Materiare v. tr.

Tunable meta skin that makes objects wrapped in it invisible to radars.

Computers were really radically disruptive; mobile devices are so disruptive that they even disrupted computers, they’re a bigger deal than the dead bookstores. We’ve got guys who own cellphones in this world who can’t even read. And I’m very intimate with this spectacle, I’m very keen on all its in and outs. The thing that bugs me about your attitude towards it is that you don’t recognize its tragic dimension. This is something that literature has always been very keen on, that technology never gets around to acknowledging: the cold, the wind, the moaning through the empty stone box. 

  And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world better. This is a dangerous word, like, ‘If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?’. Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical, because when you say a thing like that at South By – ‘Oh, we’re here to make the world better’ – you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivety. The world has a tragic dimension. This world does not always get better. This world has deserts – deserts aren’t better. People don’t always get better. You personally, once you’re over middle age, when you’re becoming elderly, you don’t get better every day. When you’re elderly, you are in metabolic decline. Every day you get worse. It’s the human condition, it’s a simple truth. It is fatuous to think that culture or politics or society or technology always get better. It’s just not true, and it’s certainly not true right now. Since the financial panic of 2008, things have gotten worse across the board. The austerity is a complete policy failure; it’s even worse than the panic. We’re not surrounded by betterness in 2013. By practically every measure: nature is worse, culture is worse, governance is worse, the infrastructure is in visible decline, business is worse, people are living in cardboard in Silicon Valley, we don’t even have much to boast about in our fashion. Although you have lost weight – and I praise you for that because I know it must have been hard.

  We are living in hard times, we are not living in jolly boom dot com times. And that’s why guys like Evgeny Morozov, who comes from the miserable country of Belarus, gets all jittery and even fiercely aggressive when he hears you talking about technological solutionism. There’s an app to make that all better. Okay, a billion apps have been sold. Where’s the betterness? Things do not always progress, and the successes of progress become thorny problems for the next generation, they don’t stay permanently better. Our value judgments about what [is] better are temporary, they are time bound. When you over-use the word “better” it’s a head-fake, it’s a mantra. You don’t have a betterometer; you can’t measure the length and duration of the betterness. Better is a metaphysical value judgment, it’s not a scientific quality, like mass or velocity. You can’t test it experimentally. We don’t know what’s better. We don’t even know what’s worse. Which is good. Every cloud has a silver lining. 

Google doesn’t want to be evil. But they don’t have an evilometer. They don’t have an evil-avoidance algorithm. I can already tell you what an evil Google Glass looks like – nobody mentioned it, but it’s stunningly obvious. You just take the four Glass design principles and you reverse them. You use software that was not designed for Glass. Buggy, abusive software, stuff that breaks up or jams or just fails to display. You grab fiercely for attention; you disrupt the user’s day; you send the user stale, useless information. You do freaky coding that breaks, or hacks, or pwns the device. And why do I know these things? Because they’re already present in Android right now.  

You don’t have to see into the future to recognize this. That’s not a prediction. All you have to do is abandon your naive pretense that every tech deployment is necessarily an advance. It isn’t true. If I’m a huckster in Ghana who was spamming you through Google Glass, for me that situation is better. I’m not your pal – I’m an adversary, I’m out to rob you. The Russians, they used to want to blow up Stanford. They didn’t want to send a Sergey Brin. They were not our permanent enemies; they were not always bad. ‘Anything that’s good for us is bad for them’ – it’s not true. If you’re fixated on betterness, you might lose hope when good goes to the bad. You might even lose hope when bad goes to the good. Because it leaves you at sea, because you are living an illusion. You are living an illusion. 

How can we get past the ‘Wow’ factor? How can we really inquire with this? How can we treat it with moral seriousness? I think the first step, really the proper step, is to accept that our hands are not clean. We don’t just play and experiment. We kill. When you disrupt the stone box, the stone box goes empty. It’s not merely irritated or disturbed – it’s dead, it’s dead media. It’s dead, it’s been killed. And to be a phoenix you have to admit your complicity in the barbecue fire. It’s your fire; it’s not somebody else’s. It’s like, yes, we killed the past. We didn’t pull the trigger on it directly, but it died for our benefit. It died through things we did.Own up to that. Own up to that. Yes, we burned it up. No one is historically innocent.  

Un amico racconta che qualche tempo dopo la morte del nonno ha dovuto liberare la cantina del suo appartamento. Tra le altre cose ha trovato uno scatolone pieno di lampadine fulminate. Era accompagnato da un biglietto scritto a mano: «Casomai in futuro inventassero un sistema per ripararle.

"Tunneling microscope "constitutes an event in the history of writing machines insofar as it makes marks on a scale beyond optics. At which visual (re)presentations are predicated on the radical priority of a haptic interface*."

Our most pervasive evidence for the autographic individualisation of bit-level digital inscription comes not form sight, but from the instrumental touch of the mechanism"

* Nathan Brown, Needle on the Real: Technoscience and Poetry at the Limits of Fabrication. (in Nanoculture, ed. Katherine Hayles)

  Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms : New Media and the forensic Imagination

Hugh J. Silverman, Malabou, Plasticity, and the Sculpturing of the Self

  " [...] to argue for the difference between flexibility - which is capitulation - and plasticity. Plasticity, situated between two extremes - 'the taking on of form' and 'the annihilation of form' - enables a double movement, an explosive self-creation"

-- Wendy Huy Kyong Chun, Order from Order, or Life According to Software

  "Malabou speaks of the brain’s plasticity, a term which stands between flexibility and rigidity, suppleness and solidity, fixedness and transformability, identity and modifiability, determination and freedom. Plasticity is thus not the mere suppleness of elasticity, for it has an element of rigidity and so is not complete elastic, not indefinitely (or even infinitely) modifiable.”

