The Analog in The Digital Age
Our Virtual Space was launched 11 November and Remains Open
What is happening here? You will have access to a 3D presentation of selected research objects and will be guided from there to a variety of individually accessible knowledge rooms designed as a 360° environment. Pre-recorded video lectures from the natural sciences, the humanities and design disciplines will be shown in these knowledge rooms. In the agenda below you can view the topics in advance or explore all contents directly in our virtual environment
How to enter and explore the content:
Use the marked entry link to enter our 3D virtual rooms. There you can navigate freely with the mouse and arrow keys and find interesting objects that are gates to the talks. As soon as you are close to an object, you will be asked to hit »Enter«. Then you will get to the 360° environment, where you can watch all lectures as video recordings and explore the info-points marked with icons in each room. The agenda bar on the left will guide you through all lectures. The links to the live discussions were only active on November 11th, when we launched the Virtual Space as part of our Annual Conference.
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ENTRANCE 3D VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE CENTER
DIRECT ACCESS TO VIDEOS AND CONTENT OF OUR ANNUAL CONFERENCE (desktop and mobile)
Agenda 11 November 2020
This lecture explores the entanglement of design and material politics against the background of industrial production in the mid-19th century. It brings a specific historical site of the global North into dialogue with an active material of the global South and sheds light on how the two are connected.
The starting point is ›The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations‹ of 1851, which was held in the Crystal Palace in London. This first international trade fair aimed to compare the ingenuity and industrial progress of all nations and to foster the free interchange of knowledge and ideas. Materials played a key role in the attempt to understand the world from an industrial perspective. They were not merely presented in the form of raw materials and commodities; they also structured the classification system of the exhibition.
Taking ›natural rubber‹ as an example of both an active material and an industrial commodity, the lecture will discuss the presentation of this tropical material at the Great Exhibition and its subsequent development into an essential building block of industrialization. Particular emphasis will be placed on the fact that there was no straight path leading from the milky sap of the wild rubber tree in the Amazon rainforest to the commercial rubber goods on display at the Crystal Palace in London. Rather, it was a complicated process of chemical material transformation, aesthetic education and, above all, forced human labor and ecological extraction that made natural rubber a useful – which is to say passive – material for industrial production.
10.35–10.55 AM
This talk discusses material activity in the context of biological and bioinspired materials. A material property (such as electrical resistivity) defines the relationship between input (voltage) and output (current). The responsiveness of a material is defined as a change in a material property resulting from an external signal, which in the case of resistivity could simply be the temperature.
A further example is shape change due to humidity, which is typically found in wood and wood-based materials. Adaptive materials respond in a feedback loop to the output, with this output serving as an (internal) signal to modify the material property if the input changes. This can lead to homeostasis or to instabilities, depending on the feedback signal. Adaptive growth and bone remodeling are discussed as examples of adaptivity. Finally, the emergence of complex shapes and structures from simple interactions is considered in the context of tissue growth under the influence of the environment.
11.30–11.50 AM
Matters of activity are matters of ›free energy‹, which is that part of the ›inner energy‹ of a system that can be converted into work. Nature makes smart use of it, for example with water. Depending on the ambient humidity and temperature, water can exert forces in suitably designed structures, which may open a blossom in the morning and close it in the evening, for instance. Here we make use of the free energy of water to cut a complex material with inner surfaces precisely at those interfaces exclusively. Molecular mixtures, such as water contaminated with organic molecules, may wet such interfaces, and in a thermodynamic filtering process, phase-separate there into their pure constituents. From the perspective of physics, these activities are many-body effects, and thus thermal energy is the key. We therefore began to expand our previously investigated Cube of Physics model for the fundamental theories of few-body systems into a Tesseract of Physics for large many-body systems. The tesseract is an object in four-dimensional space and hence challenging to visualize.
