New Material Imaginaries

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New Material Imaginaries is a research platform to investigate, sketch, probe, and reflect individual new materials and matter for artistic (and design) projects. The research platform aims to build a wide and diverse portfolio of different materials, methods, and approaches. Our focus is directed on the individual material agencies their aesthetic potentials and their imaginary qualities. Influenced by an object-oriented ontology, agential realism, and a new understanding of the thing-world we want to think of our investigations as a dialog with matter - Accepting the individual properties and agencies of matter rather than forcing our directed expectations on them. We will dive deep into material research and technology accompanied by the theoretical, fictional and artistic guidance of Karen Barad, Andrei Tarkowski, Timothy Morton, Gaston Bachelard, Ursula K. le Guin, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Hans Haacke and more.

Artistic material research can be a time-intensive process, often frustrating and discouraging, but eventually resulting in a great fundament for forthcoming projects and a new dialog with things.

project phases

1. investigate/research/theory

   • sharing ideas and materials
   • hallucinating mechanisms, systems, and materials
   • speculating material processes and animations
   • reading, exploring, talking

2. experiment/probe/animate/workshops

   • touching, heating, casting, and stimulating materials
   • prototyping
   • methods
   • observing and analyzing
   • working together online or offline
   • workshops on specific topics, technologies, material, themes

3. documenting/archiving/sharing

   • documenting
   • filming + photographing
   • writing + sharing
   • exhibiting online or offline