Where the touching is touched: The role of haptic attentive unity in the dialogue between maker and material

Abstract

This paper, drawing on research from the ‘HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making’ project (sponsored by the ERC), will attempt to show how a focus on the temporality of touch and the tactility of making can help us disambiguate the often discussed, but little understood, dialogue between maker and material. Our main thesis is that with increasing levels of skill, tactile perception plays an active role in transforming a mere kinetic interaction (where potter and clay are causally coupled) into a multi-modal kinaesthetic transaction (where the potter becomes attentive to the expressive affordances of clay and recursively the clay becomes responsive to the creative affordances of the potter’s hand). We call this situational attunement between the potter and clay haptic attentive unity (HAU). The primary objective of this paper is to explore the links between touch and attentive engagement in the context of pottery making and use the notion of HAU to account for the dialogic character of creative material engagement.

Let's Just See What Happens: A Qualitative Case Study of Risk and Uncertainty in the Creative Process

“…The very notion of a moment of a creative spark is both attractive and elusive. The evidence we present here demonstrates that this "moment" is not necessarily located in a mental plan but could rather be discovered and constructed through the interaction between creator, tool, and material in a way which is less often considered in psychological studies of creativity (although more common in anthropological research such as Malafouris & Koukouti (2022)). We track the work of a bowl turner and his habitual actions and interactions.…”

“…It comes from the theoretical perspective that creativity is necessarily an unfolding, heteroscalar process that emerges from the relationship between the maker, the tools, and the material. Such a position requires the use of detailed ethnographic techniques to generate a full picture of the underlying dynamic interaction (Malafouris & Koukouti, 2022). The themes distilled from this form of work can then be tested in wider populations.…”

Enactychism: Enacting chance in creative material engagement

“…4. The fourth premise is that chance provide opportunities for attentive material engagement and haptic attentive unity (HAU) (Malafouris & Koukouti, 2022) that may (or may not) lead to creative outcomes. I should explain that haptic attentive unity denotes the situational attunement between the potter and clay (or any maker and material) as this can be observed with increasing levels of skill.…”

“…Creative gesture embodies two opposing skills, that of distraction and that of attentive material engagement (Malafouris & Koukouti, 2022). Those two skills create a tension that pushes the potter's hand to move beyond its learned habits (technical and perceptual).…”

“…Suffice it to say, that, in contrast to the notion of ‘pure’ chance as a passive happening without cause, enactychism designates something that people do: chance enacted , as the title of this article suggests. Enactychism is a form of attentive engagement that depends on the makers’ ability to respond to chance encounters (Malafouris & Koukouti, 2022).…”