Thinking With Things: Landscapes, Connections, and Performances as Modes of Building Shared Understanding (original) (raw)
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Yet the nature of all these things must of course be physical since otherwise they could not impress our senses —for impression means touch, and touch means the touch of bodies. Lucrezio, "De Rerum Natura" The materiality of things represents the connection between our bodies and the physical world. However, in recent years, with the overlay of a new digital reality onto the existing physical one, materiality has extended its domain of existence into the virtual world through haptic technologies. The sense of touch is no longer restricted to a physical contact with any kind of "thing" existing in our world, but accessed through perception of it. By means of neurocognitive processes, which reproduce the sense of touch by stimulating particular areas of our brain, touch lost its direct and instinctive connection with the physical world to rely more on mnemonic processes of virtual perception that construct hybrid knowledge based on digital rather than physical stimula. This paper investigates what the human relationship with things is in the age of human sense simulation. Also, what kind of sensuous relationship is established with our surroundings when the main territory of material investigation has shifted to the virtual, understood as "real"? This paper will attend to human-object/thing relationships via the concept of the "material oxymoron". An oxymoron is a figure of speech that juxtaposes elements that appear to be contradictory. The "material oxymoron" finds its hybrid materiality by means of the human’s perception of, and engagement, with things. By embracing the hybrid context (between the digital and the physical) in which we dwell, we would like to define a new kind of relationship between humans and objects/things using Malafouris' theory of “material engagement”. We will articulate the process through which material oxymorons are constructed, and consider the role of material engagement theory in explaining it. In the material oxymoron, the surface quality is no longer defined a priori in reference to information stored in the human brain, i.e. what we expect, but emerges from the process through which material oxymorons are created. We will therefore treat materials as mutable things, continually transformed by humans and material actants, rather than treating them as objects existing ad infinitum. By means of material oxymoron we aim to challenge a sensuous discovery of the physical whose outcome creates composite matter, i.e. a materiality that fosters human perception and engagement with the physical world.
Much has been said about the constitutive and generative potential of matter, of its vibrancy, endless productivity and resilience. With its impersonal kind of agency, matter is both a producing force and a relationality. New Materialism, specifically, calls for a refiguration of the question of matter, bringing new approaches to debates on embodiment and interactions among bodies. Finally, the troubled divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’ is shaken too, as it begins to strike us as increasingly obsolete. Accordingly, the present paper examines encounters with artifactual creatures in artistic practice. In looking at kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen and U-Ram Choe, as well as Merleau-Ponty concept of ‘the flesh’, it develops an extended notion of interaction whereby organic ‘human’ bodies are invited to participate in the terrestrial biome affirmatively by empathetically responding to that which is non-animalesque and not even biological – artifactual automata. What is foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of artifactual entities, the immersion in environments defined by the presence of artifactual agents, and the possibility of a human-artifactual participatory becoming. Here ‘living’ material bodies are defined in terms of their capacities to generate events and regimes of novelty. A body becomes a meta-stable locale composed of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment. Here notions of empathetic immersion and participation intertwine to shape a new ecology of interlacing material bodies with their singular forms of interaction and response.
MatteRealities: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies
Open Cultural Studies, 2019
No ideas but in things!" William Carlos Williams's leitmotif for the modernist epic Paterson seems to anticipate the current renewal of academic attention to the materialities of culture: When the Smithsonian Institution accounts for The History of America in 101 Objects (Kurin) or when Neil MacGregor, designated director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, aims at telling The History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), they use specimens of material culture as register and archive of human activity. Individual exhibitions explore the role of objects in movements for social and political change (Disobedient Objects, Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Large-scale national museum projects like the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., draw attention to the long existence of collections in Western institutions of learning and reveal the inherently political character of material culture-be that by underscoring the importance of institutional recognition of particular identities or by debates about provenance and restitution of human remains and status objects. The plethora of objects assembled in systematic as well as idiosyncratic collections within and outside the university is just beginning to be systematically explored for their roles in learning and education, funded by national research organizations such as the German BMBF.1 In theatrical performances, things function as discussion prompts in biographical work (Aufstand der Dinge, Schauspielhaus Chemnitz) or unfold their potential to induce a bodily experience (The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, GK Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY). Things are present: as heritage, as commodities, as sensation; they circulate in processes of cognition and mediation, they transcend temporal and spatial distantiations. Things figure in narration and performance, in our everyday life practices, in political activism. They build knowledge of ourselves and others, influence the ways in which we interact with our fellow human beings, and in which we express or control our feelings. They combine the apparently concrete and the fleetingly abstract. Overall, things make us do things.
Structures, forms, and stuff: the materiality and medium of interaction
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2013
Though information is popularly, and often academically, understood to be immaterial, nonetheless, we only encounter it in material forms, in books, on laptops, in our brains, in spoken language, and so forth. In the past decade, HCI has increasingly focused on the material dimensions of interacting with computational devices and information. This paper explores three major strands of this research-tangible user interfaces, theories of computational materiality, and craft-oriented approaches to HCI. We argue that each of these offers a formulation of the materiality of interaction: as physical, as metaphysical, or as tradition communicating. We situate these three formulations in relation to debates on the nature of media, from philosophical aesthetics (the ontology of art, in particular), media studies, and visual cultural studies. We argue that the formulations of materiality, information, and meaning from HCI and those from the humanities have deeper underlying similarities than may be expected and that exploring these similarities have two significant benefits. Such an analysis can benefit these differing threads in different ways, taking their current theories and adding to them. It also serves as a basis to import philosophical art concepts in a robust way into HCI, that is, not simply as prepackaged ideas to be applied to HCI, but rather as ideas always already enmeshed in productive and living debates that HCI is now poised to enter-to the benefit of both HCI and the humanities.
