Liquid Things

Materials have always been transmitters of messages. Today they have acquired a new relevance as a result of the increasing flows of information that shape our societies. Consequently, many scientific fields are simultaneously developing ways of expanding the potential of matter to handle these flows. On the road to realizing concepts like "programmable matter" or "adaptive architecture", research groups on "mediated matter", "transitive materials" and "metamaterials" have recently emerged. However, these young realms are characterized by a mechanistic way of thinking which leaves promising aspects of these novel, active and metamorphic materials unelaborated. Considering Gaston Bachelard`s poetic essays on the influence of matter on imagination and that fact that our culture has been charged with ideas about transformations since the apparition of Ovid`s "Metamorphoses" two thousands years ago, we propose a practical and critical approach to the genuine advances in this field made by computer and materials sciences, physics and chemistry to face questions regarding issues such as the physical resonance of materials becoming active or their potential to cause a renegotiation of our material reality. We take both referential contexts, namely the scientific developments and the imagination applied to transformations of matter, and combine them to present new ideas, concepts and concrete actions with the intention of expanding artistic perspectives. The project "Liquid Things" is organised in three modules: Material/Thechnology, Theory/Reflection and Art/Process, each including several international invitations for concentrated, time-limited cooperations ending in individual presentations. The first module focuses on experiments with novel materials; the second deepens the context and sets the theoretical framework for our research; and finally, the third, consists of the creation of artistic prototypes. The main outcomes are presented in: two workshops on the artistic manipulation of active materials, a symposium that reflects on the theoretical and practical field adressed in the project in relation to art-based research, an exhibition that places the prototypes in a public venue for open discussion and a final published book, which summarizes the processes, collaborations, activities and results of the project. The three modules are deeply intertwined and allow the development of a critical and simultaneously deep and original collaboration with matter.

Materials showing properties and behaviours that can be called fluid are central to Liquid Things art-based research. Among these are for example polymers, hydrogels, silicones, oils or ferrofluids. In the project we concentrated on very few materials like electroactive polymers, custom metamaterials showing special optoacoustic properties, and PVA-based polymers. Our core interest lay in the productive pertinacity and potency of such materials that oscillate between stability and instability. Instead of reducing these materials to passive stuff or compliant construction material, one of our premises was to give them as much freedom of action as possible. In this way we were able to ensure enough room for these materials to take an active and formative role in artistic and theoretical work. The materials inner dynamics and tendencies were important starting points for our artistic material investigations, which were moving between studio, kitchen and chemistry lab. These investigations explored the aesthetic and epistemic potentials of fluid and changing materials and examined their impact on thinking and imagination. By integrating and expanding the results of scientific material research into a framework of artistic experimentation we established an art-based material science, which is not to be understood as a technical auxiliary science to the arts, but as an art-centered, material-conscious, and method-reflexive practice. Alongside the development of prototypes and installations, understood as abstract narrative constellations staging material processes in action and flux, our goal was to follow a continuous, reflective practice. This theoretical practice served as the platform to assess the used methods, adapt them according to new circumstances or obstacles and thus collaboratively extend our methodological, material and theoretical basis. The projects investigations into aesthetic and epistemic interrelations of working with materials resulted in the publication Raw Flows. Fluid Mattering in Arts and Research, which also contains a documentation of Liquid Things concluding exhibition Kontinuum.