Editorial Dear friends of »Matters of Activity«,

in this issue of the CZ# we would like to inform you about events and news around the Cluster. We want to focus your attention on the new junior research group »Adaptive Fibrous Materials« at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces and the short project »Exploring Filtering« with lots of interesting experiments.

We are also excited to give you a first glimpse of what will happen at our Annual Conference on November 11th, 2020, that we are very much looking forward to. Please save the date!

Happy reading,
Antje Nestler, Eva Schmidt & Franziska Wegener

Weaving | Material Form Function | Tree Bark | Yarns/Fibers | Achievements The MoA research group »Adaptive Fibrous Materials« is interested in interactions between biological material and its environment. The fact that plants are sessile make them particularly interesting regarding their adaptability and optimization strategies – there is no way for them to escape. Remodeling processes, such as those found in the animal kingdom, are absent and adaptation takes place by growth. The junior research group is jointly funded by »Matters of Activity« and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Surfaces (MPIKG). → more

Filtering | Air | Water In the week-long short project »Exploring Filtering«, Cluster member and interaction designer Thomas Ness, and textile designer Veronika Aumann dealt with the topic of Filtering with an open-ended mindset. The goal of this creative exploration of filtering processes was to gauge and express them in a practical and tangible way, respectively. The point of departure for this was not a particular substance to be filtered or a specific substrate to be attained. Rather, the interest lay much more on the actual processes of filtering in and of themselves and the filter as an object. In the »Design Lab«, different kinds and methods of filtering processes were tested hands-on with familiar prototyping materials and techniques and transformed into six narratively and visually impressive representations. → more

Exhibition We are thrilled to announce that the ethnographic work of → Maxime Le Calvé has been selected for the virtual group exhibition ↗ Illustrating Anthropology at the Royal Anthropology Institute. It was featured in the first lineup of artists & anthropologists. It will be shown next year in physical exhibitions in Liverpool and in Sheffield.

Weaving | Material Form Function | Teaching | MoA Design Research Studio | Biodesign The MoA Design Research Studio on »Growth« was a continuation of the »Scaling Nature« series introduced in Summer 2019. In this context, the core idea of the studio was to investigate matter as an active agent in the design process. This means that it has its own innate capacity of formation and performance, that is being designed from the bottom up. Scaling nature can be understood as the process of extracting principles from naturally occurring systems and taking them as inspiration for specific applications – during this process scaling operations necessarily are one key aspect of this translation. The results of the MoA Design Research Studio on »Growth« were on internal display at the weißensee school of art and design berlin from September 22nd to October 14th, 2020. → more

Object Space Agency On October 1st the Veterinary Anatomy Theater (TA T) opened its doors again (for pre-registered guests) with its new exhibition »OLIVER THIE. Die Wahrheit über den Ursprung der Welt«. The Berlin artist Oliver Thie preserves the shadows of rocks and reveals their long history. For over two hundred years, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin stores a collection of unimposing gray basalt specimens. They are evidence of a heated controversy about the origins of the earth known as the basalt dispute, which took place in the 18th century. Oliver Thie has explored these objects in an interdisciplinary dialogue with scientists from the Humboldt-Universität and the Museum für Naturkunde. → more

Material Form Function | Symbolic Material | Object Space Agency | Science Communication In Design, Cultural and Natural Sciences, an anti-Cartesian turn has manifested itself in recent years, which denies the separation into active ›res cogitans‹ and passive ›res extensa‹ and understands the material world as (co)acting. The conference from October 8th–9th deals with the aesthetic and political consequences of this turn, in design practices and thought processes. The conference will be held in German, including many Cluster members. → more

Object Space Agency | XR | Performance The international workshop series Golem-Labor by the Goethe-Institut in cooperation with the Gamelab brought together contemporary dance and mixed reality technologies. In an online conference, XR experts and artists addressed the question of how the (performative) arts and (XR) technologies can interact. → more

Call The University of Melbourne is one of the Berlin University Alliance's strategic partners, along with the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. Following a first »Joint Call for Proposals« in 2019, this second call focuses on supporting the development of joint PhD activities embedded into new and existing research collaborations. In the long term, the seed funding enables joint supervision and »cotutelle« style jointly awarded PhDs to establish new thematically oriented International Graduate Schools, structured jointly awarded PhD programs or new International Research Training Groups. Funding is up to 50.000€ per project.

For more information please visit:
↗ https://www.berlin-university-alliance.de/en/commitments/international/melbourne/call-joint-research/index.htm.

Weaving | Yarns/Fibers | Textiles Weaving is an ancient practice that is found across cultures. It commonly designates a technique of making surfaces by interlacing two sets of materials that cross each other at a right angle. However, weaving as a manual, mechanical or digital technique of entanglement applies to a broad variety of vegetal, animal or synthetic materialities brought together to form a fabric by use of a frame such as a loom. Furthermore, weaving practices may also introduce hybrid techniques such as knitting, plaiting and braiding. This one-day, practice-based, interdisciplinary workshop brought together specialists who will highlight concepts and practices of weaving from various angles by emphasizing specific techniques, technologies, materials, patterns and design. → more

Job For the research and digitization project »Restaging Fashion«, located at the Urban Complexity Lab (UCLAB) the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam is seeking a Research Associate for a fixed term of 3 years at 30 week hours (75%) starting on December 1st 2020. The project »Restaging Fashion. Digital contextualization of vestimentary sources« will digitize and contextualize fashion images and textile artefacts in order to summarize these fashion sourcesin a digital presentation and to make the cultural history of clothing, its appearance and symbolism graspable. For a research and digitization project in this field, they are now seeking an academic employee with expertise in Computer Science (data modeling, XML, Semantic Web), Visualization and 3D data modeling.

More Information can be found ↗ here.