Being Material

209 Pages·2019·15.842 MB·English

by  Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, Evan Ziporyn

Being Material
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of
Publication Data Technology
Names: Being Material (2017 : Cambridge, All rights reserved. No part of this book
Mass.) | Boucher, Marie-Pier, editor. | may be reproduced in any form by any
Helmreich, Stefan, editor. | Kinney, Leila electronic or mechanical means (including
W., editor. | Tibbits, Skylar, editor. | Uchill, photocopying, recording, or information
Rebecca, editor. | Ziporyn, Evan, editor. | storage and retrieval) without permission in
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. writing from the publisher.
Center for Art, Science & Technology.
This book was set in Monument Grotesk
Title: Being material / edited by Marie- by DINAMO.
Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Printed and bound in South Korea.
Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill,
and Evan Ziporyn. Volume Editors:
Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich,
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca
Press, [2019] | Based on April 21-22, 2017 Uchill, Evan Ziporyn
symposium entitled Being Material, pre-
sented by The MIT Center for Art, Science Developmental Editor:
& Technology. | Includes bibliographical Patsy Baudoin
references and index.
MIT Press Editor:
Identifiers: LCCN 2019006324 | ISBN Roger Conover
9780262043281 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Book & Website Design:
Subjects: LCSH: Commercial prod- E Roon Kang, Minkyoung Kim
ucts--Computer-aided design--Con- / Math Practice
gresses. | Art objects--Computer aided
design--Congresses. | Digital media--Psy- Physical Interaction Design:
chological aspects--Congresses. | Senses Marcelo Coelho, Lukas Debiasi,
and sensation--Philosophy--Congresses. E Roon Kang, Skylar Tibbits
| Materialism--Congresses. | Material
culture--Congresses. Indexer:
Tobiah Waldron
Classification: LCC TS171.A1 B45 2017 |
DDC 306.4/6--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006324
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Edited by Marie-Pier Boucher,
Being Material
Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney,
Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill,
and Evan Ziporyn
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Contents 7 Preface and Acknowledgments
11 Being Material, an Introduction
By Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan
Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney,
Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill,
and Evan Ziporyn
PROGRAMMABLE
14 Introduction
Skylar Tibbits
16 Ferrite Cores, Whirlwind Computer
Project: “The Materials of Memory”
Deborah G. Douglas
20 Code as Material
Ben Fry and Casey Reas
26 Frugal Science in the Age of
Curiosity
Manu Prakash, Jim Cybulski,
Rebecca Konte, Team Foldscope
and the global Foldscope
community
30 Machine Agency
Nadya Peek
34 Another Matter: Notes on
Worldeating
Benjamin H. Bratton
43 Interdigitation
Tom Özden-Schilling
WEARABLE
46 Introduction
Leila W. Kinney
50 The Materials of Immateriality:
Hussein Chalayan’s Fashion
Michelle Tolini Finamore
62 Yarn-dez-vous, 2014
Azra Akšamija
66 Crafting Material, Being Material
M. Amah Edoh
70 HAPIfork and the Haptic Turn in
Wearable Technology
Natasha D. Schüll
76 The Algorithms Have Eyes
Hyphen-Labs
Ashley Baccus-Clark,
Ece Tankal, Nitzan Bartov,
Carmen Aguilar y Wedge
80 Beyond Wearables: The Future AUDIBLE
Is Fleshy
Christina Agapakis and 172 Introduction
Lucy McRae Evan Ziporyn
95 Interweaving 174 On “Land”
Tom Özden-Schilling Evan Ziporyn in conversation with
Dewa Alit

LIVABLE 176 Air
Maya Beiser
98 Introduction
Rebecca Uchill and 178 Magnetic Resonances
Stefan Helmreich Arnold Dreyblatt

