Tracking Materiality An Inquiry into Gestures, Processes and Artefacts

Objectives
- To better understand the origins and contexts of our material culture
- To give a theoretical and practical overview of the processes of giving form
- To foresee possible futures for materiality

Contents
This seminar will be two-folded: First, we will track the origins of our material culture through an investigation on the bases of human technicity, from the first tools used and manufactured, to the most advanced technologies. Several themes and questions will be raised, especially around the notion of Technics: why and how human beings started producing tools and objects? What is it that makes us the amazing makers and builders that we have become?
We will also study various processes at stake in transforming an idea, a project, a wish into artefacts, images, devices... From ordinary gestures and forms to formidable projects, or from matter to materials and objects, we will study the logics and techniques of production used to create and make. We will pay attention to mental processes and follow their paths of transformation, from ideas, sensations, or imagination to concrete realizations, through through four concepts (trans-making, bricology, ecotechnical and formativity) and many figures and examples from fields of production such as art, science, industry, design, architecture, engineering, crafts, medicine, literature, performing arts, etc.

The second part of the seminar will be conducted in partnership with the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum). We will visit the collections of the museum with Curator Claudia Banz, and you will choose one or several objects of the collection based on one preferred material (glass, ceramics, metal, textile, wood…) and “track” their materiality at different periods and under the different forms they take, by investigating on the context of their production, both technically and culturally.

Methodology
The seminar will be based on texts, films and artefacts from the collections of the Kunstgewerbemuseum.
Students will be invited to present a case-study, and to speculate on the becoming of materiality, based on their investigation and their own field of practice.

- 4 hours every other Thursday (14.00 to 18.00), in English
- For MA students in Art or Design
- Room : Mart Stam Raum
- Max 20 participants