Vital Materiality Research Articles

The (Un)Capture of Cappanawalla: Vital Materiality and Collaborative Artistic Emergence

This visual essay recounts a photography excursion that unexpectedly evolved into a transformative artistic encounter on Cappanawalla mountain in rural Ireland. What started as a systematic and detached approach of photographic framing and capture, took on a dramatic shift toward an exertion of unknown forces disrupting the human role as artist-photographer. Various nonhuman actants exerted their vital materiality as thing-power forces and collaborators in the creation of images along Cappanawalla. This experience provoked a radical reframing of artistic creation as a distributive agency of authorship among the vital materiality, in which the human is just one creative actant among many.

Foundling museums: exhibition design and the intersection of the vital materiality of foundling tokens and affective visitor experience

ABSTRACT Exhibition design matters. It determines the way objects are presented, the stories they tell and the way visitors experience them. Using theories of vital materiality and affect as entry points into understanding visitor experience better, this paper explores and compares our affective responses as visitor-researchers to the exhibition designs of foundling tokens at the Foundling Museum in London and the Museum of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. The paper asks how sensitive and thoughtful exhibition design impacts our experience. The paper concludes that different design choices create subtly different affective flows and with them, uniquely personalised opportunities for engagement.

Random build challenges and vital materialism in The Sims 4: Influences, innovations, and improvisations

• Random build challenges became a popular form of Sims YouTube content in april 2020 and often incorporate a computerized randomizer that dictates composing choices. • Such challenges provide opportunities to explore material agency using Bennett's (2010) vital materialism to better understand relationships of agency, especially when aleatory elements are introduced. • Vitality includes three key concepts: efficacy, trajectory, and fractal causality. • During random build challenges, the vitalities of player, game, and randomizer compete and collaborate to compose the resulting houses; often, these houses do not function for Sims. • Applying Bennett's concept of vitality to random build challenges shows how experienced players navigate material influences, improvise, and innovate. These considerations, and the use of computerized randomizers, could be extended to other composing contexts to prompt further critical thinking and create both risk and challenge. Random build challenges became a trend among Sims YouTubers in April 2020 following Vixella's The Sims 4 but every room is a different pack . This mode of gameplay incorporates computerized randomizers to make building decisions and represent the challenges and risks associated with aleatory invention ( Holmes, 2016 , Lauer, 2016 , Leadon, 2011 , Vitanza, 2000 ). However, these challenges and risks emerge partly from material agency. To explore this phenomenon, I herein use Jane Bennett's (2010) vital materiality as a theoretical lens to examine random build challenges. Central to Bennett's theory is vitality, an agentive quality of both human and nonhuman materials that yields an effect—or in some cases affect—on other materials involved. Through examining three examples from popular Sims 4 YouTubers, Plumbella's random pack build; Lilsimsie's random townie build; and finally LaurenZSide's random meme build, this article demonstrates how player, game, and randomizer vitalities collaborate, compete, and co-exist. In addition to the videos serving as examples of aleatory building processes, random build challenges pose opportunities for experienced composers to implement new approaches in response to aleatory elements that can be adapted to other composing settings.

Learning with vital materialities: weather assemblage pedagogies in early childhood education

Early Childhood Education in general, and Early Childhood Education for Sustainability in particular, have dominantly relied on an ontological framework that privileges children’s agency. This paper challenges this dominant narrative by attuning to the everyday ways in which children are moved by the weather within a multitude of weather assemblages. It attempts to illustrate how ‘learning’ could be achieved when bodies come in relation with, and are able to be affected by, other bodies. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research orientation that highlights weather-generated data, the paper elucidates how the weather acts on and comes into relation with humans and non-human bodies. It contends that noticing and engaging with the vitality of weather offers possibilities for creating affects and that this potentially leads to an attunement towards ecological sensibility. Notions such as ‘vital materiality’ and ‘lively assemblages’ are discussed as a possibility to go beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the weather, which could pave the way towards a more relational ontology as a basis for emphasizing human’s ‘inter and intra-dependence’ with non-human nature, and hence, arguably, sustainable living.

Visceral geographic insight through a ‘source to senses’ approach to food flavour

This article examines the experience of eating and changes to the vital materiality of food through the lens of flavour. A trans-disciplinary approach is used to gain insight from gastronomy and the neurobiology of flavour perception. Technological shifts in processing food and beverages are highlighted which show complex influences on flavour. We demonstrate the value of broadening visceral geographic understanding of the biosocial nature of flavour and the senses to answer questions about the need for new methods in visceral geographic enquiry and the role of AFNs. We propose a ‘source to senses’ approach to the visceral geographies of food.

