Tipping Points: Plastic, Contingent and Unstable Matters
Annual Conference of the Cluster on 16 & 17 November
Tipping Points. Copyright: Josef Luis Pelz & NODE Berlin Oslo
MoA's Annual Conference 2021 was all about matter in motion. We discussed transition and contingency, processes of acquiring and losing form, and the creative potential of the unfinished and indeterminate.
We live, create and act in a time of tipping points. On a planetary scale, the tipping point is understood as an abrupt and irreversible change that is causing the Earth´s climate and other systems to fall out of their stable state. Such transitional phenomena are particularly significant in climate research, but no less in material, biological, anthropological and aesthetic contexts.
Beyond »points of no return«, the focus of the conference is on multi-stable, ambivalent and dynamic constellations: from adaptive processes of bacterial growth over fluid structures to plasticity in architecture, ongoing Cluster projects were be presented in 13 lectures and virtual lab tours. Between the ambiguities of image and language and the unpredictability of scientific modeling, various tipping points were explored down a range of emerging interdisciplinary and methodological avenues.
Conference Agenda Day 1 – 16 November 2021
Panel 1 – Plasticity & (In-)Stability
1.30–1.40 pm
The stretching of plasticity, the malleability of matter, leads to the evolution of application possibilities. Change of intrinsic possibilities of material also makes the researchers malleable. Unlike thick wood branches, plant fibers from short rotation coppice (SRC) – such as willow and rattan- are elastic and hygromorphic and can achieve plasticity for the design of structural textiles after water absorption.
We assembled finite-length lignified plant fibers into macroscopic active structures that respond to mechanical stress and environmental humidity. The fabrication process is based on knitting techniques and traditional materials opens to reflections on old practices.
While the loop formation in textile production techniques is a negotiation between the elasticity of the material and the specific technique itself, the yarn properties give the textile a certain stability. We asked if the loop or preformed filament could be recognized as a monomer just like in polymeric materials.
1.40–2.00 pm
In the era of sustainability and circular bio-economy, the future belongs to bacteria, an alternative and yet underexploited source of sustainable and renewable biomaterials. Bacterial cellulose (BC) is a versatile fibrous material with a wide range of applications including medicine, cosmetics, textiles, and even for speculative architecture and design projects. Combining methods from biology, design and materials science, we explored an improved production process that enhances BC properties. We grew Gluconoacetobacter hansenii – cellulose-producing bacteria – applying a new atypical approach that allows for harvesting thick layers of BC successively produced at the air-liquid interface. To understand how the physical properties of such biological material evolves as a function of growth conditions and harvest sequences, we evaluated growth kinetics, BC yield, pH levels, glucose and gluconic acid profiles, as well as the mechanical properties of the BC layers successively harvested over time. This study demonstrated that G. hansenii adapt and react to their environment resulting in enhanced cellulose production and evolving physical and mechanical properties.
2.00–2.20 pm
For design processes, the creation of temporary stability and ruptures is a fundamental component. Where tension arises, where things and protagonists are taken out of their comfort zones and provoked into new interactions, design potentials show themselves most clearly. Breaks thus form a fruitful moment of transition within the design process. In order for something to break, it must first be temporarily fixed and made stable. This happens with manageable consequences in the form of prototypes and through different uses of models. Especially in the first design phase, extreme situations are therefore modeled and intentionally misappropriated in order to filter out where a research object has its limits and courses of action are to be considered. Filtering as a cultural technique of environing used in design processes enables designers to explore and play with alternative settings, properties and consequences. Here, filter operations do not take place linearly one after the other and as a step-by-step extraction. Rather, the variously generated environments result in an assemblage, at whose friction surfaces or interesting breaks insights are gained for the further creation process.
2.20–2.40 pm
Structural instabilities in thin materials can both cause failure (e.g. when compressing a soda can) or give rise to beautiful morphogenetic phenomena (e.g. undulations in leaves’ edges). In this talk, we present our recent work on the design, mechanics and performativity of an architected thin sheet undergoing such structural instabilities. We imprint an inverted honeycomb pattern of cuts onto a thin sheet of polymeric foam, thereby bestowing it with auxetic properties. We then modify this design in order to introduce multistability, self-locking and friction. The result is a sort of ›augmented surface‹ that can be operated by simple pulling actions on its edges, activated and reset, programmed and reprogrammed. In this process, we realize that this surface has a material grammar, describing how single cells (as letters/symbols) are put together into periodic structures (as sentences) that can transform or create complex behavior (as meaning). Finally, we reflect on the virtues of such interdisciplinary hands-on explorations, and how their physical outcomes are indeed boundary objects, prefiguring a fertile space for research questions and opportunities in the fields of engineering, architecture, design and performative arts.