102 Microuniverse 180 Born-Digital Musical Instruments
Tal Danino Victor Gama
108 Being Material Beings 184 Hey Exit: Every Recording of
Claire Pentecost Gymnopédie 1
Brendan Landis
112 That Touch of Money
Bill Maurer 186 Vessels: Being as Material
Grace Leslie
120 Standing Rock: Selma Moment for
the Environmental Justice 188 Musical Trojan Horse:
Movement Uncontrollable Sounds
Winona LaDuke, illustrated Paweł Romańczuk
by Sarah LittleRedfeather
190 Gymnopédie Z
127 Interleaving (Erik Satie, arr. Ziporyn)
Tom Özden-Schilling Evan Ziporyn
INVISIBLE
193 Outroduction
130 Introduction Marie-Pier Boucher
Stefan Helmreich and
Rebecca Uchill 197 Biographies

134 Ways of Absence: or, 200 Index
The Unbearable Heft of Being
Materialized
Sandy Alexandre
140 Invisible Images
Lisa Parks in conversation with
Trevor Paglen
144 Mediating Animal-Infrastructure
Relations
Lisa Parks

154 Persistent Ephemeral Pollutants
Nicholas Shapiro
162 To See or Not to See? Dilemmas in
Imaging and Intelligence
George Barbastathis
169 Interstitial
Tom Özden-Schilling
Lisa Parks in conversation with Trevor Paglen during the 2017 "Being Material"
Symposium Invisible session. Photo credit: L. Barry Hetherington.
Preface and Acknowledgments
Leila W. Kinney
Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and of CAST
Developing Being Material and the symposium that instigated it addressed cognitive science and neurosciences, to drill down into
has been an immensely interesting and valuable process in and of areas of ongoing concern and future possibilities.
itself. The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) exists The 2017 symposium “Being Material” emerged from
through collaboration, and faculty director Evan Ziporyn and I are a two-year-long conversation. As we began to explore the
fortunate to have outstanding colleagues who work with us to unprecedented ability to program materials, we thought about
implement the Center’s mission of fostering creative, intellectual, new approaches to materialism in the humanities, the emergence
and practical exchanges among the arts, humanities, sciences, of wearable computing in the 1990s, and recent developments
and all kinds of technological innovation at MIT and beyond; we in biotechnology that allow researchers to design with the
believe that they are mutually informing modes of exploration, units of life. These developments have significantly altered the
discovery, and knowledge formation that must be constantly properties of materiality and human capacities to see, touch,
brought into dialogue and debate. and feel the physical world. In this way, “Seeing, Sounding,
The équipe for this project brings considerable experience Sensing,” which explored visual, aural, and sensorimotor faculties,
to the task. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich helmed CAST’s informed and opened a path toward “Being Material,” which
inaugural symposium in 2014, “Seeing, Sounding, Sensing,” expanded the sensate to include object as well as subject. By
organized under the leadership of art historian Caroline Jones, and then, it hardly seemed radical to bring artists, designers, and
contributed to the distinctive book that expanded the conference’s musicians into the middle of a conversation with programmers,
themes: Experience: Culture, Cognition and the Common Sense. 1 scientists, and engineers, along with such a wide array of
Art historian Rebecca Uchill, then a CAST postdoctoral fellow, humanists—anthropologists, art historians, media studies
joined the editorial team for that book and was the curator of scholars, philosophers, and social scientists, among others.
the ingeniously designed pages by artists who transformed the But how to avoid cacophony and overcome the barriers of
volume into a “polyvocal, multifaceted object”; 2 this work set the specialized language, disciplinary protocols, and different areas
tone and inspired the attempt by the editors of Being Material of expertise? Finding capacious and open-ended categories
to once again rethink the typical format of the academic book. proved crucial; clustering the disparate contents around the suffix
Architect Skylar Tibbits, founder and co-director of the Self- “-able/-ible” (borrowing all of its connotations of possibility) was a
Assembly Lab in the International Design Center at MIT, taught a breakthrough; and recalling Nicholas Negroponte’s pathbreaking
studio in Spring 2015 that explored the powerful new possibilities 1995 book Being Digital offered a touchstone that helped us to
for design and fabrication created by programmable, responsive, assess the evolving relationship between the digital and material
and self-organizing materials. He also organized “Active Matter” worlds. We were gratified that he agreed to offer opening remarks
with CAST, a research summit on the topic, which convened for the symposium and that so many young researchers from the
university and industry leaders to showcase unpublished work Media Lab were available to demo their projects at the event.
underway in architecture, biology, design, engineering, media, Looking back, it is remarkable what a recursive and
