Dear Friends of »Matters of Activity«,

An extremely exciting week with numerous MoA activities within the framework of the Berlin Science Week 2022 lies behind us and we think we can speak for everyone: It was a complete success and »Matters of Activity« was more than ever visible to all those interested in Berlin's research landscape and beyond. With this positive development, we are even more looking forward to our upcoming Annual Conference »Deep Material Futures«, happening on November 16th. Please don't forget to sign up and save your seat at silent green!

Last but not least, you will read about the conference's satellite program on November 17th including the opening of the »DAOULA | sheen« exhibition at Tieranatomisches Theater and Curators' Tour of the ongoing exhibition »Design Lab #13: Material Legacies« at Kunstgewerbemuseum which we are really looking forward to!

Happy reading,
Antje Nestler, Carolin Ott & Franziska Wegener

Event | Annual Conference With »Deep Material Futures« we want to face the multiplicity of space, time, and scale. We raise the question of what goes wrong on earth, and how the different deep, slow, fast and future times intervene in the worlds to come. By looking at very different scales, from the internal structures of matter, the interaction of objects and living beings to geological formations and atmospheric dynamics, »Deep Material Futures« asks about the different temporalities of active matter, which not only shape pasts and presents, but futures. We want to discuss and rethink the potentialities, strategies and imaginaries of desirable futures. What new and other ways of politics, design, and ›healing‹ through materialized action might there be at all levels of space, time, and scale?

16 November 2022
at ↗ silent green Kulturquartier on-site & online 

from 09:30 am: Welcome and Moderation
Claudia Mareis

10:15 am– 11:30 am: Panel 1: Wastelands
Lecture: Sandra Jasper
Discussion: Robert Stock, Alwin Cubasch
Moderation: Anke Gruendel

11:50 am– 1:30 pm: Panel 2: Earthly Matter
Lectures: Nigel Clark & James Weaver
Discussion: Karola Dierichs
Moderation: Léa Perraudin 

2:30 pm– 4:10 pm: Panel 3: Matter Across Scales
Lectures: Jeff Diamanti & Cymene Howe
Discussion: Michaela Büsse
Moderation: Clemens Winkler

4:30 pm– 6:10 pm: Panel 4: Future Materials
Lectures: Admir Masic & Vera Meyer
Discussion: Charlett Wenig
Moderation: Martin Müller

From 6:10 pm: Wrap Up & Dinner
Wolfgang Schäffner, Peter Fratzl and Horst Bredekamp 

From 7:00 pm: Premiere of »White Elephant«
Michaela Büsse

More information, the complete program, and registration:
↗ matters-of-activity.de/deepmaterialfutures 

Event | Exhibition The satellite program of our upcoming Annual Conference starts on the same day with the premiere of »White Elephant« at silent green Kulturquartier at approx. 7:00 pm.

White Elephant (2022)
by → Michaela Büsse
In 2013, Malaysian port city Malacca was declared a node in China’s Maritime Silk Road, a sea-based infrastructure project meant to connect China with Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa. Since then, numerous land reclamation and urbanization projects set out to transform Malacca’s coastline in expectation of increasing marine traffic and tourism. However, these expectations would never materialize. Soon after development in Malacca had started, the Chinese government identified a more promising trade connection and developers abandoned their half-finished construction sites. The expression »white elephant« is a contemporary euphemism for costly building projects that fail to deliver on their promises. In Southeast Asia, owning a white elephant used to signify power and prosperity. The animal was and still is considered sacred, validating its owner’s high social status while burdening them with high maintenance costs. The two-channel video installation explores the relationship between architectural models, promotional digital renders, and the actual sites. Malacca’s deserted coastline stands in for the disjunction between future promises, their material premises, and repercussions. Amidst the ruins, the silty plots of land start to form a life of their own.

Furthermore, we are happy to invite you to a Curators' Tour of the ongoing exhibition → Design Lab #13: Material Legacies, which we opened last week during Berlin Science Week at 1.00 pm at Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin on November 17th (no registration needed).

Last but not least, the exhibition → DAOULA | sheen will open at Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin, focusing 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. Please join us for the opening on November 17th, 2022!

Cutting | Material Form Function | Science Communication The two »Dissect« events held as part of Berlin Science Week 2022 on November 2nd and 4th were a great success and a unique experience. In the sold-out Tieranatomisches Theater at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, researchers from different disciplines discussed contemporary artworks in a fascinating way, involving the audience in the process of knowledge and experience: On the first evening about Marco Donnarumma's »Amygdala«, on the second evening about Tomas Saraceno's Spiders. Those who were unfortunately unable to attend can look forward to the video documentation, which will be published soon. → more

Object Space Agency | Cutting | More-Than-Human | XR | Speculative Design | Teaching 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. → more

Object Space Agency | XR | Achievements | Performance The VR dance »Paar« directed by Carly Lave, which premiered at Tieranatomisches Theater in June 2022, has been accepted and awarded into several global festivals, including the FIVARS VR Film Festival Toronto and the DigitalMediaFest Rome. »Paar« won Best Short Film in Virtual Reality at the OneEarthAwards film Festival on September 30th in India. The project was supported through Gamelab Berlin, »Matters of Activity«, and the Tieranatomisches Theater. → more

Symbolic Material | Achievements On Thursday, October 27th, 2022, MoA Senior Co-Director Horst Bredekamp received the Honorary Degree in Philosophy at the University of Turin. The Chancellor of the University of Turin, Prof. Stefano Geuna, conferred the Laurea Honoris Causa in Philosophy on Horst Bredekamp, considered among the most important contemporary researchers of art history, »whose magisterium has enabled us to conceive of the foundational significance of images in all spheres of individual and social life.« We join Professor Bredekamp in celebrating this special appreciation of his comprehensive work with warmest congratulations. → more

