What we mean by analog craft in a digital age
I’d like to think it’s pretty straightforward, this whole idea of an analog craft for the digital age. But a few people have asked me with a curious stare what I mean by this. A few wonder why we put (seemingly) random videos on the Fullsteam website.
Put simply, I’m inspired and intruged by oddities, and I like to share them. You’ll find some steampunk stuff, some music favs, and a few digitial/analog curiosities. Like the Tenori-On, a new instrument from Japanese inventor Toshio Iwai. Most of these videos will have the tension between analog and digital as a common theme. (Some will be just plain funny.)
Music has always been an analog art…full of imperfections, unintentional half-tones, white noise, and layers of nuance. Today’s digital age produces music of pure precision, binary data, and predictability. Even thought it’s a digital machine, I like the Tenori-On not just for its visual appeal, but for the analog touch (Iwai’s hands) as it manipulates binary music in 4/4 meter.
What’s this have to do with beer? On a recent brewery tour, our guide mentioned that the head brewer could literally make the beer from home, using his laptop to patch into the brewery mainframe. Is this craftsmanship? Precision and consistency is the pinnacle of good brewing, but does it undermine the craft of the laborer? Call us crazy, but Chris and I are excited about the physical demands of brewing: moving kegs, unloading grain, even cleaning tanks. A fully digitized brewhouse doesn’t appeal to either of us.
But, being realistic, an inefficient brewhouse can quickly break a business. And break your back.
So we’ll have our own decisions to make about our own analog and digital philosophy. In the early days, it won’t be an issue: we simply won’t have the resources to invest in automated systems. But as we grow, I expect we’ll stick close to our analog roots.
Chris and I have both had enough of our own digital age (essentially, the office cubicle). Let’s face it. We’re damaged goods. The Big Lots and Tuesday Morning of corporate America. But I bet a good number of you are just like us — down or done with the cube and ready to labor, ache, and toil.
We’ve found our analog craft. What’s yours?
[...] in Durham, NC called Fullsteam. They are for two things: 1) a southern style of beer & 2) a hands-on approach. Hopefully the next time that I am in Durham, I can stop in and have a pint with a good ole’ [...]
I brew beer and wine on occasion too, but I don’t think I’d ever considered it on the analog/digital level before. Thanks! My wife is a printmaker in a time when most of that is moving to digital image generation, and I’m trying to teach one of my sons how to make chain-mail. Would kevlar be the digital equivalent?
Of course there are plenty of digital/analog pairings outside of the crafts area for me though: do you play board games or computer games? When I moved to the town I live it, I saw a flyer for some guys who get together in the back room of a restaurant to play tabletop wargames, so I’ve been doing that. I work in the IT world, but I’ve never touched World of Warcraft or those other immersive/addictive environments. Same thing goes for news/music/relationships, etc…
Dave — when it comes to extending the concept of analog and digital, my first thought is Facebook and the so-called “web 2.0″ technologies. Some of my friends have rejected them as devoid of human connectedness — as impersonal substitutes for real-world interaction.
I look at Facebook and other social media quite differently. I’m interacting more with friends, even to the point of seeing them in-person more often. A group of friends gathered last month for a dinner in Chicago — they hadn’t seen each other in many years, and some of them had never met. But they got together because of a Facebook email thread that one of them set up months ago.
Clearly technology can bring people together. The challenge is knowing when it’s time to step away from the keyboard, turn off the cell phone, and be human. I’m hopeful that we can create a place that is, in that sense, much more “analog.”
Side note: the worst mash-up of analog and digital in the modern era? The ubiquity of cell phone video-recording artists at modern rock concerts. “Hey Buffy! Let’s record this song and post it on MySpace so I can tell my friends just how great this live concert was!” So freakin’ meta.
You know, I’ve been on Facebook for a year or so now, and it was only in the last month that it started to get interesting: I guess a critical mass of people entered the picture and started connecting. I have Friendster and MySpace pages, but I would only check them once every six months or so, but somehow this is significantly different. Since I’ve been too busy with work to properly answer personal emails at the length they deserve, and since I moved away from everyone, I stopped writing people, stopped blogging, stopped making very many phonecalls, but I’ve noticed that Facebook is drawing me back into interaction by the mere fact that a lot can be accomplished in a very short timeframe: keeping up on Twitters, appropriately short comments, etc, and chat if you want to pick something up right then.
You are right about the mobile-phone videos. I went and saw a so-so Decemberists show a while back after having not been out much for a while and was amazed by the number of people who were spending more time watching the show via their phone screens than actually enjoying the show. The capture became the experience, the viewer became a mediator and not an end-point.
That makes me also think of parents making videos of their young children who are experiencing threshold moments: the parent inserts an experience collection device between themselves and their child at the very moment when the child needs direct and uninhibited contact with the parent to help them negotiate the emotions of that experience. Dad may be too preoccupied with trying to get the zoom level right to travel that moment with his child… Digital is far more likely to steal from children than it is to bring them something they couldn’t have otherwise. For the young, love is usually always analog.
BTW, I love your logo.