Copyright: Jann Mausen
Public Lecture by T. J. Demos as Part of »Critical Times. Part 1: Multiple Matter«
How might we rescue the future from the grips of planetary negativity, capitalist longtermism, and generalized catastrophism? It will take nothing less than cultivating an emancipated chronopolitics emerging from the traditions of the oppressed in relation to an undetermined not-yet. T. J. Demos presentation addresses recent creative modelings of radical Indigenous and Afrofuturist worlds-to-come and their radical temporal reconfigurations, founded upon social justice and environmental flourishing.
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Workshop with EER in Copenhagen, 2023. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé
Spinning-On STS Workshop on 27–29 September 2023
In an era fraught with dizzying socio-political events and burgeoning ecological catastrophes, this workshop for a special issue will delve into the concept of epistemic dizziness as a disordered state of whirling vertigo, applying it to the contemporary state of STS. As we navigate the tumultuous landscape of an open-ended pandemic, war, and socio-ecological devastation (Stengers 2021), the research practices of STS itself risk inducing ›epistemic dizziness‹. This workshop, inspired by Donna Haraway (2016), draws on ›serious fun‹ as a means of staving off paralysis and fainting, urging that knowledge production can serve as both a coping mechanism and a source of resilience. Repurposing the concept of ›ilinx‹, as delineated by Roger Caillois (1961), the series of lecture performances will critically examine playful dizzying practices in Western, indigenous, and other worlds as a pathway towards comprehending our vertiginously speedy world.
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Copyright: »Spontaneous Generations«, https://www.spontaneousgenerations.com/
Karin Krauthausen and Michael Friedman Published Article in Special Issue of »Spontaneous Generations«
»Spontaneous Generations«, the Journal of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto launched a special issue on ›agency‹. The volume »From Bacteria to Gaia: Levels of Biological Agency« includes an article of the Cluster members Karin Krauthausen and Michael Friedman on the agency and activities of materials in the 21st century.
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Design of soft robots. Research on form, its deformation and possible function. Copyright: Anna Schaeffner
Cluster Members Anna Schaeffner and Rasa Weber Presented at Major Event on the Global Electronic Art Scene ISEA2023
On May 17th and 18th Cluster Members Anna Schaeffner and Rasa Weber Presented at a major event on the global electronic art scene, that aims to strengthen the dialog between artists, researchers, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs from the cultural and creative industries who participate in the advances of research and creation. Anna Schaffner gave an artist talk »For a Design of Deformation« and Rasa Weber presented her paper »A Sympoietic Ocean. Design Research with/in the Marine Holobiont«.
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Visual Writing Workshop, Stuart McLean, May 2023. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé, Matters of Activity
Writing Workshop on 11 May with Anthropologist Stuart McLean
What new possibilities for thinking and living might result from extending the notion of creativity beyond the human realm? The worlds that humans often pride themselves on creating are not and have never been exclusively human but are dependent upon and inflected by a multitude of other-than-human powers and presences, including animals, plants, geological formations, weather systems, and a range of humanly manufactured artifacts fashioned from a variety of materials. On May 11th, from 11 am–3 pm, Stuart McLean, professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, is invited by Cluster member Maxime Le Calvé as part of the stretching senses school (Cutting/OSA) to give a writing workshop on multimodal anthropological fabulations – you're kindly invited to join!
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Copyright: Mina Mahouti
New Cluster Event Series Critically Explores Material Sustainability Concepts
Transforming linear economies into resource, energy, and more-than-human friendly processes means to bridge different areas of expertise. Ongoing discussions in different Cluster research groups such as MFF, Filtering, Weaving etc. have shown the importance of involving the perspectives of various actors, practitioners and experts into further research processes. Promising solutions and insights for a new material economy and culture are facing similar problems when it comes to transfer them from laboratory to the market. (Material) engineers, designers and activists face numerous challenges in expanding their activities, be they technological, political, economic or social. Kicking-off in June 2023, a new series of events will connect members of the Cluster interested in critically exploring material sustainability concepts with different practitioners and stakeholders from outside the Academy, and foster knowledge exchange in both directions.
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Maxime Le Calvé, Fieldwork Charité, 2022. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé, Matters of Activity.
Maxime Le Calvé Invited to Teach alongside Alice Jarry at Concordia University, Montreal
Cluster Member Maxime Le Calvé will travel to Montreal for a short research and teaching stay at the Milieux Biolab and the Milieux Speculative Life Cluster at Concordia University. He is invited by Prof. Alice Jarry, an assistant professor of Design and Computation Arts (Concordia University, Montréal) who holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality.