Is it food or is it waste? The materiality and relational agency of food waste across the value chain

ABSTRACTFood waste has serious economic and environmental repercussions, and there is growing policy attention to this issue in Canada. This study investigates how the material characteristics of wasted food influence its circulation and management in the City of Guelph, Ontario. Based on interviews with informants across the food value chain, we learned that there is a high reliance on systems and techniques to determine when food becomes waste (including cold chains, best before dates, and aesthetic standards). We document how these systems pervade the food chain and food recovery efforts, and also note attempts to disrupt their momentum. Our analysis emphasizes the relational agency of food waste: how social and cultural contexts interact with food’s vital materiality in the determination of when it becomes waste, the circumstances under which waste can become food again, and how organic matter can find a second life as a source of energy and nutrients.

Relational Encounters and Vital Materiality in the Practice of Craft Work

Practice-based studies of organization have drawn attention to the importance of the body as a site of knowledge and knowing. However, relational encounters between bodies and objects, and the affects they generate, are less well understood in organization studies. This article uses new materialist theory to explore the role of affect in embodied practices of craft making. It suggests that craft work relies on affective organizational relations and intensities that flow between bodies, objects and places of making. This perspective enables a more affective, materially inclusive understanding of organizational practice, as encounters between human and nonhuman entities and forces. We draw on empirical data from a qualitative study of four UK organizations that make bicycles, shoes and hand-decorated pottery. We track the embodied techniques that enable vital encounters with matter and the affective traces and spatial, aesthetic atmospheres that emerge from these encounters. We suggest that a concern with the vitality of objects is central to the meaning that is attributed to craft work practices and the ethical sensibilities that arise from these encounters. We conclude by proposing an affective ethics of mattering that constructs agency in ways that are not confined to humans and acknowledges the importance of orientations towards matter in generating possibilities for ethical generosity towards others.

Visualizing Lake Ontario through the Installations of Bonnie Devine and Nicole Clouston1

This article explores the efficacy and physicality of Lake Ontario through its lack of a border vista, a physical feature in much of the rest of the country that contributes to the geographic imaginary of Canada. Within this context, the article discusses two art installations––Battle for the Woodlands (2014-2015) by Bonnie Devine and A Portrait of Lake Ontario (2017) by Nicole Clouston––both of which engage with the integrated, material, and lively watershed of Lake Ontario. “Vital materiality” and decolonial literatures are also engaged with to show how the installations reaffirm the efficacy and physicality of Lake Ontario and the ways in which it stands as a resistant space in relation to the colonial nation-state of Canada with its arbitrary borders.

OB-scene, a Live Audio/Visual Performance for Photoplethysmograph and Female Body

OB-sceneis a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe (photoplethysmograph), made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson (1966) introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space.OB-scenetakes inspiration from Jane Bennett’sVibrant Matter(2010) in which she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans andunhuman. Furthermore,OB-sceneis affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’ (XF). It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other (Laboria Cuboniks 2015). In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a uniqueactant(Latour 2009) enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications.OB-sceneis as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’ (Hamilakis 2017).

Natural Born Humans

In recent years, scientists and humanists have begun converging towards a new concept of humanity, one in which human culture, creativity, and power are seen as the product of nature, not its antithesis. Drawing on these insights, I suggest some ways in which scholars might embrace the concept of the ‘natural born human' to better recognize the powerful role of the natural material world in creating the human past and future. If a vital materiality informs every aspect of who we are as humans, then the scientific insights into this material world are not distinct from or contrary to humanism. To the contrary, science might be better understood as a manner of humanism and perhaps even akin to a materially grounded religion. Thus the old divide between science and the humanities might now be closing as we better recognize the inescapable material nature of the human animal in all of its dimensions.

Children, Performance and Ecology

This article explores the generative role that child collaborators can have in the development of an ecological performance practice. It elucidates how children might uniquely do the ecological in the context of devising professional contemporary performance. Specifically, this article focuses on a piece of practice-led research, Wild Life - a performance project that sits between choreography, live art and contemporary theatre. Wild Life involved collaborating with eight professional and non-professional performers between nine and 60 years to co-devise a performance that explored and enacted ‘wildness’. The process of co-creating, directing and critically reflecting on Wild Life has led me to propose that intergenerational collaboration is a particularly dynamic performance ecology through which to understand and develop an ecological practice.The main proposition of this article is that the ecological potential of performance lies in the actualities of devising in collaboration with diverse people, where children are treated as capable and skilled artists in their own right who have unique performance aesthetics, styles and abilities. I discuss how child collaborators might significantly enable live theatrical performance to do the ecological in its very modes and moments of enactment. I propose that the spontaneity and pragmatism of, what I call, the just doing-ness of child performers, can implicitly draw attention to what Jane Bennett (2010) describes as the ‘vital materiality’ of the human and, in doing so, performance can draw attention to our inevitable human interconnection and interactivity with(in) vibrant nonhuman matter.This discussion brings diverse fields into dialogue with each other in order to offer a unique discussion on children, performance and ecology. These fields are: performance and ecology; children in contemporary performance; intergenerational practice; and, vital materialism.

