Showing Making: On Visual Documentation and Creative Practice

This article discusses visual representations of creative practice as source material to study the complex procedures involved in the making of artifacts. After a brief discussion of theoretical approaches to production processes, the genre of showing making is introduced as a new line of enquiry. The still and moving images belonging to the genre contain at least four main elements which are extremely useful to the analysis of making. They have an archival function, as they store tacit knowledge about making; an instructional function, in that they enable the acquisition of skills and material knowledge; a participatory function, in the sense that demonstration incites pleasure in the viewer through kinaesthetic identification with the depicted process; and finally a display function, which showcases some but hides other elements of the creative process. These functions can be made instrumental to the study of creative practice, it is finally argued, if the mediated nature of images (which is the result of material processes) is taken into account.