Gustav Thane
Om Gustav Thane
This thesis is an inquiry into craft understood as manual-gestural skills. The hypothesis is that craft activity organizes and focuses the actions of a researcher into a specific understanding of the world, one scarcely represented within the academy. It argues, from the position of a craftsman in action, that Heideggers concept of a thing, thinging in a worlding world, combined with Deluzes and Guattari’s ideas of material flow present a productive way of taking part in the world by shaping raw material by hand with simple tools.
Tools will be forged and used for forging new tools in four generations. The first set of tools will be made from nothing but what nature provides. In the next generation, metal and a source of heat supplement the tools already made. The third and fourth generation are expected to provide tools of gradually higher precision. The manual gestures of making will be recorded and compared between the generations
These activities intend to show a relationship between the maker and that which is made, to problematize the hierarchies of the two and present an aspect of knowledge based on know-how. The maker is not just shaping but is also shaped by the material and the tools used. The process of taking part in the world in this way allows a maker to an approach that is both specific and beyond individual concerns.