“Regionality”

“Regionality” Neil Campbell (bio) Regionalism often appears as a fixed and knowable set of beliefs or a centered totality (Painter), an “ism” to put alongside all the other “isms” we appear to know as finished acts or things completed; ways of seeing and being, thinking and operating that reassure us and provide a clear horizon and a stable boundary within which to function. In 1997 Lucy Lippard summarized this well: Today the term regionalism . . . continues to be used pejoratively, to mean corny backwater art flowing from tributaries that might eventually reach the mainstream but is currently stagnating out there in the boondocks. (36) With this in mind, Deleuze and Guattari might term “regionalism” an “order-word” functioning to “mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions” while reassuringly reminding us that “There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage” (Thousand 110). What I am arguing here is that since Lippard’s comment of 1997 there has been a shift toward what I have termed “expanded critical regionalism” defined by “components of passage” that saw region as decidedly mobile and diverse, rather than static and closed-in, and engaged with multiple disciplines beyond architecture (Campbell, Rhizomatic). Such reimagining began in 1980 with Anthony Alofsin’s early move toward a definition of critical regionalism as “an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them” (qtd. in Canizaro 370). Later Kenneth Frampton developed Paul Ricoeur’s idea stating that the central tension in critical regionalism was “how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization” (Frampton 16). These simple-sounding but complex arguments formed the [End Page 69] dramatic elements through which regionalism might take on a new and different complexion within western studies. An expanded critical regionalism would, therefore, no longer be associated with nostalgia or defined as simply “local” and, therefore, as a “place of lesser achievement and the source of backwardness, provincialism, and chauvinism” (Canizaro 12), as suggested by Lippard above. Instead it would be about placing the “local quality of life” at the forefront, “not in spite of global concerns and possibilities, but in order to better take advantage of them . . . [and] to re-embed us in the reality and diversity of our local places—critically and comfortably” (12). More recently regionality has developed as a new “pass-word” brim-full of “components of passage” insisting upon “becoming” rather than fixity, moving, in every sense of that word, as it gathers up senses of people, place, and things as a complex assemblage of region (Campbell, Affective 15). Jane Bennett refers to “the quarantines of matter and life” that, for me, suggests the closed weight of regionalism needing to be challenged with what she calls turbulent and “vital materiality” (vii). Such vitality and becoming is, for example, expressed in Ellen Meloy’s struggle to articulate the wonders of the western desert, where she senses no single stable thing but rather the “uncountable thousands” of colors that make up “some exquisite combination of Place” (15). Regionality is, therefore, a form of “vital materiality” or “exquisite combination” that moves still further beyond Canizaro’s position above, placing the emphasis upon process and becoming rather than established ground and invariance (or “re-embedding”)—so that encircling unanimity is constantly and productively challenged by multiple, critical processes, little refrains of difference, vital local histories, and the interruptions of the “minor” (acting like a foreign language within the dominant language, as Deleuze and Guattari define it). Regionality is, therefore, less about “comfort” and reassurance of a settled place in the world and more about an active critical presence that turns the proximate and local outward in dialogic relations with the world. In this process, regionality unashamedly worlds. [End Page 70] Regionality, in Kathleen Stewart’s seminal essay of the same name, comes alive through her swirling, descriptive passages, forming and deforming what she calls “the tactile compositionality of things” (277), tracked in voices, actions, places, memories, and histories. Regionality is an “edgy composite” (281) of the material and immaterial, the human and nonhuman as an active and energetic presence: “it permeates the contours of the...

Embodied Vibrations

This article contributes to debates that consider things (buildings) that have previously been assumed to be bounded and fixed. When thinking about how literally anything can become mobile, this article addresses how buildings “live on” through the bodies of participants. The notion of material affects is advanced to draw together a complex set of ideas on vibrant materialities. Material affects, then, entangle the earth, forces, embodiment, and micro mobilities to expose the vibrant matter of buildings. Empirical material is drawn from semistructured interviews with people who relocated out of Christchurch following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and aftershocks. In relocation, acute spatial awareness and sensitivity to movement and vibration—that is, the minute shudders and flexes of buildings—colonized the bodies of participants. Material affects are able to challenge the distinction between vital energy (life) forces and materiality.

