2014

conversation flowing through time (2013)

The best way to understand craft, I believe, is to think of it as a conversation flowing through time. Or, more precisely, as a recent eddy in a broad conversation about object-making that began at least 25 million years ago, when our hominid ancestors were making tools . . . Knowledge gained through experience has accreted from generation to generation (along with their beliefs, values, and aesthetic ideals), passed on by example and explanation. This flow of information through millennia is the conversation of object making. We participate in it every time we make an object and, to a lesser extent, every time we interact with one.

Peter Korn (2013)