A Love Letter to Ironing: Learning and Unlearning

Lynne Heller

What does ironing have in common with learning to build a digital world? This exposition explores the nature of learning and unlearning through the juxtaposition of skills, specifically ironing, a competency acquired for the most part through unconscious absorption, versus creating in a digital medium where our learning was much more self-conscious. In learning to build and program in Unreal Engine (UE5), a game engine capable of enabling a virtual reality (VR) experience, we learned, once again, what it means to learn. The exposition is written as a lyric essay to encompass both the prosaic and poetic ways that we engaged with a project titled, Craft and the Digital Turn. By using VR as a means of data visualization we sought to bring our craft backgrounds together with future trends in digitalization and communication. Through personal narratives and histories, melded with theory and analysis we hope to record a process that was deeply engaging and extremely challenging for us as practitioners.

We would like to thank the Society for Artistic Research for the opportunity to present this project. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada, as well as the entire Thinking Through Craft and the Digital Turn team, research assistants, and research staff at the Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts), Emily Carr University of Art + Design, NSCAD University, OCAD University, and Sheridan College.

Credits

Text: Tricia Crivellaro, Lynne Heller, Dorie Millerson, and Kathleen Morris

Ironing Stories: Tricia Crivellaro, Lynne Heller, Shiemara Hogarth, Dorie Millerson, Pablo Montenegro, and Kathleen Morris

Text Edit: Ivana Dizdar

For more information, visit https://craftandthedigitalturn.com/index.php/creation

Go back to where it all started...

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