2.40–3.00 pm
3.00–3.30 pm
Panel 2 – Indeterminacy & Liveliness
4.00–4.10 pm
Embraced by the arts but a nuisance to science, vagueness is ever so often depicted not by its potential but by what it is lacking. It’s synonyms and paraphrases – unsteadiness, uncertainty, undefinedness, indeterminacy – invariably point to its much-preferred opposites: distinctness, precision, and the applicability of conditions of truth. As an inherent trait of language and embodied cognition, though, vagueness is the continual companion of processes of articulation that allow for exploring and redrawing the boundaries between grasping and being grasped. It is on inarticulate grounds, through vagabond thoughts and groping words, that forms come about.
4.10–4.30 pm
Pareidolia, a recently much studied cognitive phenomenon, works as a perceptual bias that visually detects patterns and potential agency in underdetermined forms. In early modern society, it was not merely understood as an impairment, but also used as an artistic tool for the imagination and generation of forms in the mimesis of the natural world. An omnipresent discourse on the fallibility of our perception of natural phenomena coincided with long-held pre-scientific ideas of a natura naturans that playfully created significant forms (ludi naturae) as an agent of its own, using generative forces. Early modern painting, on many occasions, operated at the threshold of both of these discourses by exploring the instability and potential activity of painted matter through pareidolic imagery in order to deceive as well as question our cognition of art and nature.
4.30–4.50 pm
Regarding the questions our Cluster asks, »Where does the activity lie in?« and »Where is life where we do not expect it?«, this talk invites us to walk through invisible infrastructures, suspended microbes in clouds and weather that we often describe as environmental or external factors. Departing from the attempt to merely shape, map and control physical clouding processes, it is gestures of letting go, care and redefining a new formlessness that leads to responsible forms of interactions, sensing the shifting boundaries of the human body and its relationships to objects and further ecological entanglements. This will be exemplified through the creation of learning sites in the exhibition »Stretching Materialities«, where researchers and the public interact with indoor micro-climates and microbiomes, especially through the fields of Aerobiology and topics such as the ›Exposome‹. Located at the interface between many disciplines, this talk investigates atmospheric making as an example of experimental design research resulting in participatory and curatorial practices.
4.50–5.10 pm
The architectural space of the page in a book – in avantgarde book experiments, photo books, or picture books – forms the center of my talk. Understanding the page of a book as a site and stage where words and images form dynamic constellations of epistemological exchange, I wish to explore questions relating to the human body, imagination and resonance. The space of the page, in between its elements, is the place where Gestaltung occurs, creating readability, agency and interrelated sites of knowledge and activation. It is ambivalent in nature, a space of both presence and absence producing surplus, sometimes noise, in interpretative and associative possibilities. This space can be a ›mine‹ as Georges Didi-Huberman called it with reference to the Atlas of images, both a ›gold mine‹ of possible readings and a ›landmine‹ with explosive potential. This space in between is unstable and messy, perhaps, but an urgent depository of active material that is contagious in the best of ways. Investigating the relation of words and images by way of resistances, frictions, as much as associations and correspondences, I wish to place the act of engaging with this productive activity in the hands of the beholders.
5.10–5.30 pm
5.30–5.50 pm
Conference Agenda Day 2 – 17 November 2021
Panel 3 – Fragile Entanglements
9.30–9.40 am
Framed as invigorator and existential threat alike, the waters of Venice provide liquid grounds for intervention. Abundant processes of leakage and accumulation throughout the city traverse the distinction between fluid and solid, stable grounds and vulnerable territory, local practices and planetary urgency. In challenging prevalent concepts of how things take form and come into existence, I will work through the salty wounds, moldy deposits and mudflats in the very fabric of the area as questions of mediation. The vulnerabilities as well as outstanding influxes of urban channels and wetlands are carriers of kinship that remain vigorously resistant to the tales that have been told about inertia and animation and allow to trace and queer the aquatic specificity of the Venetian Lagoon. Engaging with the mutualities of exposure and concealment, flow and contamination in liquid infrastructures, the talk sheds light on the phase transitions of media through geo-political, techno-feminist and material-semiotic matters of concern and co-livability.