News | Exzellenz erklärt The German science podcast ↗ Exzellent erklärt (»Excellence Explained«) on current scientific topics reflects the research diversity of Germany’s leading research institutions and Clusters of Excellence, from Africa Studies to Quantum Physics. In each episode, listeners can expect insights into the interdisciplinary work of one research network. The researchers of the Clusters of Excellence, funded by ↗ DFG, talk to podcaster Larissa Vassilian about how they want to find scientifically sound answers to relevant topics of our time – for the society of tomorrow. In Episode 21, researchers of the Cluster of Excellence ↗ Quantum Universe at the University of Hamburg explain how they deal with fundamental questions concerning the origin, evolution, and composition of the universe. Plug in your headphones during your lunch break and have a listen! ↗ more

Press | Designing Matter Cluster Professor → Karola Dierichs has been interviewed by the magazine »md Interior Design Architecture«. »What a wonderful spinning: cocoons floating seemingly weightlessly through space, delicate webs and entanglements that map natural processes and think them through artistically. The course topic may sound a bit dry at first: »Designing Matter«. But the question posed in the Textile and Surface Design course goes beyond the boundaries of art and science: »Designing Matter« does not simply ask about weaving, felting and knotting techniques or about bionic applications from the realm of nature. It asks about what lies behind the tangible. Karola Dierichs is concerned with fundamental issues: ›We deal with the question: What is Matter?‹«

Read more (in German) about textile as the future technology and how to connect art and science in md-mag.com. ↗ more

Cutting | Science Communication | Brain | Sensing – Vibrations An article written by Thomas Picht, Patricia Ribault, Jürgen P. Rabe and John Nyakatura has been published in the Tagesspiegel Special on Neurology. »Cutting, separating and exposing are ancient human cultural techniques. The Cluster of Excellence project »Cutting« is investigating them on the basis of tumors in the brain and of fossils in rock. The results could change the future of neurosurgery.« Read the full article and find out more about how »Cutting« and the »Virtual Sensing Knife« can change the future of medicine! → more

Open Science Open Access Week 2022 – Open for Climate Justice
For this year’s international Open Access Week (October 24th to 30th 2022), the Open-Access-Büro Berlin, Forschungs- und Kompetenzzentrum Digitalisierung Berlin (digiS) and Berlin University Alliance (BUA) joined the world-wide event by organizing a series of get-togethers, talks and workshops in Berlin and online. 2022’s theme »Open for Climate Justice« aims to coordinate across communities to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work.

BerlinUP
The BUA’s program for Open Access Week 2022 was organized by the newly founded, non-commercial publisher Berlin Universities Publishing (BerlinUP). Sponsored by the BUA and jointly supported by the libraries of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Charité, BerlinUP enables researchers at BUA institutions to publish the results of their research activities in quality-assured and open access monographs and journals. BerlinUP just published its first book → Engage with Fungi, edited by Cluster member → Vera Meyer (TU) and Sven Pfeiffer (Hochschule Bochum).

Open Science as Part of Research Culture
In its recently published positioning titled ↗ Open Science as Part of Research Culture, the German Research Foundation (DFG) considers Open Science as the transformation of research practices and processes that are established or designed to make research results openly accessible for the long term, thereby ensuring an increased uptake of these results by researchers and other stakeholders. The DFG regards Open Science to be a key part of the overarching discourse on research culture and suggests that research institutions and bodies should be involved in the governance of infrastructures to benefit Open Science.

With its → Open Science Statement, »Matters of Activity« supports its members in opening up their research through additional financial means as well as personnel assistance within the management office and expressly advocates new ways of publishing and evaluating research results. For consultations, please contact Elisabeth Obermeier or Alexander Struck.

Object Space Agency | Publications | Fungi/Mycelium The recently founded Open Access publishing house Berlin Universities Publishing (BerlinUP) has published its first book: »Engage with Fungi«. How do we want to live in the future? How do we take responsibility for the future of the Earth, for our environment, for our society? Fusing the creativity engines of science, art, and society enables us to develop visions for a sustainable future and viable paths towards it. The publication exemplifies such a transdisciplinary endeavor and focuses on collaborative research on and learning from fungi. → more

Cutting | Brain | Graphic Anthropology »Sketching Brains« is a collaborative exhibition-as-research project which intends to trigger new conversations around the act of sketching in and about neurosurgical practice. Based on a series of fieldwork within the Neurosurgical Department at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin by graphic ethnographer Maxime Le Calvé and on the research of neurosurgeon and cultural scientist Anna L. Roethe, this initiative takes the form of conversations based on graphic-based stories, presented and continued both onsite and online. In German and English, the texts are comment-enabled to bring the community to react and question the description. The ›participant exhibition‹ becomes a vibrant collaborative forum, choreographed by the ethnographer, to understand more profoundly the implications of neurosurgery in people’s lives, on both sides of the scalpel. → more

Object Space Agency | MoA Design Research Studio The interdisciplinary lecture series MoA Talks was continued on November 7th, with a talk by Claudia Blümle,  Professor of History and Theory of Form at the Institute of Art and Visual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In the tension between visibility and theory, the talk »Öffnen und Schließen. Zur Medialität des Vorhangs in der zeitgenössischen Kunst« focused on the production of visual form, its pictorial techniques and materiality, as well as on the cultural and medial conditionality of the perception of art. The talk was hold in German. → 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