Being Material

Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill

"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...