The Material Subject: Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion
The Material Subject: Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion, 2021
'The Material Subject' emphasises how bodily and material cultures combine to make and transform subjects dynamically. The book is based on the French Matière à Penser (MaP) school of thought, which draws upon the ideas of Mauss, Schilder, Foucault and Bourdieu, among others, to enhance the anthropological study of embodiment, practices, techniques, materiality and power. Through theoretical sophistication and empirical field research, case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia bring MaP’s ideas into dialogue with other strands of material culture studies in the English-speaking world. These studies mediate different scales of engagement through a sensori-motor, affective and cognitive focus on practices of making and doing. Examples range from the precarity of professional divers in French public works to the gendered subjectivity of female carpet weavers in Morocco, from the ways Swiss watchmakers transmit craft knowledge to how Hindu devotees in India make efficacious use of altars, and from the enskilment of Paiwan indigenous people in Taiwan to the prestige of women’s wild silk wrappers in Burkina Faso. The chapters are organised according to domains of practice, defined as “matter of” work and technology, heritage, politics, religion and knowledge. Scholars and students with an interest in material culture will gain valuable access to global research, rooted in a specific intellectual tradition.
Becoming materials: material forms and forms of practice
Digital Creativity, 2010
As a result of development toward ‘smart’ materials, materials now enable an expanding range of aesthetic expressions and user experiences. These materials are fundamentally temporal in their capacity to assume multiple, discrete states of expression that can be repeatedly and minutely controlled. These materials come to be, or become, only over time and in context—they are becoming materials. Thus, in the development and application of such materials, we must engage more extensively with the experience of materials in practices of design and of use. This paper introduces and discusses the concept of becoming materials—as well as the implications for practice—through a series of examples from our own practice-led research within art, design and architecture. Coming to terms with the implications for material practices of design and of use, we suggest, requires the development of new concepts and methods for doing and studying the design of becoming materials.
Most scientific conceptualizations of material culture focus on existing orders and on rationales that motivate the usages and arrangements of objects. Here, a usage is usually seen as connected to humans’ needs and objects are understood as representatives of a certain vision of the world. Although the existence of such arrangements is undeniable, material things are much more (or sometimes less) than this. They constitute a challenge to people’s capacity to manage their environment or even to confront them with an ontological alterity. The challenge of things is related to their uncontrollable presence long after they have been disposed of or their original users have gone, continuing through to the emergence of non-functional features and of material characteristics that have been hitherto invisible or suppressed. In such moments, the initial perception of a thing as a highly valued object can be challenged and reversed with the object even becoming a source of annoyance, disturbance or threat. Inviting contributions from anthropologists and archaeologists, the conference will highlight processes of re-evaluation that emerge from the discovery and realization of additional properties of things. The contributions will examine objects, discussing how traces left by and through objects - as well as their interpretations - are not indicative of their usage only. Approaches include, but are not limited to, exploring questions of affect of objects, the felt presence of their absence or the ways shifts in semiotic contexts call into question the meanings of objects precisely because of the objects’ materiality. Closer examination of entangled histories of specific objects is expected, also, to reveal conceptual problems and theoretical issues. To a limited extent the conference is a follow-up to a lecture series entitled “The Obstinacy of Objects” (Eigensinn der Dinge), organized by the Research Training Group “Value and Equivalence” during the winter term 2012/13 and the Panel "The Obstinacy of Things", organized by Philipp Stockhammer in cooperation with Hans Peter Hahn at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" in October 2012.
Convergence, 2020
Digital and networked media are characterized by a fundamental disconnection between the modes of operating of these media, the human sensorium and knowledge. In order for humans to consciously participate in this expanded domain of sensibility, additional mediation is required to 'presentify' what is not accessible to human perception. This situation has motivated the creation of manifold 'data objects' in the form of visualizations, soundscapes and sonifications, 3D materializations, and data-driven interactives in the neighboring domains of art, design, science, and humanities scholarship. These new knowledge objects, as we propose to call them, both produce and mediate knowledge in the process of making data experienceable. They turn that what essentially does not correlate to human sensory capacities into something that the human sensorium is capable of engaging with. As such, they can play a crucial role in providing access, and thereby modalities of critical and creative relating, to what Hansen (2015) describes as the expanded domain of sensibility. Yet, the effects and implications of the sensory specificities of these knowledge objects remain under-acknowledged, as are the potentials of these modes of presentifying data. Here, we explore and compare a diversity of such knowledge objects and look at their different media modalities and different experiential qualities, and how these afford ways of knowing.
Embodied Curation: Materials, Performance and the Generation of Knowledge
The following essay unfolds as a conversation about the staging of a “cinematographic tribute” to Lou Reed and to the Velvet Underground’s early involvement with Andy Warhol and with underground cinema. The conversation—between the curator-host and an anthropologist-filmmaker present in the audience—pieces together personal registers of the event to make a case for embodied curation—a series of trans-disciplinary and multisensory research and performance practices that are generative of new ways of knowing about, and through, historical materials. Rather than a didactic endeavor, the encounters between curator, materials, and audience members generated new forms of embodied knowledge. Making a case for embodied methods of research and performance, we argue that this generation of knowledge was made possible only through the particular constellation of materials and practices that came together in the staging of this event.