Dear Friends of »Matters of Activity«,

With today's issue, we are back from the Cluster summer break and would like to draw your attention to our freshly released podcast in the »Exzellent Erklärt« series with Cluster-Co-Director Claudia Mareis and Postdoctoral Researcher Khashayar Razghandi! Moreover, we look back to the superb presentation of the Master Open Design Students in the Humboldt Lab in July and invite you to experience the wonderful installation of MoA members at the Triennale Milano, which can be seen until December. Finally, we give a little foretaste of the two great MoA exhibitions that will open in November and other events coming up soon.

Happy reading,
Antje Nestler, Carolin Ott & Franziska Wegener

Material Form Function | Science Communication How do we deal with materiality in the age of digitalization? Can other understandings of materiality lead to other modes of production or other ways of living? Episode 18 of the DFG podcast series »Exzellent erklärt« (English: Excellent Explained), available from 1 September 2022, focuses on the interdisciplinary research at »Matters of Acticity«. Journalist Larissa Vassilian speaks with Cluster Co-Director Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis, designer and cultural historian, and Research Associate Dr. Khashayar Razghandi, a materials scientist and design teacher about topics like sustainability and bio-inspired design and what active materials have to do with it. → more

Weaving | Material Form Function | Object Space Agency | Bacteria | Biofilm | Science Communication | Cellulose Cellulose of different forms and origins is woven together in this structure: pieces of wood, paper threads and biofilms grown by bacteria. A collaborative textile is created – human, plant and microbial. Three MoA research projects, Weaving, Material Form Function and Object Space Agency and with that many MoA Members worked together on the project  »Bacterial Cellulose: Co-Weaving Biofilms« shown at the Triennale di Milano XXIII »Unknown Unknows, An Introduction to Mysteries«, in the thematic exhibition »Alchemic Laboratory«, curated by Ingrid Paoletti, from July 15th to December 11th, 2022. → more

Filtering | Weaving | Cutting | Master Open Design | Teaching | Science Communication With the event and exhibition »Growing Sensecapes«, the students of the »Open Design« Master Program wanted to bring forward the numerous dilemmas and challenges they face, not only as students but also as individuals, when it comes to designing a better tomorrow. A permanent flow of people engaged with the students in their reflections at the Humboldt Labor on July 25th 2022. Visitors encountered the six projects that were developed during the Seminar Laboratory Projects led by Cluster members Frank Bauer, Bastian Beyer, Maxime Le Calvé, Jose D. Cojal Gonzaléz, the lecturers from the Universidad de Buenos Aires Rodrigo Martin Iglesias, José Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin and the support of Brazilian artist Rejane Cantoni. → more

Filtering | Teaching | MoA Design Research Studio In the summer term of 2022, the Embodied Interaction Studio hosted the practice project »Heliobolici« at the weißensee school of art and design berlin. The Bachelor's and Master's students in the Product Design Department investigated solar technology's potential to make artifacts energetically independent. The solutions developed range from concepts for public infrastructure to personal use.
Many objects, tools or services we use daily require energy to produce heat, light, motor or computing power. A whole range of these artifacts could achieve energy self-sufficiency through solar power. In the project, we investigated objects and application contexts in which solar energy could be used to achieve energy independence. »Heliobolici« explored the question of to what extent this product dimension can generate new rituals of use and, therefore, new aesthetic archetypes. → more

Object Space Agency | Publications While the nation-state gave rise to the advent of museums, its influence in times of transculturality and post-/decolonial studies appears to have vanished. But is this really the case? With case studies from various geo- and sociopolitical contexts from around the globe, the contributors investigate which roles the nation-state continues to play in museums, collections, and heritage. They answer the question to which degree the nation-state still determines practices of collection and circulation and its amount of power to shape contemporary narratives. The volume thus examines the contradictions at play when the necessary claim for transculturality meets the institutions of the nation-state. With contributions by Stanislas Spero Adotevi, Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Natasha Ginwala, Monica Hanna, Rajkamal Kahlon, Suzana Milevska, Mirjam Shatanawi, Kavita Singh, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Witcomb. → more

Prototype / Model The open access book »Model and Mathematics: From the 19th to the 21st Century«, published in August 2022, collects the historical and medial perspectives of a systematic and epistemological analysis of the complicated, multifaceted relationship between model and mathematics. Contributions and expert interviews range from, for example, the physical mathematical models of the 19th century to the simulation and digital modeling of the 21st century. The aim of this anthology, edited by MoA members Michael Friedman and Karin Krauthausen, is to showcase the status of the mathematical model between abstraction and realization, presentation and representation, what is modeled and what models. → more

Symbolic Material | Material Form Function | Publications After the release of the anthology edited by Patricia Ribault, including contributions by Cluster members Samuel Bianchini, Cecile Bidan, Horst Bredekamp, Mason Dean, Emile De Visscher, Peter Fratzl, Lorenzo Guiducci, Leonie Häsler, Claudia Mareis, Martin Müller, Jörg Petruschat, Emanuele Quinz, Khashayar Razghandi, Patricia Ribault, Wolfgang Schäffer and Charlett Wenig, we're happy to announce that the publication is now available open access. Through the concepts of »Design, Gestaltung and Formatività«, this book sheds new light on the processes of formation and transformation of the material world we live in. In the first part— »Giving Form« —philosophers, historians, psychologists and cultural studies scholars question our modes of giving form, while in the second— »Form Given« — artists, designers, engineers and scientists unfold their creative processes. These »philosophies of making« invite us to reflect on what we do, what we can do, and how to do it, but they also spur us into action. → more

Yarns/Fibers We were very happy to invite  to our  »Talking Matters« lecture on October 11th as an on-site event in the Sophienstraße. With our guest César Enrique Giraldo Herrera, Social Anthropologist from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, we had an inspiring discussion about »Winding intentionalities and the harmony of ropes«. → more

Material Form Function | Fish Skins | Sand | Rubber | Textiles | Tree Bark | Yarns/Fibers | Tessellation | Science Communication | Material Legacies The exhibition »Design Lab #13: Material Legacies« at Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin explored contingencies and ruptures between traditional crafts and the most recent developments at the crossroads of material research, design, engineering, and architecture. It brought together artifacts from the museum’s collection with work-in-progress installations by designers and researchers from the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« in order to initiate a dialogue about the historical, contemporary, and future conditions under which materiality unfolds.
By engaging with a series of different materials and techniques the exhibition encompassed both the problematization of unsustainable pasts and presents as well as the imagination of speculative material futures. Taking materiality as a starting point, each of the exhibits investigated its sociocultural, economic, and political context in order to disentangle the multiple interrelations that arise from and with materials. → more

Weaving | Daoula Sheen | Wild Silk | Science Communication The exhibition »DAOULA | sheen«, which can be seen at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin until June 30th, 2023, at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin, focuses on the natural formation and the cultural history of wild silk obtained from caterpillars in West Africa, and on the many and complex ways in which this unique material is viewed by microbiologists, materials scientists, and architects in Germany. Curated by MoA members Laurence Douny, Karin Krauthausen, and Felix Sattler, and co-created by a large and diverse multidisciplinary team, this unusual project sets out to stimulate dialogue between West African craft, European science, and design. → more