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Fourth Door Review is a leading-edge green cultural review magazine
with a unique perspective on the relationships between the arts,
architecture, design, craft, the environment, music and other cultural
subjects. One of the cardinal relationships the review examines is that
between the senses and the natural world and the abstract and
intellectual, with the aim to find a new synthesis and balance between
them. In FDR’s pages artists and other creative individuals address
their relation to nature and technology. The award-winning review is
the oeuvre of editorial co-ordinator Oliver Lowenstein, who also
coordinates Fourth Door Research, a virutal research network of
designers, architects, writers and new media designers involved in
permeable cross-disciplinary projects. BLOOM investigates Lowenstein’s
unique point of view.


What role do you feel craft plays, or can play, in contemporary culture?

One role craft and making plays is that of a counter-balance to our
accelerating cultural tempo. Craft/making does so in part because it
maintains an evolutionary link to hand-eye coordination and to the
upper limbs. With the reduction in hand-eye co-ordination and
hand-based skills, contemporary culture is moving away from this
element of our evolutionary make-up, for the first time in tens of
thousands of years. In terms of the next hundred years, say, it is
critical for this aspect of our humanity, (man the maker) not to be so
marginalised as to disappear. With so much of our lives taken up with
differently-skilled activities –-- typing at the keyboard, for
instance, or driving -- along with an increasing rate of automation,
the cultural tempo also speeds up, and the time available for craft
and making diminishes.

If you downsize and join the likes of the Schumacher Society, who view
craft in its purist form, this more traditional stance can act as a
counter-weight to the electronicising of culture. But because we are so
locked into using modern technology, there is a need to look at the
positive alongside the negative consequences. For example, if
technology is usually an agent for cultural acceleration, maybe there
is a need to look at technology --– new media for instance --- as an
agent for the deceleration of society. This has been a guiding theme
throughout the various issues of Fourth Door Review.

All of this means a specific challenge is to grow a future where crafts
and making are vital elements in culture alongside new media. This has
animated the forum I sought to initiate within Fourth Door Review ---
that new media works with rather than replaces craft. Craft with
software. A both/and approach, where new media integrates into craft
and making.

I have aimed to develop within Fourth Door Review an inclusive approach
to craft futures which foresees how these two very different ends of a
spectrum can be reconciled. This has meant inhabiting paradoxes. In
issue 4 the review looked at the Technolacework of Finnish art maker
Helena Hietanen, who weaves traditional Finnish folk lace-making forms
using fiber-optic materials that light up, so they are also unique
pieces of ‘light art’. When I first saw these Technolacepieces they
seemed very wonderful to me, and opened a way into a sense of the North
in terms of the imagination, of Borges’ north, his kingdom of Tlon.

Issue 5 looks at a Sussex wooden building design, the Weald and
Downland Museum Gridshell. This is both a beautiful building and an
example of what a building team integrating heavy building carpentry
crafts with technology can do at the turn of the millennium. The
building is created through craft, but wouldn’t have been possible
without the modelling capacities of the computer. The museum gridshell
sits on the cusp of the imaginary and the realisable, and inhabits
both. FDR7 features an in-depth interview with George Dyson, who
embodies a both/and apprehension of crafts and technology. The son of
the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson, George has made his life out of
building versions of the baidarkaboat --– the kayak boat of the Bering
Sea. Dyson first built baidarkas in the 70s, using for the boats’ skin
what were then space-age materials---aluminium and dust cloth. Mid-way
through this water-journey, he turned his attention to computers and
wrote a contemporary history of computing, Darwin Among the Machines.

If we want to include crafts in the future this is part of the path to
travel along. It is part of doing civilisation well. Beauty is a part
of this. it is important for there to be beautiful things and beautiful
processes, in any society trying to do civilisation well.

This leads to the question of education and specifically how we learn.
Modern education does not promote a diversity of ways of being and
becoming. This seems to me a symptom of language-based learning, and a
consequence of modernity’s relationship to technology, what has been
described in philosophical terms as‘Technique’. In the words of Jacques
Ellul, “‘Technique’ can be described asthe totality of methods
rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency…in every field of
human activity…advocating the entire remaking of life and tolerating no
judgement from without.”Why is it not possible to have universities
where you can do an academic course on Quantum Electric Dynamics,
another on Sung Dynasty Chinese Art, and also practical courses on Tree
Surgery and Wood Engineering, Weaving and Tai Chi? Higher education
establishments aim to hone a mono-cultural sensibility well prepared
for the job market. Why not aim to establish a culture of head, heart
and hands?



How can you explain the return of the handmade and the decorative at
the same time as the rise of the digital and the "design" (as in
industrial design)?

My sense is that the demand for individually-made objects is a response
to a sense of powerlessness within a mass society. The revival of the
handmade and decorative was already happening irrespective of the
computer revolution of the last fifteen years. But the computer
revolution has coloured the craft/making resurgence and there have been
crossovers, such as the introduction of CAD-CAM into design. But maybe
the crafts resurgence shouldn’t be overplayed; according to recent
figures from the Crafts Council, there are only 25,000
crafts/designer-makers currently making a living in Britain. For this
to develop into a significant phenomenon depends on people being turned
on to making ‘making’ their life.

One element that is interesting to me is the division between the
younger computer-accepting generation and some in the older generations
who don’t care for recent machinery. And there is a generation in the
middle that has come of age in the pre-computer world and presided over
the transition. This middle generation can mediate between the older
and the younger generations, so that something of the past can continue
into the future. The artist Andy Goldsworthy, who is sometimes seen as
more a crafts-person than a fine artist, talks beyond generational
divisions; both old and young connect with his work. In the Fourth
Door features on his work, we examine Goldsworthy’s art as a
manifestation of a persuasive both/and philosophy which incorporates
craft-making and the use of new energy-efficient materials.