and robotics labs. The gathering and the subsequent book were iterative process the creation of this work has proven to be. We
a preliminary mapping, a scouting expedition, designed as a are extremely grateful to Being Material’s contributors, who
“field guide for future matter programmers.” 3 After that event, we have inspired us throughout the process and challenged us to
knew that we wanted to revisit this emerging domain of materials make sense of such a disparate range of inputs. Tom Özden-
science and engineering using the broad conceptual, critical, and Schilling’s willingness to join the fray was especially welcome,
historical framework of CAST’s inaugural symposium, which had as his series of vignettes from the history of research at MIT,
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which he encountered as a student, add a penetrating and 1. Caroline A. Jones, David Mather, and Rebecca
experiential account of activity that can at times seem abstract Uchill, eds., Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the
Common Sense (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
and incomprehensible. A very special recognition goes to
Marie-Pier Boucher, our current CAST postdoctoral fellow, who 2. Ibid, 9.
joined the team as contributor, editor, and logistical wrangler of
3. Skylar Tibbits, ed., Active Matter (Cambridge, MA:
the contents. Patsy Baudoin, the developmental editor, made
MIT Press, 2017), 11.
invaluable suggestions and enhanced the final text immeasurably.
We thank acquiring editor Roger Conover for his ongoing support 4. “MIT Reshapes Itself to Shape the Future,” MIT
News, October 15, 2017, http://news.mit.edu/2018/
and generous advice; he has known when to encourage our
mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarzman-college-
adventurous inclinations regarding book design and when to of-computing-1015.
restrain them. We are honored to have ours among the final
books he will publish for the MIT Press during his long and
distinguished career. Our designer E Roon Kang/Math Practice
was in every way a full-fledged partner; as we experimented with
various approaches to making this book both a physical and a
digital expression of its contents, he guided us through a number
of design options that were inventive and inspiring. We landed
on the cover and web design that expresses this ambition, a joint
creation of Kang, Tibbits, and electronics/interaction/product
designer Marcelo Coelho.
Material as well as intangible support are vital, and we
would like to express our profound appreciation for the funding
that made this project possible. Ron Kurtz ’54, ’59, SM ’60 funded
both the “Being Material” symposium and the preceding “Active
Matter” studio and research summit. The Council for the Arts at
MIT underwrote the musical performances at the symposium, and
the 2018 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT gala donors
offered a generous subsidy for the book, which enabled us to
realize its current form. An ongoing grant from The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation allows CAST to move forward, as does the
support of Associate Provost with responsibility for the arts Philip
S. Khoury, of Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences Melissa Nobles, and of Dean of the School
of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis, as well as of many
other individual donors.
When we began planning the “Being Material” symposium,
none of us could anticipate its unfolding in the dramatic context
of an urgent, nationwide call to support art, science, and the
humanities. We therefore adjusted our schedule to enable
participants to attend The March for Science on the Boston
Common, in solidarity with those being held around the country,
on April 22, 2017 and coinciding with the 47th annual celebration
of Earth Day. We felt that “Being Visible” meant that we be with
science and engineering, both in the sense of standing for the
scientific method and its results as well as in recognition that
all of us—scientists, artists, humanists, engineers—must stand
with one another in support of reliable accounts of the material
world, accounts crafted in cross-disciplinary solidarity, dialogue,
and, as demanded, debate. And then, as we were finalizing the
manuscript for this book, we learned that MIT was planning to
make a huge investment in the future of computing and artificial
intelligence. The new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of
Computing was announced in October 2018, in order to “bring the
power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT” and, equally
important in our view, “[allow] the future of computing and AI to
be shaped by insights from all other disciplines.” 4 We hope that
this coincident and fortuitously timed contribution to the ongoing
discussion will prove beneficial and provocative.
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Christina Agapakis in conversation with Lucy McCrae during the 2017 "Being
Material" Symposium Wearable session. Photo credit: L. Barry Hetherington.
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