Together, they will conduct the workshop »More-Than-Ethnographic Probes«. This workshop is a fieldwork and a platform for the development of collaborative sketching, writing, and documentation methods. The workshop will be followed by a roundtable panel at the »Uncommon Senses« Conference at Concordia on May 4th. The panel will be chaired by anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (MIT). Moreover, Maxime will present a paper on the »Sensory Ethnography« panel at the »Uncommon Senses« conference, with the title: »Sketching a Sense of Presence: Graphic Ethnography as Speculative Sensorial Attunement to Neurosurgical Practice«. more
Together, they will conduct the workshop »More-Than-Ethnographic Probes«. This workshop is a fieldwork and a platform for the development of collaborative sketching, writing, and documentation methods. The workshop will be followed by a roundtable panel at the »Uncommon Senses« Conference at Concordia on May 4th. The panel will be chaired by anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (MIT). Moreover, Maxime will present a paper on the »Sensory Ethnography« panel at the »Uncommon Senses« conference, with the title: »Sketching a Sense of Presence: Graphic Ethnography as Speculative Sensorial Attunement to Neurosurgical Practice«. more
Copyright: N Scot Unsplash
Robert Stock Talks at the Hybrid Symposium »Luso-Ecologies: More-Than-Human Complexities, Agency, and Resistance in the Lusophone Anthropocene« at University of Oxford
Following Mia Couto’s quote, places of ›nature‹ require us to think more than we would expect. While highlighting that those ›natural‹ places were fabricated through stories (and histories), Couto also contends that they are indeed ›fazedores‹ – makers – of so many other stories. Taking up these thoughts that resonate with Haraway’s claim to create novel stories and »stay with the trouble«, Robert Stock approaches the coastal line of Mozambique to learn about the ways in which mangrove forests intersect with the contemporary postcolonial condition of this country as part of the first panel starting Thursday, March 30th.
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Epistemic Dizziness in STS, 5056x2944 px, DALL•E 2, 2022, Copyright: Lucius Fekonja, Maxime Le Calvé, Matters of Activity
Maxime Le Calvé Contributed to the Science & Technology Studies Hub 2023 in Aachen
Cluster Member Maxime Le Calvé convened a special topic panel titled »Epistemic dizziness. Coping with the side effects of the fast-paced circulation of metaphors and figures in STS« with his colleagues Britta Acksel and Jonna Josties of the laboratory for Human Environment Relations (HU Berlin) at the Science & Technology Studies-Hub from March 15-17th, 2023, in Aachen.
Together, they introduced the notion of epistemic dizziness in a collective paper, followed by hands-on dizziness-inducing exercises. The contribution featured an AI-generated artwork created collaboratively by the Cluster members Lucius Fekonja and Maxime Le Calvé. more
Together, they introduced the notion of epistemic dizziness in a collective paper, followed by hands-on dizziness-inducing exercises. The contribution featured an AI-generated artwork created collaboratively by the Cluster members Lucius Fekonja and Maxime Le Calvé. more
Stretching senses school logo with a photo of mycelium growing on willow, 2022. Copyright: Natalija Miodragovic & Dimitra Almpani-Lekka, Biomaterials Lab TU Berlin and MoA, 2022
at UdK »InKüLe – Innovationen für die künstlerische Lehre«
The stretching senses school, an MoA project curated by Cluster anthropologists Yoonha Kim (OSA) and Maxime Le Calvé (Cutting), is starting a longer teaching collaboration with the UdK-based project InKüLe »Innovationen für die Künstlerische Lehre«. The stretching senses school is an emerging learning community around immersive arts, creative coding and speculative ethnography. It aims to explore more-than-human perceptions through making practices bringing in conversation various immersive media. The collaborative workshops with InKüLe were focused on the potential of artistic education to change our relations to the environment through an engagement at the level of anthropotechniques.
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Poster »Frictioned Functionality«. Copyright: Matters of Activity
MoA's First Interdisciplinary Autumn School 17–22 October 2022
Against a background of ecologies in crisis, the interdisciplinary Autumn School »Frictioned Functionality: Un/Designing Un/Sustainable Matter« invited Post-Docs, PhDs and MA students from the humanities, natural sciences and design to work through the conflicted entanglement of materiality, design and un/sustainability, using frictioned functionality as the guiding principle. In the context of this Autumn School, frictioned functionality has been understood as a working concept to reopen other narrative and performative spaces of imagination in and beyond unruly times. The autumn school took place from October 17th–22nd, 2022.
