Table Of Content

Being Material Library of Congress Cataloging-in- © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Publication Data Technology Names: Being Material (2017 : Cambridge, All rights reserved. No part of this book Mass.) | Boucher, Marie-Pier, editor. | may be reproduced in any form by any Helmreich, Stefan, editor. | Kinney, Leila electronic or mechanical means (including W., editor. | Tibbits, Skylar, editor. | Uchill, photocopying, recording, or information Rebecca, editor. | Ziporyn, Evan, editor. | storage and retrieval) without permission in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. writing from the publisher. Center for Art, Science & Technology. This book was set in Monument Grotesk Title: Being material / edited by Marie- by DINAMO. Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Printed and bound in South Korea. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, and Evan Ziporyn. Volume Editors: Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Press, [2019] | Based on April 21-22, 2017 Uchill, Evan Ziporyn symposium entitled Being Material, pre- sented by The MIT Center for Art, Science Developmental Editor: & Technology. | Includes bibliographical Patsy Baudoin references and index. MIT Press Editor: Identifiers: LCCN 2019006324 | ISBN Roger Conover 9780262043281 (hardcover : alk. paper) Book & Website Design: Subjects: LCSH: Commercial prod- E Roon Kang, Minkyoung Kim ucts--Computer-aided design--Con- / Math Practice gresses. | Art objects--Computer aided design--Congresses. | Digital media--Psy- Physical Interaction Design: chological aspects--Congresses. | Senses Marcelo Coelho, Lukas Debiasi, and sensation--Philosophy--Congresses. E Roon Kang, Skylar Tibbits | Materialism--Congresses. | Material culture--Congresses. Indexer: Tobiah Waldron Classification: LCC TS171.A1 B45 2017 | DDC 306.4/6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006324 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Being Material Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, and Evan Ziporyn The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Contents 7 Preface and Acknowledgments 11 Being Material, an Introduction By Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, and Evan Ziporyn PROGRAMMABLE 14 Introduction Skylar Tibbits 16 Ferrite Cores, Whirlwind Computer Project: “The Materials of Memory” Deborah G. Douglas 20 Code as Material Ben Fry and Casey Reas 26 Frugal Science in the Age of Curiosity Manu Prakash, Jim Cybulski, Rebecca Konte, Team Foldscope and the global Foldscope community 30 Machine Agency Nadya Peek 34 Another Matter: Notes on Worldeating Benjamin H. Bratton 43 Interdigitation Tom Özden-Schilling WEARABLE 46 Introduction Leila W. Kinney 50 The Materials of Immateriality: Hussein Chalayan’s Fashion Michelle Tolini Finamore 62 Yarn-dez-vous, 2014 Azra Akšamija 66 Crafting Material, Being Material M. Amah Edoh 70 HAPIfork and the Haptic Turn in Wearable Technology Natasha D. Schüll 76 The Algorithms Have Eyes Hyphen-Labs Ashley Baccus-Clark, Ece Tankal, Nitzan Bartov, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge 80 Beyond Wearables: The Future AUDIBLE Is Fleshy Christina Agapakis and 172 Introduction Lucy McRae Evan Ziporyn 95 Interweaving 174 On “Land” Tom Özden-Schilling Evan Ziporyn in conversation with Dewa Alit LIVABLE 176 Air Maya Beiser 98 Introduction Rebecca Uchill and 178 Magnetic Resonances Stefan Helmreich Arnold Dreyblatt 102 Microuniverse 180 Born-Digital Musical Instruments Tal Danino Victor Gama 108 Being Material Beings 184 Hey Exit: Every Recording of Claire Pentecost Gymnopédie 1 Brendan Landis 112 That Touch of Money Bill Maurer 186 Vessels: Being as Material Grace Leslie 120 Standing Rock: Selma Moment for the Environmental Justice 188 Musical Trojan Horse: Movement Uncontrollable Sounds Winona LaDuke, illustrated Paweł Romańczuk by Sarah LittleRedfeather 190 Gymnopédie Z 127 Interleaving (Erik Satie, arr. Ziporyn) Tom Özden-Schilling Evan Ziporyn INVISIBLE 193 Outroduction 130 Introduction Marie-Pier Boucher Stefan Helmreich and Rebecca Uchill 197 Biographies 134 Ways of Absence: or, 200 Index The Unbearable Heft of Being Materialized Sandy Alexandre 140 Invisible Images Lisa Parks in conversation with Trevor Paglen 144 Mediating Animal-Infrastructure Relations Lisa Parks 154 Persistent Ephemeral Pollutants Nicholas Shapiro 162 To See or Not to See? Dilemmas in Imaging and Intelligence George Barbastathis 169 Interstitial Tom Özden-Schilling Lisa Parks in conversation with Trevor Paglen during the 2017 "Being Material" Symposium Invisible session. Photo credit: L. Barry Hetherington. Preface and Acknowledgments Leila W. Kinney Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and of CAST Developing Being Material and the symposium that instigated it addressed cognitive science and neurosciences, to drill down into has been an immensely interesting and valuable process in and of areas of ongoing concern and future possibilities. itself. The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) exists The 2017 symposium “Being Material” emerged from through collaboration, and faculty director Evan Ziporyn and I are a two-year-long conversation. As we began to explore the fortunate to have outstanding colleagues who work with us to unprecedented ability to program materials, we thought about implement the Center’s mission of fostering creative, intellectual, new approaches to materialism in the humanities, the emergence and practical exchanges among the arts, humanities, sciences, of wearable computing in the 1990s, and recent developments and all kinds of technological innovation at MIT and beyond; we in biotechnology that allow researchers to design with the believe that they are mutually informing modes of exploration, units of life. These developments have significantly altered the discovery, and knowledge formation that must be constantly properties of materiality and human capacities to see, touch, brought into dialogue and debate. and feel the physical world. In this way, “Seeing, Sounding, The équipe for this project brings considerable experience Sensing,” which explored visual, aural, and sensorimotor faculties, to the task. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich helmed CAST’s informed and opened a path toward “Being Material,” which inaugural symposium in 2014, “Seeing, Sounding, Sensing,” expanded the sensate to include object as well as subject. By organized under the leadership of art historian Caroline Jones, and then, it hardly seemed radical to bring artists, designers, and contributed to the distinctive book that expanded the conference’s musicians into the middle of a conversation with programmers, themes: Experience: Culture, Cognition and the Common Sense. 