Handmaking the Digital

Abstract

Abstract This Coda constellates work by Zadie Smith and multimedia artist Sarah Sze to examine the confluence of the handmade and digital making. Working back through Virginia Woolf’s cartographic modernisms, it shows how contemporary artists and writers expand Woolf’s work into the global, multimedia present. Restructuring media hierarchies, Smith’s writing makes for a particularly striking comparative case study as she reroutes characters through Woolf’s fictional landscapes, developing ideas of art and craft into the technological present. Coming full circle to Woolf, the Coda exposes interwoven threads of craft, from early photographic negatives to recent digital forms, foregrounding the feminist complexity of transmedia making. Smith and Sze take familiar territory and begin to test its parameters, a conceptual and material practice central to contemporary craft studies’ interest in technological hybridity as an archival practice.