  "A position between determination (rigid, pre-figured, con-figured in advance) and freedom (supple and transformative)."

  "Plasticity, rethought philosophically, could be the name of this entre deux - between activity and passivity, ability to change and to be changed, shaping and being shaped, modifying and being modified, historicizing and being historicized."

  "The capacity for self re-form. Is this not the best possible definition of plasticity: the relation that an individual entertains with what, on the one hand, attaches him originally to himself, to his proper form, and with what, on the other hand, allows him to launch himself into the void of all identity, to abandon all rigid and fixed determination?”

-- Hugh J. Silverman, Malabou, Plasticity, and the Sculpting of the self

  I've been thinking about Textiles and trying to build a theoretical framework that would allow me to define the field  from a new perspective, informed by Social Science, Human Computer Interaction and Design Theory.

The term plasticity borrowed from Malabou clarifies a particular point. Textiles are "entre deux": plastic material, nor completely rigid nor completely elastic, both fixed and transformable, both determinate and free.

They animate when coming in contact with other bodies, they live and  perform when "intra-acting" with other forms of matter.

They both shape and are shaped by bodies.

For this reason their nature as design products cannot sign up to theories of Design thinking, since their relationship with humans is much more intimate, haptics driven, and the nature of the material infinitely more malleable than other types of products ( I am referring here to Product and Industrial Design). The type of skills required to work with Textiles highly differ from the set of skills needed to construct chairs, tables and electronic devices. They express different qualities and require different intra-actions.

Futhermore, due to this plastic nature, Textiles are also hard to grasp as an independent, strongly characterised field. Traditionally, they are easily attributed to Fashion or Interior Design; more recently to wearable technologies, or regenerative medicine.

I recently started to read more on feminist theory, and became particularly interested in Karen Barad's work. Her language is helping me to redefine some terms that started to give me "itchiness".

  Interaction is one of these terms. I started to question whether most of interactive art is actually reactive. How many times have we entered a gallery and, by randomly walking in the space, activated some sort of digital visual effect? How many times has our touch become a synthetic sound? How many times have we frantically waived at a screen, with gestures that are not natural in any sort of human enocunter?

These experiences are, to me, artificially created by transforming the input coming from one or more senses (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) in a synthetic output stimulating other senses.

In my opinion this approach is incoherent, because it creates a chain of reactions between different sensory experiences rather than a truly continuous feedback. 

This is due, in my opinion, to our largely predominating visual culture.

'All that once was directly lived has become mere representation'

-- Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle

  We are highly disembodied and our interactions reflect this imbalance, privileging spectacular visual effects rather than more intimate engagement.

  Barad's intra-actions seem to embrace what -in my opinion- has been lacking in most of new media and visual artworks.Intra-actions account for the tangible sensorial relationship between bodies (human and non human),the reaffirming of the bodily against the representational.

'What is important of intra-actions is that marks are left on the body' 

-- Karen Barad (2003)

  Adopting Lygia Clark's definition of her own sculptural work, artworks/objects/bodies hold a 'relational'nature, as their tangible nature draws us to them, to experience rather than to look at*.

Li Hongbo

In my opinion this artwork embodies the perfect use of traditional craft as material process with strong embedded meaning. The artist lets the potential properties of the material express themselves: only paper could have achieved such a result through this traditional chinese honeycomb technique.

Through this process the body looses its "natural" structure, shape and boundaries, extending in space, becoming other [than human] body.

  Sometimes I forget how beautiful is my mother tongue language, and how much history is hidden behind words that fell in disuse. On a day like today, when I am trying to find a single word that can encompass many nuances of meaning at once, I feel the need to seek for my roots: my Italian and Latin roots.

On a day like today, I miss my Latin to Italian vocabulary, so hated, underestimated and mauled at the times of high school. 

  This blog is a diary of a process, the digital witness of the physical and mental effort in shaping, through theoretical research and discursive practice, what materials mean to me.

As a process, it cannot be grammatically described by a static object/name. It can only be described by a dynamic/potential/in becoming/verb.

This blog will discuss matter and materials (from the Latin word mātĕrĭa n.), tools and fabrication processes, craft and design, culture and nature, technology and tradition, bodies and ecology.

More substantially, this blog will explore matter "as a doing"; craft and design as "discursive and diffractive practices", products of "multiple apparatuses of bodily production" (Barad 2003). Artifacts will be considered performative acts, emerging from the ongoing reconfiguring of agential intra-actions between bodies.Bodies will be defined with no boundaries, and will not discriminate between human and non humans.Tools (apparatuses)of creation will be treated as bodies themselves, as dynamic agents in the ecology of materials.

  Materiare (Italian verb) seems to embrace all these nuances of mātĕrĭa as active and performative agent, as matterial and meaning in the process of shaping, as product of a local, temporary agential cut in the continuus reconfiguring of matter.

  Materiare v tr: dare consistenza materiale e concretezza a qualche cosa. In senso figurato, assumere un determinato contenuto.

"Credeva trovarsi … in mezzo a forme che le appartenessero come se ella le avesse materiate della sua propria sostanza"

 -- Gabriele d'Annunzio

"La sua filosofia si materiò di paura, di ignoranza e di obbedienza.”

 -- Giovanni Papini