Material Agency

<p>The ‘material turn’ of the twentieth century focuses on the vibrancy of matter and non-human agency, providing an engaging platform from which to re-assess, and also promote, the role of materiality in design. The material turn draws away from a ‘representational’ paradigm towards a focus on materials as being non-objective, performative and responsive, where materials operate as authoritative matter. This design research thesis investigates the agential capacity of materials to amplify atmospheric experience in architecture. Through this research proposition, the thesis harnesses contemporary material perspectives to drive a series of enquiries that explore material agency in design. Within this framework, the design research seeks to strengthen relationships between user, matter and site. This method engages and evaluates materials on a tactile and emotional level, reflected in its atmospheric outputs. Ultimately, the design research employs materiality as an agent in the production of a 1:1 scale installation and two speculative building designs at the domestic and public scale. A historic site in East London has been selected to provide the contextual and material foundations for the design research. This thesis concludes that materials have an ability to exert force on the design process when they are engaged in a responsive feedback loop which acknowledges the transformative capacity of both ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ elements. The dynamic nature of scaling as a design method supported these findings by encouraging progressive dialogue between matter and design process.</p>

Material Agency

<p>The ‘material turn’ of the twentieth century focuses on the vibrancy of matter and non-human agency, providing an engaging platform from which to re-assess, and also promote, the role of materiality in design. The material turn draws away from a ‘representational’ paradigm towards a focus on materials as being non-objective, performative and responsive, where materials operate as authoritative matter. This design research thesis investigates the agential capacity of materials to amplify atmospheric experience in architecture. Through this research proposition, the thesis harnesses contemporary material perspectives to drive a series of enquiries that explore material agency in design. Within this framework, the design research seeks to strengthen relationships between user, matter and site. This method engages and evaluates materials on a tactile and emotional level, reflected in its atmospheric outputs. Ultimately, the design research employs materiality as an agent in the production of a 1:1 scale installation and two speculative building designs at the domestic and public scale. A historic site in East London has been selected to provide the contextual and material foundations for the design research. This thesis concludes that materials have an ability to exert force on the design process when they are engaged in a responsive feedback loop which acknowledges the transformative capacity of both ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ elements. The dynamic nature of scaling as a design method supported these findings by encouraging progressive dialogue between matter and design process.</p>

Bach and Material Culture

Bach’s music is often interpreted as transcending the material conditions of everyday life. This chapter, by contrast, argues that Bach scholarship could be enriched via approaches taken from the study of material culture. It places Bach within the vibrant consumer culture of early-eighteenth-century Leipzig, exploring his postmortem inventory and his keyboard publications in the context of how the town’s bourgeoisie used material goods to show their status and identity. It investigates Bach’s printed and manuscript music in terms of the social practices surrounding these material artifacts. Finally, the chapter relates Bach’s working practices to debates about the interplay of human and material agency. It discusses how he experimented with the material characteristics of instruments such as organs, and analyzes his compositional practice as an interaction between player-composer and contrapuntal materials.

Moving beyond the mirror: relational and performative meaning making in human–robot communication

Current research in human–robot interaction often focuses on rendering communication between humans and robots more ‘natural’ by designing machines that appear and behave humanlike. Communication, in this human-centric approach, is often understood as a process of successfully transmitting information in the form of predefined messages and gestures. This article introduces an alternative arts-led, movement-centric approach, which embraces the differences of machinelike robotic artefacts and, instead, investigates how meaning is dynamically enacted in the encounter of humans and machines. Our design approach revolves around a novel embodied mapping methodology, which serves to bridge between human–machine asymmetries and socioculturally situate abstract robotic artefacts. Building on concepts from performativity, material agency, enactive sense-making and kinaesthetic empathy, our Machine Movement Lab project opens up a performative-relational model of human–machine communication, where meaning is generated through relational dynamics in the interaction itself.

Narrating a Valley in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän: Material Agency, Rain, and the Geologic Past

The complex narrative composition of image and text in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän discloses entanglements between humans and nonhuman entities that impact the narrative and that demand careful consideration. The story depicts the aging protagonist’s struggle with memory loss and his careful examination of the valley’s mountain formations in fear of a landslide. In this analysis, I show that both of these threats can be read as entangled with nonhuman agents. By focusing on the material dimension of the text, two central and related shifts occur: the background element of rain becomes foregrounded in the narrative, and the natural formations of the valley that are assumed to be static are revealed to be dynamic. These shifts lead to an interpretation of Frisch’s text focused on the impacts of rain and the temporal scale of the text’s geologic dimension. Approaching the text through the lens of material ecocriticism unveils the multiple agencies at play, decenters the human, and illustrates the embodied experience of climate change.

Start Here

This article attempts to lend an ear to the compact audio cassette: a key feature of the domestic soundscape from its introduction in the early 1960s until its gradual obsolescence in the first decades of the 21st century. The piece aims to provide a new perspective on the cassette by way of a discussion of the Start Here tapes project: a series of seven artist audio cassette tapes released in 2016 and 2017. Applying a practice-based methodology to a study of objects that are intimate and well known, the project seeks to foreground the material agency of the cassette by making work that reflexively references material objecthood. The article examines what is at stake politically in this focus on materiality, and considers the way creative forms of reflexivity might have renewed ethical and political value within a ecopolitical or biopolitical context.