1 scientists, and engineers, along with such a wide array of Art historian Rebecca Uchill, then a CAST postdoctoral fellow, humanists—anthropologists, art historians, media studies joined the editorial team for that book and was the curator of scholars, philosophers, and social scientists, among others. the ingeniously designed pages by artists who transformed the But how to avoid cacophony and overcome the barriers of volume into a “polyvocal, multifaceted object”; 2 this work set the specialized language, disciplinary protocols, and different areas tone and inspired the attempt by the editors of Being Material of expertise? Finding capacious and open-ended categories to once again rethink the typical format of the academic book. proved crucial; clustering the disparate contents around the suffix Architect Skylar Tibbits, founder and co-director of the Self- “-able/-ible” (borrowing all of its connotations of possibility) was a Assembly Lab in the International Design Center at MIT, taught a breakthrough; and recalling Nicholas Negroponte’s pathbreaking studio in Spring 2015 that explored the powerful new possibilities 1995 book Being Digital offered a touchstone that helped us to for design and fabrication created by programmable, responsive, assess the evolving relationship between the digital and material and self-organizing materials. He also organized “Active Matter” worlds. We were gratified that he agreed to offer opening remarks with CAST, a research summit on the topic, which convened for the symposium and that so many young researchers from the university and industry leaders to showcase unpublished work Media Lab were available to demo their projects at the event. underway in architecture, biology, design, engineering, media, Looking back, it is remarkable what a recursive and and robotics labs. The gathering and the subsequent book were iterative process the creation of this work has proven to be. We a preliminary mapping, a scouting expedition, designed as a are extremely grateful to Being Material’s contributors, who “field guide for future matter programmers.” 3 After that event, we have inspired us throughout the process and challenged us to knew that we wanted to revisit this emerging domain of materials make sense of such a disparate range of inputs. Tom Özden- science and engineering using the broad conceptual, critical, and Schilling’s willingness to join the fray was especially welcome, historical framework of CAST’s inaugural symposium, which had as his series of vignettes from the history of research at MIT, 7 which he encountered as a student, add a penetrating and 1. Caroline A. Jones, David Mather, and Rebecca experiential account of activity that can at times seem abstract Uchill, eds., Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). and incomprehensible. A very special recognition goes to Marie-Pier Boucher, our current CAST postdoctoral fellow, who 2. Ibid, 9. joined the team as contributor, editor, and logistical wrangler of 3. Skylar Tibbits, ed., Active Matter (Cambridge, MA: the contents. Patsy Baudoin, the developmental editor, made MIT Press, 2017), 11. invaluable suggestions and enhanced the final text immeasurably. We thank acquiring editor Roger Conover for his ongoing support 4. “MIT Reshapes Itself to Shape the Future,” MIT News, October 15, 2017, http://news.mit.edu/2018/ and generous advice; he has known when to encourage our mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarzman-college- adventurous inclinations regarding book design and when to of-computing-1015. restrain them. We are honored to have ours among the final books he will publish for the MIT Press during his long and distinguished career. Our designer E Roon Kang/Math Practice was in every way a full-fledged partner; as we experimented with various approaches to making this book both a physical and a digital expression of its contents, he guided us through a number of design options that were inventive and inspiring. We landed on the cover and web design that expresses this ambition, a joint creation of Kang, Tibbits, and electronics/interaction/product designer Marcelo Coelho. Material as well as intangible support are vital, and we would like to express our profound appreciation for the funding that made this project possible. Ron Kurtz ’54, ’59, SM ’60 funded both the “Being Material” symposium and the preceding “Active Matter” studio and research summit. The Council for the Arts at MIT underwrote the musical performances at the symposium, and the 2018 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT gala donors offered a generous subsidy for the book, which enabled us to realize its current form. An ongoing grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allows CAST to move forward, as does the support of Associate Provost with responsibility for the arts Philip S. Khoury, of Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Melissa Nobles, and of Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis, as well as of many other individual donors. When we began planning the “Being Material” symposium, none of us could anticipate its unfolding in the dramatic context of an urgent, nationwide call to support art, science, and the humanities. We therefore adjusted our schedule to enable participants to attend The March for Science on the Boston Common, in solidarity with those being held around the country, on April 22, 2017 and coinciding with the 47th annual celebration of Earth Day. We felt that “Being Visible” meant that we be with science and engineering, both in the sense of standing for the scientific method and its results as well as in recognition that all of us—scientists, artists, humanists, engineers—must stand with one another in support of reliable accounts of the material world, accounts crafted in cross-disciplinary solidarity, dialogue, and, as demanded, debate. And then, as we were finalizing the manuscript for this book, we learned that MIT was planning to make a huge investment in the future of computing and artificial intelligence. The new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing was announced in October 2018, in order to “bring the power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT” and, equally important in our view, “[allow] the future of computing and AI to be shaped by insights from all other disciplines.” 4 We hope that this coincident and fortuitously timed contribution to the ongoing discussion will prove beneficial and provocative. 8 Christina Agapakis in conversation with Lucy McCrae during the 2017 "Being Material" Symposium Wearable session. Photo credit: L. Barry Hetherington. 9