Being Material

Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age.

In his oracular 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that social relations, media, and commerce would move from the realm of "atoms to bits"--that human affairs would be increasingly untethered from the material world. And yet in 2019, an age dominated by the digital, we have not quite left the material world behind. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints. Digital technologies themselves, they remind us, are material things--constituted by atoms of gold, silver, silicon, copper, tin, tungsten, and more.

The contributors explore five modes of being material: programmable, wearable, livable, invisible, and audible. Their contributions take the form of reports, manifestos, philosophical essays, and artist portfolios, among other configurations. The book's cover merges the possibilities of paper with those of the digital, featuring a bookmark-like card that, when "seen" by a smartphone, generates graphic arrangements that unlock films, music, and other dynamic content on the book's website. At once artist's book, digitally activated object, and collection of scholarship, this book both demonstrates and chronicles the many ways of being material.

Contributors
Christina Agapakis, Azra Aksamija, Sandy Alexandre, Dewa Alit, George Barbastathis, Maya Beiser, Marie-Pier Boucher, Benjamin H. Bratton, Hussein Chalayan, Jim Cybulski, Tal Danino, Deborah G. Douglas, Arnold Dreyblatt, M. Amah Edoh, Michelle Tolini Finamore, Team Foldscope and Global Foldscope community, Ben Fry, Victor Gama, Stefan Helmreich, Hyphen-Labs, Leila Kinney, Rebecca Konte, Winona LaDuke, Brendan Landis, Grace Leslie, Bill Maurer, Lucy McRae, Tom Özden-Schilling, Trevor Paglen, Lisa Parks, Nadya Peek, Claire Pentecost, Manu Prakash, Casey Reas, Pawel Romańczuk, Natasha D. Schüll, Nick Shapiro, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, Evan Ziporyn
Book Design: E Roon Kang
Electronics, interactions, and product designer: Marcelo Coelho

"In 1995, MIT's Nicholas Negroponte predicted that "being digital" would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy materiality persists and even reasserts itself. At the intersection of art, science and technology, "Being Material" revisits Negroponte's prediction by exploring new and unexpected convergences between the digital and the material in the practices of artists, designers, engineers and scientists who work with programmable matter, self-assembling structures, 3D/4D printing, wearable technologies and bio-inspired design. This book will radically intervene into the understanding of how material dynamics limit, expand, transform, and/or vivify our biological, social and political lives. "Being Material" will revisit the history of material science (particularly at MIT), contribute to "new materialism" in critical theory, and place both projects in dialogue with kindred and contrasting philosophy, art practice and critique. The editors and contributors refine and expand on such cross-field investigations by developing a contrast among five different material genealogical lineages: programmable, wearable, livable, invisible, and audible"--
Marie-Pier Boucher is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto and former Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MIT.