9.40–10.00 am
Our imprint on the earth, gathered under the term Anthropocene, seems inescapable. New layers of rock, mixing industrial plastics, reinforced concrete and nuclear waste are inexorably accumulating. We are caught up in incommensurable temporal scales, with an urgency to act (every year counts), and infinite effects (several hundred thousand years for waste to degrade). As in the myth of Medusa, every new action we try to take is both a cure and a new poison. Is it still possible to think, and populate, this layer of the Anthropos differently? Emile De Visscher has developed a process attempting to question this fate: Petrification is a transmutational process from organic to inorganic, from vegetal to mineral, from cellulose to Silicon Carbide. At a time of drastic impoverishment of biological and technical diversity, the project wishes to account for the fragile assemblages and precarities of our contemporary world – which, according to Anna Tsing, is one of the most sensible effects of current capitalist logics. Approached as a speculative archaeological proposal, the project stabilizes transient matters and questions the permanent call for cyclic strategies as a unique response to the ecological crisis.
10.00–10.20 am
10.20–10.40 pm
Panel 4 – Contingent Matters
11:00-11:10 am
The concept of growth, stemming from our understanding of the natural world, has played a crucial role in the perception and shaping of our material, social and economic realities. As dystopic futures unfold in front of us, we need to rethink some of our basic concepts to stand a chance facing the current crises. The presented work aims to reflect on the concept of growth from a bio-inspired perspective, rethink it within the current discourse of Active Materialism, and put it forward as an analytical tool as well as a design strategy to address the urgencies of our time. »Rethinking Growth« goes through the whys and ways of biological material solutions and how they differ from our design and manufacturing paradigms; encourages a more entangled and performative take on growth that moves away from the passive and individuated understanding of matter; highlights the entangled dynamisms and adaptive nature of creative processes, and showcases how this conception of growth can inspire new approaches in design research and practices towards a more holistic sustainability paradigm.
11.10–11.30 am
The Latin root of the word contingency is con-tingere (together-touching): It refers to the mutual touch of people and things with their surroundings, and to the mutual dependencies of events in the seamless tissue of life. Cutting is often perceived as a destructive and extractive action, a violent separating operation within this material or conceptual tissue. Dichotomies in particular are conceptual cuts that allow for the classification of things into sharp categories, »carving nature at its joints«, as Plato wrote. However, as Karen Barad has shown, in science and elsewhere, such discriminative and disruptive operations are actually always »cutting together apart«. Based on fieldwork material from ongoing research at »Matters of Activity«, I will challenge in this paper the modernist idea of the cut, especially the breach introduced between the cutter and the thing being cut. I will argue that cutting, as observed in neurosurgery, virtual paleontology and macromolecular physics, can be considered a respons-able stretching of the senses toward materials and things. Blending the elements of modeling, simulation, training and invention, these practices are daily challenging our own bodily entanglement with multifarious contingencies.
11.30–11.50 am
Collaborative and interdisciplinary research faces complex and organic environments, often torn between undetermined and unreliable variety. Actively tipping between matters of methods, notions and subjects of research, the current Cluster’s PhD cohort from diverse disciplines represents a vivid venue for such questions, and arguably works as a catalyst to some of their answers. In which ways will bespoke, reciprocal or extra-disciplinary perspectives on our tools augment the whys and hows of our dealing with joint questions? How may at times transient, at others seemingly static boundaries affect the way we work? How and where do we choose to communicate this work within mixed teams and environments? At which points may those contingencies and convergences to research be stimulated, and at which impeded? Through complementing records, notes and narratives from ongoing research, »Points in Making« may reveal some of the instabilities and productivities between virtual and physical formats. Discussing dynamic ›islands of instability‹ emerging and dissolving along these processes, the paper embraces some curiously productive messiness as a potential quality of inter- and truly transdisciplinary work.
11:50 am – 12.10 pm
12.10–12.30 pm
Researchers
Frank Bauer
Lorenzo Guiducci
Skander Hathroubi
Yoonha Kim
Sabine Marienberg
Natalija Miodragović
Iva Rešetar
Clemens Winkler
Science Communication Team