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Poster PhD presentations 2022. Layout: Ada Favaron
Doctoral Presentations at the MoA Retreat 2022
The 2022 presentation of the Doctoral Program »Matters of Activity« at the MoA Retreat in September at Landgut Stober was both a review and an outlook of the doctoral research conducted at the Cluster between 2020 and 2022. Under the title »Scaling Matters: From the Lab to the Field, «Pre-Doctoral Researchers at varying stages of their research — from the very beginning to the final phase of their theses — presented their heterogeneous work whilst continuing to negotiate common themes, methods, questions and tools. The format combined talks and an exhibition and invited MoA Members to engage individually with the presentation and a selection of their research objects.
Thanks to everyone involved for making possible this all-around successful event. Enjoy some visual impressions of the exhibition, as well as the talks and have a look at the booklet.
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MoA Exhibition »Stretching Materialities«. Copyright: Offshore Design
Hidden Activities in Objects and Spaces at Tieranatomisches Theater
Matter is dead? Objects are lifeless? Think again! In the exhibition »Stretching Materialities« the liveliness and activity of matter could be experienced in a completely new way. From September 16th, 2021 to March 4th, 2022, the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin became an interactive playground: an actual cloud levitated in the middle of the room, reacting to body heat and movement, hovering around the visitors like a strange creature. Stones revealed their weathering as a dynamic process of change. Large willow structures, carefully co-crafted by humans and computers, were interwoven with the inhabitable space. Korean ›durumagi‹, a silk overcoat connecting the digital and physical realm, vibrated on the visitors’ skin as they interacted with diverse materials. Walking through the room with VR headsets on, visitors could enter a glass elevator and travel straight down into the materials presented – into the CT scan of a stone or high up into the clouds to interact with air molecules.
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Can Bacteria Spin a Yarn? Kick-Off event »MitWissenschaft/ WeSearch«, Humboldt Forum Berlin, 29 April 2021. Copyright: Humbolt Forum
Cluster Members Opened Event Series »MitWissenschaft/ WeSearch« at the Humboldt Forum
On Thursday, April 29th, 7–9:30 pm, members of the Cluster gave insights into the research of »Matters of Activity« in an interactive live show, thus opening the event series »MitWissenschaft/ WeSearch« at the Humboldt Forum.
Using concrete examples from the Cluster projects »Weaving« and »Filtering«, MoA members Bastian Beyer, Alwin Cubasch, Peter Fratzl, Regine Hengge, Claudia Mareis, Léa Perraudin, Christiane Sauer and Wolfgang Schäffner showed how the natural sciences, the humanities and the design disciplines work closely together to find innovative solutions to contemporary problems.
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The Speculative Realities Lab. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé
The SpecLab is a space connecting neurosurgery, anthropology, and the immersive arts. It contributes to expanding their respective disciplinary equipment – conceptual, material, and digital – in order to animate brain-related knowledge for navigation, prediction, and inspiration. We want to make neurosurgery appear strange again in order to unsettle certain ›status quo‹ of the clinical practice.
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Subterranean Matters, by Baris Pekcagliyan, Warja Rybakova, Nayeli Vega, Paulina Greta, stretching senses school. Copyright: Matters of Activity
The »stretching senses school« is an education-as-research project between »Cutting« and »Object Space Agency«, which stemmed from the exhibition »Stretching Materialities«. Through this workshop-based contribution to the exhibition, we fostered collaborations between anthropology and immersive interaction art.
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Left: The Bark Sphere, Charlett Wenig with Johanna Hehemeyer-Cürten I MPI-CI and Alexander Magerl, 2021
Middle: The Bark Project Flexibilized, Charlett Wenig with Johanna Hehemeyer-Cürten I MPI-CI and Patrick Walter
Right: Charles Eisen’s allegorical engraving of the first hut (= Vitruvian hut). Frontispiece in: Marc Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, Paris: Chez Duchesne […], 2. edition, 1755. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 1254, https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-128 / Public Domain Mark
»Syntopic Architectures« engages in structures for habitation, sourced from and embedded in the material cycles of a specific environment. The term ›syntopic‹ (noun: syntopy) has been coined by Luis Rene Rivas in 1964 and denotes the inhabitation of the same »macrohabitat« by »two or more related species«. It is a composition of the Greek words ›syn‹ meaning together and topos meaning place. To develop Syntopic Architectures thus means to create inhabitable structures with the place where they are built in.
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Wild silk wrapper from the Marka Dafing in Safané, Burkina Faso (showing the sheen). Video still from the film installation at the exhibition »DAOULA | Sheen. West-African Wild Silk On Its Way« (Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin). Film installation by Thabo Thindi with film material from Salif Sawadog and others.
West-African Textile Craft Meets European Science and Design
Bacterial Weavings
From Microbiological Activity and Fibrous Biofilm Matrices to Design and Architecture