UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Tim Ingold, professor emeritus of social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, will give a remote lecture about the decline of skilled handmade works with the rise of artificial intelligence technology at the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State at 4 p.m. on March 26.
The remote lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be live streamed via Zoom in the Stuckeman Family Jury Space.
Titled “Digitization and Fingerwork,” Ingold will examine how the skilled work of the hand — which humans have relied on for millennia in skilled manual operations ranging from knotting and weaving through breadmaking and milking to embroidery and handwriting — has migrated to the fingertips with the rise in digital technology.
“While our fingertips mediate the transmission of information in a virtual world of artificial intelligence, they have no purchase in the real world of forces and materials. They cannot feel its surface textures, nor can they intertwine with one another, curl around things, squeeze, grasp, hold or carry,” Ingold explained.
In turn, humans are closer to losing those skills due to new technologies “. . . increasingly invading the theaters of everyday life.”
“The technology is manifestly unsustainable,” said Ingold. “We therefore owe it to coming generations to look after the skills that have served our ancestors for so long. For far into the future, people will still need them, just as they did in the past.”
Ingold has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organization in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice, and his current interests lie at the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.
He has authored several books including “The Rise and Fall of Generation Now” (Polity, 2024); “Imagining for Real” (Routledge, 2022); “Correspondences” (Polity, 2020); “Anthropology and/as Education” (Routledge, 2018); “Anthropology: Why it Matters” (Polity, 2018); “The Life of Lines” (Routledge, 2015); “Making: Anthropology, Art and Architecture” (Routledge, 2013); “Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description” (Routledge, 2011); “Lines: A Brief History” (Routledge, 2007); and “The Perception of the Environment” (Routledge, 2000).
Ingold is a fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.