Experimental Analysis of the Thermal Performance of Wood Fiber Insulating Panels

During the last decades, attention to energy and environmental problems has significantly grown, along with the development of international and national policies addressing sustainability issues. In the construction sector, one of the most widespread energy efficiency strategies consists of thermal insulation of buildings thanks to external insulating panels. Among these, wood fiber is an insulating material characterized by a natural, eco-sustainable and biodegradable structure, coming from the recycling of waste wood from sawmills. The present study aimed to characterize small test building insulated with wood fiber panels from the thermal point of view, comparing the results with those of an identical, non-insulated reference test building. The experimental campaign highlighted several advantages and an excellent thermal performance provided by the eco-sustainable solution of wood fiber insulating panels: Lower values of the thermal transmittance (-57%), thus ensuring greater stability of the internal air temperature and better values in terms of attenuation (-60% in summer and -74 % in winter) and phase shift (+2 h in summer and +2.28 h in winter) compared to those obtained from the reference building. The material is also equipped with an Environmental Performance Declaration (EPD) that certifies its environmental benefits

Ultra-infra: Becoming Skin

This demonstration showcases outcomes from a program of research that seeks to expand the practice of painting through the exploitation of new digital technologies. Through virtual reality and digital painting processes, this research interrogates the nature of materiality by considering the hidden realities of human skin. The demonstration is in the form of a VR-based artwork delivered on a Windows Mixed Reality headset

Cinematic and aesthetic cartographies of subjective mutation

This article exmaines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinciton between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the quesiton in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a cirtical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century

New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage

This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our exploration is the materialist notion of a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore the micropolitics of the research process, and then – along with a review of 30 recent empirical studies – to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry methodology and methods. We discuss the epistemological consequences of adopting a materialist ontology

Girls' Aesthetics of Existence in/With Hayao Miyazaki's Films

In this article, I analyze the processual aesthetic production of girl subjectivity in/with Hayao Miyazaki's films through a feminist materialist perspective informed by the writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, and Affrica Taylor. I elaborate on feminist materialist concepts such as those of relational ontology, aesthetics of existence, worldmaking, mythopoesis, queer kin, and gender/sexual difference. With these concepts, I philosophically and ethnographically inquire in/with girl spectators who are interested in the experimentation with new modalities of existence that do not limit to those of success and alienation, but allow for creative possibilities of rupture, recomposition, and transversalization of girl subjectivities

The quantified self: what counts in the neoliberal workplace

Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and wellbeing in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs, and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalized the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing, entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces

On the Usefulness of Modern Animism: Co-Creating Architecture with Soils as Ontopolitical Practice

In opposition to the general understanding of animism as an irrational religious set of beliefs, the—secular—modern animism embodied in this practice of built and grown architecture is operative. It conceives of places—ecosystems—as beings with agency that we garden with to nurture and express their resilience. It is a useful ontology for ecological practice; this architectural animism is ontopolitical; it co-creates a common world. At a recent symposium, a number of projects were presented as architectural soils and to give a voice to these earthly beings, the method was to write a letter from them to me. This first letter with the response in this article forms the beginning of an animistic correspondence. The medium places the reader in a pluriverse, in between the multiple voices of various “actants.” The text is isomorphic to the embodied dialogue of this earthy practice. It is useful both to nurture societal awareness—empathy and care—towards these fragmentary ecosystemic beings, and as research method to conceive them, and our relationship

From eviction to evicting: Rethinking the technologies, lives and power sustaining displacement

An unnamed shift has occurred in geographies of eviction. While past research focused on the causes and effects of eviction in political economy, state power, and cultural difference, emerging work emphasises the subjective experience and sustaining practices of eviction as it happens. This paper makes the case for this turn away from causes and outcomes of ‘eviction’, and towards ‘evicting’ as a set of material technologies and practices that sustain displacement, and explores the implications of such a shift. Research into lived durations of eviction, evicting technologies, and eviction enforcement agencies opens up new conceptual and political fields of intervention

The great ephemeral tattooed skin

The skin is always and already a series of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one’s subjectivity through one’s own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminism, particularly corporeal feminists, have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman’s body’. Thinking the tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin and possible configurations of skin and world which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity