Material Agency Research Articles

The limits of control: Technological agency, urban terrain, strategy and the state in the 2014 Gaza War

This article reassesses of the role of military technologies both in normative strategic thought and in the critical geopolitics literature by problematising their shared tendency towards representing the power of military technologies in a binary and sometimes hyperbolic way in relation to the complexity of terrain and the emergent intensity of war. In order to do so, it borrows theoretically from Object-Oriented-Ontology, using Harman's concept of “duomining” in dialogue with other understandings of material agency from assemblage theory and Actor-Network-Theory. This interstitial epistemology is applied to analyse the political implications for the State of Israel of its military's decisions on the use of weapons in urban warfare during the 2014 Gaza War. Through this framing, the paper argues that technological agency is ambivalent to the project of state stabilisation, and can act across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways unanticipated by political and strategic decisionmakers. It also demonstrates, counterintuitively, that technological objects can exercise agency as much by their absence as their presence in an event. These findings foreground the need for a more accurate accounting of what technological objects are, not just what they do, alongside a more nuanced consideration of the contingency of their power to shape politics in relation to the complex milieu of human and non-human factors that comprise geopolitical phenomena.

Waste's translations

ABSTRACTMumbai's dumping grounds, located on the city's estuarine edge, are sites where garbage and marsh are turned into salable land. This process of translating waste into land depends on keeping matter, beings, and landscapes separate and on limiting their interactions. Yet waste and the marsh interact and transform in ways that escape managerial discourse, revealing a haze of category and control errors that complicate knowledge, agency, and responsibility. While developers translate waste to land in relation to developmental goals, fishing communities, scientists, and activists translate it differently: scientists translate it in relation to chemical properties, interactions, and timelines; marine‐life activists draw attention to its coastal ecologies; and fisher communities look for productive possibilities on a polluted shore. These translations attend to the inseparability of waste substances from the coast and its futures. They articulate a politics that acknowledges waste's sociopolitics, material agency, temporalities, and multispecies ethics. [coast, waste, development, pollution, marine life, ecology, chemistry, Mumbai]

Climate justice in more-than-human worlds

ABSTRACT Theories of climate justice retain a persistent tension between transcorporeal entanglement and coherent individuality. The ontology of bodily separation required for accountability for polluters and reparation for the vulnerable enacts a worldview potentially inconsistent with the more-than-human relationality of climate change. Yet theories of material agency and posthuman becoming are criticised for offering limited guidance for political practice. Engaging with the bushfire smoke that blanketed eastern Australia throughout 2019/2020, I seek to revitalise climate justice by engaging with theories of more-than-human transcorporeality. To do so, I articulate an aspirational climate justice, where aspiration is understood as a yearning arising from inhibited breath. Aspirational climate justice considers the relationally composed human and non-human bodies that breathe, as well as the relationship – respiration – itself, as subjects, and offers a politics through which we might keep breathing together towards a more liveable world.

DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Electronics, Coin-Operated Relic Boxes and Techno-Animist Shrines

Abstract The author uses creative practice and DIY electronics as the vehicle for a practice-led inquiry into the similarities between techno-animism and material agency. Combining technology with aspects of magic and religion, techno-animism is an emerging concept in postmodern anthropology used to discuss the sentient agency of objects and materials within the context of modern technological societies. This combination of seemingly disparate fields of knowledge is the basis of a postdisciplinary research into creative practices, attitudes and ethos using a series of artifacts that visualize the ideas of techno-animism, made by the author over a period of 30 years.

Material Pacification: How a Conflict Over Paving Uganda’s Tourism Road Got Accidentally Resolved

ABSTRACT Starting from an Actor-network Theory (ANT) inspired relational perspective on object formation and material agency, this article analyses the controversies about plans to pave the Ruhija road through Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (Uganda). Based on interviews, ethnographic observations, and analysis of relevant documents, we examine the multiple ways in which the Ruhija road is enacted and objectified in conservation, tourism, and planning practices. We further show how these different objectifications of the Ruhija road not only led to enduring conflicts but also contributed to postponing the plans to pave the road. We argue that improving traction of the road pacified the conflicts. The partial solidification of the muddiest parts of the road unintentionally matched with the different “road realities” of the actors involved. Our analysis shows how the vibrancy of materiality is always relational, and can only be understood by taking into account the context of their objectification.

Material affordances in circular products and business model development: for a relational understanding of human and material agency

ABSTRACT This paper uses the notion of material affordances to show that a focus on how people engage with materials helps understanding how organizations transit toward sustainability. Material affordances refer to the enablements and constraints afforded by materials to someone engaging with an environment for a particular purpose. Based on a qualitative study of a company's efforts at becoming circular, we show that material affordances are evolutive as organizational members shift focus from the development of products to the establishment of a circular business model. We also show that affordances are distributed across the company's circular ecosystem. Between what they enable and prevent, they invite humans to a dynamic engagement with materials that decenters human agencies to incorporate material agency in such efforts. A key contribution of the notion of material affordances is to put the relationships of humans and materials at the core of a transition toward circularity and sustainability.

Thinking with costume and material: a critical approach to (new) costume ecologies

ABSTRACT This article intends to shift current discourse on material thinking and agency from thinking of and through materials to thinking with materials; we therefore argue that re-locating the affects and agency of costume materiality in the changing material environment at this current moment is essential. Responding to the global environmental crisis and based on the emergent philosophical concepts of extramaterialism and costume thinking, examined through the prism of ecosomatics, we propose a critical approach to think and (co)create in contemporary costume praxis informed by ecological sensibility. Through acknowledging that the material, the natural and the cultural are not separate but co-constitutive, our aim is to provoke new insights into more-than-human material agency. This is explored by addressing the relationship between living and non-living things and the systems created through the inter- and intra-actions between these elements via the medium of costume. By analysing the use of biobased materials as costume matter in two case study productions, the article positions costume design as a critical tool for new performance narratives and cultural landscapes to be considered and created. It pushes the boundaries of wider philosophical understandings and innovations in costume with the potential to influence broader, environmentally aware cultural and societal contexts.

A sense of absence: Resituating housing vacancy in post-crisis Athens

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the everyday making of housing vacancy in Athens and discusses the multiple housing struggles and cross-tenure dispossessions this process entails. The analysis draws on interview material collected during a six-month fieldwork, particularly on the narratives of inhabitants in a neighbourhood of the city experiencing increasing vacancy levels and being represented as ‘declining’ in the public debate. Through a relational reading of vacancy, the often unknowingly related actors involved and affected by this process, their practices and understandings, are analysed. The findings reveal the different, perceived or actualised processes, human and material agencies sustaining vacancy in place, showing how (unequally) affected actors, despite their geographical and social distance, shape this process through their interdependencies. The paper discusses some dichotomies dominating the conceptualization of vacancy, suggesting also that these seemingly inactive spaces are not natural outputs or abstract representations of the market, but spaces constituted through action, embroiled in social antagonisms and conflicts over power and agency.

What lies beneath? The material agency and politics of the underground in urban regeneration

Drawing on a growing literature on vertical and volumetric urbanism and a recent “subterranean turn” in geography, this paper explores the materiality and material agency of the underground and its entwinement with aboveground planning and development. The paper focuses on urban regeneration and planning in Newcastle, Australia: a city where underground coal mining has been deeply entwined in the establishment, economic prosperity, and geographical spread of the city, leaving the city undermined by multiple mine shafts (voids). Our analysis reveals the interconnectedness of vertical and horizontal capacities of the city and how this has shaped recent urban regeneration initiatives. Positioning the underground as a vital and agentic element of the wider urban assemblage and constitutive of the aboveground, we explore how its material presence (or, in this case, absence) is made visible through mapping techniques, and how its agency shapes the form, function and politics of urban development. Our analysis empirically traces the material agency of the underground at two scales. First, we examine how underground voids affect construction and financial viability at the building level. Second, we unpack how the presence of underground voids across the inner-city shapes precinct and city-scale regeneration initiatives, influencing the form and function of the city. The paper builds our understandings of volumetric urbanism and the subterranean, teasing out empirically the intertwinement of the aboveground and underground, and surfacing the material agency of the underground and its influence on the pathways and politics of aboveground urban development.

Fabricating future bodies: making digital sexualities research matter

PurposeThis paper critically examines the development and direction of the Fabricating Future Bodies (FFB) Workshop. Troubling notions of co-production as enacting equality or empowering participants, it draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts to understand it as an eventful process that occurs in unpredictable and shifting affect-laden assemblages.Design/methodology/approachThe FFB Workshop formed part of the final phase of my Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded doctoral study, titled “Exploring young people's digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts-based methods”. With additional support from Wales' Doctoral Training Partnership, the workshop provided sixteen young people (aged 11–13 years) from one fieldwork school with the opportunity to work with two professional artists in order to creatively re-animate research findings on the digitally networked body. In a three-hour workshop, participants produced cut-up texts and life-size body fabrics that re-imagined what bodies might do, be and become in the future.FindingsThis paper finds that co-productive practices cannot flatten out the institutional and societal power dynamics operating within schools, highlighting how adult intervention was necessary to hold space for young people to participate. It also observes the agency of the art materials employed in the workshop in enabling young people to articulate what mattered to them about the digitally networked body. While the workshop was limited in its ability to renegotiate institutional and peer power dynamics, it produced rich data that indicated how carefully choreographed arts-based practices offer generative possibilities for digital sexualities research and education.Originality/valueBy employing speculative fiction, cut-up poetry and textiles to explore the digitally networked body, this paper outlines an innovative methodological-pedagogical approach to engaging with young people's digitally networked lives.

Plastic (in) Paradise: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

This contribution examines the magic-realist metaphor of the Matacão in Karen Tei Yamashita’s (1990) debut novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest as a trope that invites us to imagine, reflect on, and explore plastic’s cross-cultural meanings, aesthetic experiences, and materialist implications. I contend that through the Matacão, Yamashita engenders a narrative about, as well as an aesthetic experience of, plastic that is inherently ambivalent and paradoxical. While it provides societies with material wealth and sensual pleasures, it poses at the same time a profound threat to life – human and nonhuman. The main part of the article is divided into two major sections: in the first part, I read Yamashita’s story about the Matacão as historiographic metafiction that parodies the socio-cultural history of plastic and its utopian promises and failures. In the second part, I draw on Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity to explore the Matacão’s material agency, as well as the social mobility and economic connectivity of Yamashita’s human protagonists in their plastic environments. The theoretical perspective of Malabou’s concept of plasticity shifts the focus to the agentic forces of the waste material and allows us to read Yamashita’s Matacão as both a site and material that, notwithstanding its devastating impacts, also holds potentialities for resilience and repair, and even the possibility for an, at least temporary, utopia.

Media-as-things: The Intensified Materiality of Degenerated Images

This paper adopts an art-based research model to investigate how media objects, as entangled material agencies, can become co-creators with artists and condition the viewers' memory and imagination. My work Recycled Series among other artists’ work are the subjects of this analysis. All these works involve images that are degenerated with a copy machine. The degenerated images lose coherence and become forms of ruins that the copier builds. Drawing from theories of things (Brown; Harman; Shaviro), I examine these works as the examples of “media-as-things” to show when media is misused, the potential of media is revealed. I place these works in the context of “broken-tech art” (Boym) and “haptic visuality” (Marks). I argue that these images determine a different object-subject relationship for their audience and their “thingness,” which is intensified through degeneration effects, becomes a major factor in their aesthetic reception.

Experimenting Interpretation: Methods for Developing and Guiding a “Vibrant Visit”

ABSTRACT This article offers insights from an on-going research project titled, Experimenting Interpretation, which explores pedagogical approaches to guided visits that enable visitors to encounter and interpret multi-sensory contemporary art through attunement to embodied knowledge and affective responses. The case study discussed here was conducted at PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, located in Montreal, Quebec, during an exhibition by Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic. Our findings indicate that poetic strategies can be employed as prompts that provide a prismatic lens for engagement and lead to constellatory interpretations in the form of converging and diverging questions and comments. Additionally, we suggest that gallery educators who would like to develop and guide visits that are somatically and affectively attuned would benefit from developing methods that are informed by relational thinking and new materialist theories (i.e. material agency and vibrant dynamics of place).

The victorious battles of the lost war against aquatic invasive plants: “Fluid” categorisation and multiple forms of ordinary commitment

Focusing on invasive plant species management issues, we propose an empirically based contribution to one of the main challenges of contemporary geography theory, that of materiality. In keeping with the aim of analysing how practitioners on the ground engage with invasive aquatic plants in the littoral lakes of Aquitaine (south‐west France), we endorse a relational approach to categorisation, one that specifically emphasises categorisation as a process embedding, and fashioning, materiality and material agency. Nevertheless, we advocate a still overlooked critical attention to the most vibrant trends in new materialist geography, namely, the risk of minimising the separation issue. The results of our ethnographic inquiry show that the process of categorisation recognises, on the one hand, the indeterminacy of plants’ behaviour, mobility, and various other characteristics – i.e., a process pervaded with ideas of fluidity. Moreover, our results show that the process of categorisation comes with a large array of contextualised management objectives, imbued with the determination of people to keep some control over spreading phenomena – i.e., a process pervaded with ideas of creativity and responsibility. These results suggest that a reasonably sustained critical attention, firmly grounded in empirical analysis, can enable research to open up to novel opportunities for operational engagement with rapidly changing environments. We discuss how participatory territorial governance mechanisms should give way to ordinary modes of relating and separating, a condition for successful implementation of everyday contextualised struggles against invasive species, far from vitalist or eradication rhetoric.

Using a collaborative zine to co-produce knowledge about location-based virtual reality experiences

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on a designed research methodology to distil existing research findings from an esrc/ahrc funded japan/uk network on location-based virtual reality experiences for children in order to generate new knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThe structured co-production methodology was undertaken in three stages. These were: (1) a collaborative workshop which produced a series of collage narratives, (2) collaborating with a non-human entity in the form of a digital coded tool to reconfigure the workshop responses and mediate the hierarchy of roles, (3) the co-production of a zine as a collaborative reflection method, which shared via postal service enabled a dialogue and exchange of round Robin interventions by the network members.FindingsThe analysis of the data collected in this study highlighted five themes that could be used by other researchers on a wide range of projects. These were: (1) knowing through making, (2) the importance of process, (3) beyond linear representations, (4) agency of physical materials and (5) agency of digital code.Research limitations/implicationsThe context of the study being undertaken during the first phase of the global pandemic, revealed insight into a method of co-production that was undertaken under emergency remote working conditions. The knowledge generated from this can be applied to other research contexts such as working with researchers or participants across global borders without the need to travel.Originality/valueThe research provides an innovative rethinking of co-production methods in order to generate new knowledge from multidisciplinary and multimodal research.

Conflicting and entangled human–nature relationships: A discursive‐material analysis of the documentary film Kiruna ‐ A Brand New World

