What does it mean to be a “materially attuned” practitioner?

This paper reports on research in progress that explores the potential role the materiality of things plays as a tool for the critical understanding of the human relationship with man-­‐made objects. The paper argues that many designers habitually engage with production and consumption of meanings more through the materiality of things than words and symbols. It proposes a hypothesis that materiality is a key to understanding the context, knowledge and information the man-­made objects may “embody”. Through the case study of an exhibition, the paper examines the ways in which this embodiment may be facilitated. Referring to Heidegger’s notion of "thingness", it further explores the origin of the mediating, and the “engaging capacity” of objects. The paper draws on the more established analysis of the origin and the experience of the work of art, in its examination of the role that materiality plays in the production and consumption of meaning and in facilitating the experience through objects. While exploring the potential advantage of an anthropological approach to design, the paper suggests that an attunement to materiality and an active reflection on their observations enable the designers to have better insights into the workings of the human-­object relationship

What to make of the exception? A three-stage route to Schmitt’s institutionalism

This article traces a developmental trajectory in Schmitt’s conception of law that brings out alternative conceptualizations of the exception. “Transcendence”, “immanence” and “integration” signify three different models to represent the relation between what I call “nomic force” (the particular phenomenon of bringing order) and “materiality” (the matter-offactness of a particular entity or phenomenon). I contend that while Political Theology feeds off a transcendent model, where a sovereign decider makes materiality speakable, The Concept of the Political shows important differences as Schmitt’s argument implies a novel conception of materiality, much indebted to an immanent model. Finally, in the years in which Schmitt embraces an institutional theory of law, between 1928 and 1934, he elaborated on a theory of law pivoted on integration. The chief claim of this article is that Schmitt’s conceptualization of exception and decision is conditional upon the relation between nomic power and materiality that underlies his reflection in these three phases

Materiality of Time

Introduced by William Fowler, BFI National Archive and Natalie Brett Pro-Vice Chancellor London College of Communication with a screening of Raban's About Now MMX (2010), 28 minutes. William Raban reflects on his filmmaking over the last four and a half decades paying particular attention to About Now MMX (2010) which is almost certainly the last of his works to be shot on film. Acknowledged for his contributions to expanded cinema, his films about London and the River Thames, Raban discusses his practice since he was a painting student at Saint Martin’s School of Art (1967-1971)

Materiality and human cognition

In this paper, we examine the role of materiality in human cognition. We address issues such as the ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause change in brain functions, and the spans of time required for brain functions to reorganize when interacting with material forms. We then contrast thinking through materiality with thinking about it. We discuss these in terms of their evolutionary significance and history as attested by stone tools and writing, material forms whose interaction endowed our lineage with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains

Thinking Materially: Cognition as Extended and Enacted

Human cognition is extended and enacted. Drawing the boundaries of cognition to include the resources and attributes of the body and materiality allows an examination of how these components interact with the brain as a system, especially over cultural and evolutionary spans of time. Literacy and numeracy provide examples of multigenerational, incremental change in both psychological functioning and material forms. Though we think materiality, its central role in human cognition is often unappreciated, for reasons that include conceptual distribution over multiple material forms, the unconscious transparency of cognitive activity in general, and the different temporalities of metaplastic change in neurons and cultural forms

Materiality, Parthood, and Possibility

This paper offers an argument in favour of a Lewisian version of concretism that maintains both the principle of material inheritance (according to which, if all the parts of an object x are material, then x is material) and the materiality-modality link (that is, the principle that, for every x, if x is material, then x is possible)

Materiality and surface of the digital print

This paper discusses how the materiality and surface of the digital printmaking process may be seen as visually evidenced in the resulting printed imag

The meaning of materiality: reconsidering the materiality of Gramscian IR

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Digital Materiality of the Internet-of-Things

date-added: 2015-01-19 04:14:58 +0000 date-modified: 2015-04-01 06:51:10 +0000date-added: 2015-01-19 04:14:58 +0000 date-modified: 2015-04-01 06:51:10 +0000This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, CreativeWorks London Hub, grant AH/J005142/1, and the European Regional Development Fund, London Creative and Digital Fusion

Digital culture, materiality and Nineteenth-Century studies

The rhetoric of the virtual stubbornly clings to digital culture, even though our experience of working within it is of a resisting medium that only behaves in certain ways. The persistence of the virtual demands attention: why do we cling to such a description even while we quite willingly recognise the interpenetration of the world beyond the monitor and that represented on it? In education we’re encouraged to use Virtual Learning Environments, as if somehow these spaces are not as real as classrooms; we participate (or read about others participating) in virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, places that imitate the real world, providing access to fantasies that are underpinned by very real economics; and we exploit the World Wide Web, believing in its textual metaphors (pages, hypertext) while ignoring its presence as a medium. In my contribution to this forum I want to suggest that our insistence on the immateriality of digital culture enforces an ontological distinction that overdetermines the materiality of the world beyond the monitor while misrecognizing the new things that are displayed upon it. Rather than continue to use the virtual as a category, I would like to argue using an alternative term, the apparition.1 Unlike the virtual, which foregrounds its effect of the real with reality itself present only as absence, apparition has two meanings: the first is an immaterial appearance, a ghostly presence that, like the virtual, can signal an absent materiality; the second is simply the appearance of something, specifically the emergence of something into history. It is this latter meaning, I suggest, that permits materiality to re-enter digital discourse