12.30–12.50 PM
Since conservators have perfected the practice of passivating materials and slowing down their material transformation process, they have acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the activity of materials and can be considered experts in active and passive matter. This talk investigates pathological specimens and wax moulages from the conservation laboratory of the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité. Asking which practices of activating and passivating are associated with these objects, the talk analyses their intrinsic activity. Linking the findings to aspects of the history of conservation, the talk argues that the dominant conservation paradigm still active today can be regarded as a legacy from the late 18th and the 19th centuries. The talk concludes with a reflection on the contemporary challenges of preserving and remembering, and with the question of how processes of material disintegration can be made productive in an ever-expanding museum culture and age of collecting.
1.25–1.45 PM
We‘re happy to provide you with »Break Out Rooms« in Zoom. If you want to talk to any specific person here during the break please write to the Zoom meetings host »Moa Conference« via chat function.
This lecture treats felt as a material that transcends its pure materiality and has since time immemorial embodied specific qualities that can be characterized as symbolic activity. These qualities refer first to an effect of protection and security that exceeds physical impulses as well as to an aura of freedom that goes beyond this. Since antiquity, when felt hats were evidence of liberation from slavery, felt, which is composed of tangles of individual hairs and threads, has come to be associated with the community of the republic and the state of freedom and autonomy. A person who wears felt is free: This attribution has been used both as a sign of the tyrannicide and as an iconography of the autonomous status of artists. Michelangelo and above all Joseph Beuys can be evaluated as felt artists in this sense and hence as protagonists of »active matter.«
3.20–3.40 PM
The practices of cultivating materials by working with bacterial cultures and fermentation processes, long associated with agriculture or food processing, have recently found their way into architectural design. Cellulose is such a material; it not only occurs in plant tissues but can also be a result of bacterial metabolic processes.
As a biological material, bacterial cellulose belongs to a new generation of renewable polymers that are fundamentally different from standardized, industrial materials. Its outstanding properties, such as high water absorption and filtering capacity, high crystallinity, and the ability to withstand high tensile forces, are dependent on cultivation methods, microbial activity and a constant exchange with the environment. In contrast to conventional chemical-intensive processes for extracting plant cellulose to manufacture derivatives and products, design with bacterial cellulose opens up the possibility of bringing design practices closer to the processes of organic growth.
By engaging in an interdisciplinary collaboration between microbiology, materials science and architecture, our experiments with co-weaving soft fibrous structures with living organisms explore how these new entanglements of the natural, technological and material realms can connect temporal and spatial scales and contribute to transforming our current material and environmental practices.
4.20–4.40 pm
Bacterial colony biofilms are highly structured multicellular aggregates held together by an elastic extracellular matrix of self-produced biopolymers, which buckle up and fold into intriguing forms that are
visible even to the naked eye. These self-organizing biofilms are an excellent model system for exploring how the interaction between nano/microscale material and microenvironment actively generates macroscopic form.
Bringing together microbiological and mathematical perspectives, the presentation will cover a wide range, from molecular materials – amyloid fibers and cellulose fibrils – to living fiber microarchitectures and dynamic macroscopic form. Alongside this, we will present experimental geometric processes related to the various length scales that underly bacterial morphogenetic activity, ranging from hyperbolic folding to entangled geometries.
5.20–5.40 PM
This talk is an attempt to pick up on various threads from the recent talks. It focuses on the fundamental dichotomy of the material and the symbolic, the analog and the digital, and how the Cluster’s approach seeks to overcome it by adopting biological materials as a model for symbolic material. Since industrialization, technology has effected this dichotomy throughout every sphere of our culture, as becomes evident from mechanical and digital machinery. In contrast, biomaterials no longer reveal a separation of the motor, information processing and working units, but rather integrate all these components into one and the same material structure. Material, energy and information are thus integrated within the material’s structure, which includes environmental conditions within its activity. In terms of code, the material structure can be regarded as a material or analog code that does not only represent or simulate physical processes, but also performs symbolic and physical operations simultaneously.
6.15-6.35 PM
