| Summary: | This research explores the contemporary visibility of manufacturing processes, with a particular focus on the production of glass. The context for this study is the well documented sense of disconnection and estrangement said to result from our distance to and unfamiliarity with making processes. At the centre of the study is 'The Archive of Manufacture', an 'archival artwork' (Hal Foster) which has been especially collated for this research. The Archive responds to the question - how do we know how something is made - and gathers together 'points of visibility' - secondary sources where process is made visible, from industry, craft, popular culture, and press coverage. The study explores The Archive through three interrelated questions: Why, examines the social, political, and economic context in order to understand 'drivers' which affect the visibility of process, How, explores the formal and material aspects of the photograph, film, or object through which process is made visible, What is understood - investigates how this material contributes to an understanding of making process and how it shapes our understanding of objects. Initially, The Archive is explored in relation to a wide range of theoretical debates regarding our contemporary relationship with making process. This includes exploring the recent popular fascination with making (including Richard Sennett, Matthew Crawford), as well as descriptions of disconnection, alienation and invisibility (Karl Marx, James Heartfield, David Nye).Methods from art practice are employed as critical forms of looking to explore specific examples from The Archive. In particular, close reading as a 'meticulous visual analysis' (Shepard Steiner) is developed as a key method. The research expands this definition to include the written form of ekphrasis, and interrogative material and visual making processes. Through the production of the body of artworks, the research examines the contingency for the interpretation of the fragmentary or partial descriptions of process in The Archive, and the imagined or speculative understanding that results. The research identifies types of visibility and explores their limitations, and develops four key principles that describe how the visibility of process is effected and how it is subsequently understood. The key artworks offer a live experience, where the viewer's interpretation of the work mirrors the processes by which an understanding of process forms.
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