Liquid passions: bodies, publics and city waters

This article explores water’s capacities as a vibrant matter with specific properties that generates passions, attachments and a sense of belonging, and which enrols bodies in new connections, socialities, alliances and politics in unpredictable ways. Based on research into practices and engagements with water in a large urban public space the paper builds on studies of blue space. It concludes that water has the capacity to enhance a sense of well-being in those that swim in it and to mobilise a very particular sense of embodiment which gives this form of public space its distinctiveness constituting new forms of sociality and connections amongst diverse individuals. It seeks to do this by paying attention to the experiences of things themselves and the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and the ‘vital materiality’ that runs through and across bodies both human and non-human. The article also explores water’s capacity to be constituted and defined by experts as dangerous and risky matter, and to thus engender political associations and connections amongst diverse groups who seek to oppose such expert interventions.

Placental economies: Care, anticipation and vital matters in the placenta stem cell lab in Korea

Thinking with the vital materiality of placentas as it is evinced in a placental stem cell research lab in Korea, this article explores the relations and practices of care that are essential to the circulation of biological matters as infrastructure of tissue economies. I attend to the flows of care that sustain tissue economies with the notion of ‘placental economies’. Shifting attention from donor subjects and tissue objects to practices and relations of care as an infrastructure for the circulation of tissues, I explore how the vitality of biological matters is an achievement made and sustained through the relations and practices of care that animate the placenta in different forms. On the basis of an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Korea, this article focuses on two different forms of care (lab workers’ care of cells, and pregnant women’s care of fetuses) that enable the (re)production and circulation of placenta-derived stem cells possible. I argue that the flows of tissues and vitality are indeed the flows of care, as an anticipatory as well as responsive practices, without which the vitality cannot exist in its current form. Furthermore, I suggest that relations and practices of care are a kind of infrastructure of promissory biotechnological enterprises.

Environmental Justice, Vital Materiality, and the Toxic Sublime in Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes, the 2006 film directed by Jennifer Baichwal, is a documentary portrayal of the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The film explores Burtynsky as he documents sites of extraction, factory production, and waste disposal around the world. This article provides an environmental justice reading of the film and the photographs. It focuses on representations of materiality, such as how the bodies of workers interact with the environmental toxins with and in which they work, and the limits of an aesthetics of beauty to account for global consumer complicity and risk. Burtynsky’s deployment of a “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011) and the film’s depiction of vital materiality ask audiences to reckon with the “dirty ecologies” (Morton 2009) of risk society’s “storied matter” (Bennett 2010), such as oil, e-waste, and invisible toxic fumes. Burtynsky’s photographs foreground toxicity in ways that suggest that “beauty” is not a grounds for environmentalism in the Anthropocene, colluding with a paradigm of “health” that evades the “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010) of human bodies. Moreover, attachment to beauty and health might, in fact, ironically engender toxicity. Through the film, Burtynsky’s works make visible the externalized costs of global consumerism to very specific bodies and very specific environments, and draw audiences materially into relation with those costs, emphasizing what is termed in this article a material relationality. The author concludes that, despite eliciting sharp scholarly criticism, the film and Burtynsky’s photographs call for an aesthetic sensibility and form capable of revealing how materialism facilitates global environmental justice.

Leaky States: Water Audits, Ignorance, and the Politics of Infrastructure

In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not only a technology of politics, produced and managed by municipal water engineers and their subjects. Leakages, and the ignorances of leakages, are also enabled by the vital materiality of the city’s infrastructure. As engineers work hard to improvise resolutions to the leakages they can fix, and ignore the thousands of others they cannot, the processes of leakage always exceed the control of the city’s government. As such, the uncertain appearances of leakage in Mumbai not only provide the grounds for the work of the state. Leakages also constantly disrupt governmental projects in ways that make the water department vulnerable both to the claims of marginalized subjects and to new reform projects in the city.

The Bio-Politics of Bees

Everywhere, honeybees and other insect pollinators are dwindling and dying, in a slowly but relentlessly unfolding crisis that has come to be known as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” This article draws upon theoretical currents from animal studies, environmental sociology and ecofeminism in order to explore the aetiology and significance of this crisis, an animal-techno-ecological assemblage of forbidding complexity and intense controversy. It is argued that the critical animal studies concept of the “animal-industrial complex” offers a potentially fruitful framework for grasping CCD, but that it ultimately rests upon notions of nonhuman animal subjectivity and objectification which do not translate persuasively to eusocial invertebrates such as honeybees. The article therefore develops a bio-political reading of the animal-industrial complex which reworks its conceptual underpinnings such as to render coherent the notion of an “apis-industrial complex.” This bio-political approach is articulated through a critical discussion of the relationship between the industrial organization of agricultural production and the vital materiality of complex living systems.

Vital Matters and Generative Materiality: Between Bennett and Irigaray

This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or entity to its (excluded but constitutive) ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to (human dependencies on) inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends.

Response to Mimi Sheller, “The vital materiality of aluminum: light modernity and the global Atlantic”

Response to Mimi Sheller, “The vital materiality of aluminum: light modernity and the global Atlantic”