Symbiotic Wood

»Symbiotic Wood« is an invitation to rethink our relationship with forests and materials, not as resources to control, but as ecosystems we share. In the face of climate change and collapsing monocultures, the project explores how beetle- and fungi-affected spruce wood can open up new ways of designing: less predictable, more situated, and radically collaborative. Through layered insights, from microscopic wood patterns to cultural history as well as artistic design prototyping, this visual article reveals how material science, design, and art can engage with nonhuman agencies and multispecies entanglements. We'd like to congratulate all contributing authors, inlcuding numerous Cluster members, on this newest .able publication: Pelin Asa, Judith Marlen Dobler, Peter Fratzl, Jessica Farmer, Johannes A. J. Huber, Florent Jouy, Nuri Kang, Rahel Kesselring, Anna Kubelík, Karin Krauthausen, Inka Mai, Sakiko Noda, Stefan Neuhäuser, Julia Rhein, Robert Stock, Kerstin Wolff, and Karola Dierichs.

Watch the full essay here: https://doi.org/10.69564/able.en.25027.symbioticwood

.able reinvents the publication form by making research accessible through images. Free of charge and distributed on numerous platforms, media, and devices, created at the initiative of La Chaire Arts & Sciences of the École Polytechnique, the École des Arts Décoratifs – PSL, and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso, the journal is published by Actar Publishers and supported by some thirty international academic partners. We are delighted with the unique, already published works, including Cluster member Emile de Visscher's visual essay Vascularizations, and look forward to many more contributions from MoA members this year!