Is your point of view today more sub-cultural or Utopian?

I would say it encompasses both. Let’s entertain an idea from dream
theory –- that the imaginary is as, maybe more, necessary than the
real. This would go against the grain for many people. But I am
convinced that the mainstream has it the wrong way round. A person
starts by doing what they believe in, often with a question, a ‘what
if?’ and often ignoring the economic dimension, walking a path which
unfolds, and from which an answer emerges. What if this process of
question and answer were operative at a cultural level? There’s a
question. The mainstream doesn’t have the confidence to believe in
this, and falls back on an economic outlook, asking about the bottom
line, and embarking upon a path because of the added value it
represents, not out of passion. This, for me, is machine logic.
Stafford Beer, the cybernetician speaks of ‘riding on the dynamics of
the moment’. Can a society self-organise itself to ride on the dynamics
of moments as certain people do, and as sometimes certain sub-cultures,
for a while, do?



Why do you think that nature, flowers and plants are becoming again
such important elements in contemporary culture?

Contemporary culture is moving away from its connection with the
natural. The last century has seen the link cut for so many, and this
interest is in part a nostalgic longing for an idea of lost pastoral
innocence, that probably, for many, didn’t exist . This is romantic, of
course.



What is the role of wildness (vs. domesticity) in an increasingly
controlled world?

Wildness comes in many forms. There is wilderness, the ends of the
earth: environmentalists in the Thoreau and Emerson lineage are ardent
supporters of this form of the wild. But is the world wild anymore in
the way Thoreau saw it? A phone call can be made from any mountaintop,
or from the midst of any desert, whether silica or ice. There are other
kinds of wildnesses though, such as cultural wildness and the digital
wild.

Cultural wildness has been expressed ever since modernism began to take
hold, and in such cultural movements of the last forty years as the
hippies and punk, but today these seem like cultural??????? Today a
semblance of cultural wildness is tamed, appropriated, and
enthusiastically cultivated by the powers that be. Think of the
cultural and creative industries. I’m with the cyberpunk novelist Bill
Gibson when in All Tomorrow’s Parties, he says these bohemias were
where industrial societies went to dream, but because “we started
picking them before they could ‘ripen’ they’ve become, or are on the
verge of becoming, extinct.”

What is the digital wild? We are only beginning to sense what this
post- computerised world is about, after its first fifty years. The
external world has been tamed, but the digital world is a new frontier,
and may be a threshold into new forms of wildness.

Yet with the domestication of the landscape, society’s attention has
moved on, which paradoxically may mean that in post-industrial
societies the wild is returning to the countryside. Living a
rural-paced life is irrelevant to advanced industrial societies, so it
is difficult for this wild to find a place within industrial society’s
image of its own future. Slipping outside this future’s parameters, the
rural dimension thus becomes a space where de-domestication is again
possible. Weeds in the concrete.


"Hybrid" is a recurring term in your vocabulary. Could you please give
us your definition of this word?

I use “hybrid” as a substitute for a word which doesn’t quite exist.
“Fusion” was used in a similar way a couple of generations ago.
“Hybrid” is more biological, yet also controlled, which is still not
quite what I’m trying for with Fourth Door. Hybrid bears a link to the
digital realm, although words like ‘connectivity’ and ‘convergence’ are
alternatives. I’m interested in divergence, a many-possible-paths
future, as much as I am in convergence. “Hybrid” also relates to the
both/and notions I’ve been referring to. Maybe an organic form of
hybridity is what I’m trying to describe.



Can you please give us your definition of the word "green"?

I’ve been trying to figure out a definition for a while. In terms of
its cultural use you could put green on a grid: one can refer to a
spectrum from pale to deep green, to articulate the cultural stance of
an individual or an organisation. If you factor in wild-to-domestic as
another vector, you move from 2D to 3D. Also, many people who identify
themselves as “green” tend to see technology and nature as binary
opposites, or divide technology into good and bad, but if you approach
this from a both/and perspective, nature and technology can be part of
one thing. I’ve described Fourth Door Review as a green cultural review
magazine, but purists might debate the definition, partially because of
the focus on technology, partially because there is so much emphasis on
craft and making. But there again, I like to think that the issues
highlighted around craft and making, particularly the potential
disappearance of skill, are implicitly “green” concerns.



Can you please comment on the cultural experimentation of the
Bloomsbury group and how it is relevant today?

Bloomsbury was of critical importance in shaping elements of the
cultural conversation in the last century, particularly in Britain, but
also further afield. From one perspective the Bloomsbury movement might
seem too much the product of a rarified cultural elite of the early
20th century, but then again maybe its elite origin has contributed to
Bloomsbury’s continuing hold on the British imagination. Whether
Bloomsbury could happen today or what exactly it would consist of is an
interesting thought experiment. What would Virginia Woolf have made of
the Feminisms of the late 20th century, or of Chick Lit, and what would
Roger Fry have thought of Brit Art and Complexity Architecture? There
are cultural threads which sustain elements of Bloomsbury, although the
world has changed so much that these might be unrecognisable if Fry or
Woolf arrived in a time capsule to look at what is happening at the
beginning of the 21st-century. I live near Charleston, the Sussex home
of some of the Bloomsbury figures, and recently Patti Smith performed
there. The feeling was that a connection was being made between her and
the Bloomsbury movement, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much of
this was marketing. That this question arose at all is indicative of
the current era; such a question wouldn’t have come up 80 or so years
ago. Bloomsbury seems to me to be part of another age, a time from
which the 21st-century world is fast moving away, but which it needs to
hold onto as part of its core anchoring and grounding, in its
infant-like and accelerating journey towards the future.

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