What are futures made of? Collactive Materials, a joint SCIoI/MoA project

Abstract:
The BUA-funded experimental knowledge transfer project CollActive Materials, a collaboration between the Clusters of Excellence Science of Intelligence and Matters of Activity, encourages speculation on what the future has in store.

Which intelligent materials will pave our tomorrows? How can substances and materials change our world in an intelligent way? What will the world look like in the coming decades, and how can we turn our speculations into something tangible?  Finally, what kinds of relationships could we create with intelligent materials?

In this Thursday Morning Talk the audience will learn more about the CollActive Materials project and all the exciting interactions between the two clusters, and most importantly, they will get a chance to dive into the project themselves by taking part in a mini speculative design exercise.

SPEAKERS: 

Léa Perraudin is a media theorist and speculative material scholar and works as postdoctoral research associate at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material«. Léa currently works on a habilitation project, bringing forth a media theory of phase transitions by investigating the ties of material and metaphor in contemporary technocapitalist media environments through transience, dispersal, abundance and solidification.
Furthermore, Léa is the co-leader of the experimental laboratory »CollActive Materials«, a joint project of the Clusters of Excellence »Matters of Activity« and »Science of Intelligence«, that intends to gather multiple publics to jointly tackle possible material futures through the method of speculative design.

Martin Müller researches at the intersection of cultural history and theory, media studies, history of knowledge and science, and design theory. He is a postdoctoral research associate at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« – in the projects »Symbolic Material« and »Material Form Function«. Since 2015 he has been teaching at the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Martin is the co-leader of the experimental laboratory for knowledge exchange and speculative design »CollActive Materials«. Recently published: »The Will to Engineer. Synthetic Biology and the Escalation of Zoëpolitics«, in: P. Ribault (Ed.): Design, Gestaltung, Formatività, 2022

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.