Out of Hand. Active, Ambiguous and Unsteady Matters

Claudia Mareis, Co-Director of Matters of Activity

José D. Cojal González (Physics, Matters of Activity)

Practicing with Light: Operational

Jussi Parikka (Digital Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University)

This is the first part of our joint talk with Abelardo Gil-Fournier where we investigate »practicing« with images that practice with matter and its transformations. This first part addresses »operational images« as they pertain to technical images and instruments of sensing and imaging, but also the multiscalar questions that the concept implies. It teases out points about light that does not end up in »seeing« in the restricted human sense.

Jussi Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist whose work focuses on environmental media, the circulation of environmental data, and the material infrastructures of technological culture. Drawing on media archaeology and the environmental humanities, he investigates how technological systems mediate ecological processes and shape our cultural understanding of planetary change. He is a Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Practicing with Light: Experimental

Abelardo Gil-Fournier (Art and Physics, BBVA Foundation Scholar)

This is the second part of our joint talk with Jussi Parikka, where we investigate »practicing« with images that practice with matter and its transformations. This second part will address a series of examples of experimental setups involving light as an active agent in relation to its effects on matter and image formation. Emphasis will be placed on the environing dimension of this material culture and how it relates to the ubiquity of everyday optical and non-optical monitoring systems.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher whose work explores the visual cultures of environmental transformation, technological vision, and the politics of landscape. He investigates how planetary processes are mediated through images, data, and machines, working across film, photography, and critical theory. Originally trained in Physics, he holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art (UK) under the supervision of Jussi Parikka.

Abelardo and Jussi frequently collaborate on projects at the intersection of art, media archaeology, and environmental aesthetics. Their film LUMI, featured in this event, offers a speculative vision of climate restoration through synthetic intelligence and landscape datasets.

Light-Driven Proteins Operate as Flexible Nanomachines

Joachim Heberle (Experimental Molecular Biophysics, Freie Universität Berlin)

Light is sensed in living systems through chromophoric proteins. In both animal vision and microbial photoreception, a particular group of these proteins, called rhodopsins, serve as the primary light sensors, converting absorbed photons into structural changes. In animals, including humans, this process initiates signaling cascades that enable vision, whereas in microbes, rhodopsins function as ion pumps or channels that directly harness light to move ions across cell membranes. In my talk, I will illustrate how these versatile nanomachines transform after absorbing light, as revealed by biophysical techniques spanning the full range of chemical time and length scales.

Joachim Heberle is a biophysicist whose research focuses on the structure and function of membrane proteins and the methodologies used to investigate them. Combining experimental and theoretical approaches, he explores the dynamics of biological membranes at multiple scales. Originally trained in Chemistry, he works at the interface of physics, biology, and technology to understand the fundamental processes of life.

Discussion

Maja Avnat (Design, Cultural Theory and History, weißensee school of art and design berlin)

Bastian Beyer (Architecture and Design, Matters of Activity)

Planetary Expressionism: Parable of a Tree

Hélène Frichot (Architecture and Philosophy, Melbourne School of Design)

Matters have gotten out of hand manufacturing the polycrisis we find ourselves confounded by today, with no clear way out through the anthropogenic weeds. Responding to material urgencies, I want to think with planetary expressionism and vegetal life alongside the imperatives of worldly repair and creative maintenance. We have not spent enough time mulching, maintaining, and mending our worlds, instead we have been preoccupied with smoothing the passage along global infrastructural supply chains that connect sites of extraction and material processing to design and manufacture, then installation and afterlife. Matter, or rather, extracted and harvested materials pass through a great many industrially, socio-technically augmented hands on the way to becoming waste and destruction and the diminution of life worlds, human and non-human. The destruction of environment-worlds and devastation of multi-species communities all too often nurture the rarefied gardens of the privileged, as I will show in my parable of a tree where I draw on Salomé Jashi’s remarkable documentary Taming the Garden.

Reflections on Metastable Space: Precarious, Resilient, Open

Philip Beesley (Architecture, Living Architecture Systems Group, University of Waterloo)

This talk will outline a conceptual approach to current architecture offering precarious instruments that can indicate possible emerging realities. A tough and resilient optimism can be expressed within new kinds of form-language that are delicate, and open. What is coming in our future? How can we speak of the future when the world seems almost unspeakably insecure?
It is tempting to respond by building closed walls around our homes and closed shells around each of our individual worlds. Yet new science tells me that life is always open, not closed. It tells us that life is continually arising and continually being created. My work is based on this new science.
The hovering, oscillating membranes that are gathering within this work speak of worlds arising in fertility. They invite us to be open, instead of closed. With these architectures, the boundaries of our own homes and cities and even our own bodies might resemble crystalline snowflakes and petaled flowers. We can be unapologetically fragile.

Discussion

Karin Krauthausen (Cultural History and Literature, Matters of Activity)
Robert Stock (Cultures of Knowledge and Dis/ability Studies, Matters of Activity)

Christian Stein (Computer Science and Literature, Matters of Activity)

Flash Talks
Rodrigo Martin Iglesias (Critical Design, Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Horst Bredekamp (Art History, Matters of Activity)
Carlos-Andres Palma (Physics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Anna Kubelik (Artistic Experimental Representation and Design, University of Applied Sciences in Konstanz)

Discussion

Summary of the workshop »Radical Interdisciplinarity«

Léa Perraudin (Environmental Media Studies, Matters of Activity)

Technologies of Purification: When Toxicity Gets Out of Hand

Thao Phan (Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Australian National University)

In 2017, Google launched Perspective API: an AI-powered tool designed to detect »toxic« comments online. »Toxicity online poses a serious challenge for platforms and publishers« they write, »online abuse and harassment silences important voices in conversation, forcing already marginalized people offline.« To counter this, the Perspective API tool used a machine learning model to identify abusive comments and give them a toxicity rating represented as a value between 0 and 1. The score could then be returned to commenters as feedback, assist moderators in their review processes, or to filter out “toxic” content for readers. In this presentation, I explore how the language of toxicity and purification has come to stand in for naming structures of domination and oppression, such as sexism, racism, ableism, and so on. I ask: What unsteady modes of classification are reified through these ambiguous processes of automated identification? What kind of labour does this rely on? And can we address toxicity without fetishising purity?

Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Lecturer in Sociology (STS) in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU). She has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research.

Matters of Hope: Empty Fields of Seeds

Xan Chacko (Science, Technology, and Society, Brown University)

Seed banking is a technoscientific enterprise that has come to represent the hope for human salvation through the capture of abundance (10,000 seeds per accession), while at the same time serving as a reminder of the failure of humanity’s stewardship of life on Earth as evidenced in the loss of biodiversity (40% of plant species at risk of extinction). This paper draws on the theories and practices that structure the identification, categorization, and organization of seeds and their meta-data in the bank. It matters what kinds of archival strategies are used to sort and store meta information about the plants. I probe the unsteady limits of data capture and ask how identity is determined and stabilized and for whom. I chart the material erasures that become the ‘empty fields’ of the seed bank database. These gaps of knowledge and history are what allow the narratives of biodiversity loss to persist.

Xan Chacko is the Assistant Teaching Professor and Interim Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University. She is co-editor of Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman & Littlefield 2022) and a special section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience on »Domestication of War« Vol. 9 No. 1 (2023). Xan is working on a book about the colonial roots of biodiversity conservation in seed banks.

Discussion

Michelle Christensen (Design, Diversity and New Commons, Berlin University of the Arts)

Directors of Matters of Activity