AbstractKiruna ‐ A Brand New World(2019) is a documentary film directed by Greta Stocklassa, and produced by the Czech company Analog Vision. It analyses the move of (part of) Kiruna, a north‐Swedish mining city, which is threatened by destruction because of the operations of the state‐owned ore mining company, Luossavaara‐Kiirunavaara (LKAB). The film focusses on the lives of a number of inhabitants, including Timo, a local activist opposing the move, the teenage Sami Maja and Abdalrahman, a teenage refugee from Yemen.Our discursive‐material analysis (see Carpentier, 2017) focusses on how the film represents and intervenes in a discursive‐material struggle over the identity of three actors—the soil, the city and the mine—and their interconnections.The article starts with a theoretical discussion on discourse theory, enriched by new materialist approaches, to develop a theoretical framework that does justice to the discursive‐material entanglement.This framework is then used to identify a hegemonic cluster of discourses that give meaning to nature, consisting of anthropocentrism, dualism and prometheanism, and a counterhegemonic cluster, consisting of ecocentrism, integrationism and survivalism.The analysis shows that the documentary film shows the workings of the hegemonic cluster (centred around the topoi of progress and TINA), but also visualizes the gaps in, and limits of, this hegemonic cluster. Second, the film also gently highlights the discursive‐material conflict by giving voice to those who identify with the counterhegemonic discourses, and by representing the soil as having material agency, resisting its exploitation.A freePlain Language Summarycan be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Moving beyond the mirror: relational and performative meaning making in human\u2013robot communication

Current research in human–robot interaction often focuses on rendering communication between humans and robots more ‘natural’ by designing machines that appear and behave humanlike. Communication, in this human-centric approach, is often understood as a process of successfully transmitting information in the form of predefined messages and gestures. This article introduces an alternative arts-led, movement-centric approach, which embraces the differences of machinelike robotic artefacts and, instead, investigates how meaning is dynamically enacted in the encounter of humans and machines. Our design approach revolves around a novel embodied mapping methodology, which serves to bridge between human–machine asymmetries and socioculturally situate abstract robotic artefacts. Building on concepts from performativity, material agency, enactive sense-making and kinaesthetic empathy, our Machine Movement Lab project opens up a performative-relational model of human–machine communication, where meaning is generated through relational dynamics in the interaction itself.

Start Here

This article attempts to lend an ear to the compact audio cassette: a key feature of the domestic soundscape from its introduction in the early 1960s until its gradual obsolescence in the first decades of the 21st century. The piece aims to provide a new perspective on the cassette by way of a discussion of the Start Here tapes project: a series of seven artist audio cassette tapes released in 2016 and 2017. Applying a practice-based methodology to a study of objects that are intimate and well known, the project seeks to foreground the material agency of the cassette by making work that reflexively references material objecthood. The article examines what is at stake politically in this focus on materiality, and considers the way creative forms of reflexivity might have renewed ethical and political value within a ecopolitical or biopolitical context.

Composing Technique, Performing Technique

Technique as the entanglement of composition and performance as an epistemic object (Knorr Cetina) emergent from contingent materiality. Two pieces by Scott McLaughlin—respectively for Zubin Kanga (piano) and Mira Benjamin (violin)—are discussed as case studies of strategies for entwining the specific embodied techniques of instrumental performance with the material agency (Pickering) of the instrument as a 'material indeterminacy' in which knowledge inheres through practice (Spatz). This exposition situates the artistic research as a novel conceptualisation of 'technique' that treats composition and performance not as separate domains but as an Ingoldian 'meshwork' where virtual structures in the performance technique are amplified through processes of listening and through compositional structures into open-ended local feedback loops.

What time is this coast? Temporal encounters in the Arctic

While the discipline of landscape architecture is regarded as engaging closely with time, the temporal span that it works within is, more often than not, very narrow. In this article, I draw on three concepts of time that allow experiential engagement with the material and immaterial agencies of an Arctic coastal site to emerge. Conceptually, I refer to descriptive insights from literary figures on time and coastal landscapes along with landscape theorists. As an initial site reading, I apply, explore and review these concepts via a time-centred analysis of a frozen shore. In-situ techniques using photography and fieldnote taking are used to identify different temporalities. I proceed to modelmaking in a studio setting to further explore the processes, states and conditions that were observed on site. I propose that the application of these time concepts provides a framework for landscape architects to articulate observations and understanding of temporal encounters within and beyond this Arctic coast.