This residency has been about thinking with models and materials to engage with larger questions of scientific practice, art practice and the environmental humanities.

Problems are thought through with materials as we handle them; become familiar with them and their potential properties; go about performative actions; think about developing certain qualities; carefully observe chemical reactions; change material properties for specific purposes.

1 Diffraction is a conceptual and material-semeiotic device that responds to the dilemma of how we think about complex matters in material ways; how we approach artistic and designer work so that it is not reduced to representational schemas or public communication of scientific facts; and how we can not merely reflect theories but participate in their production and transformative potential. 2 Diffractive models are real-world agents that are “interfering, bluring, bending and transforming the content under study”.

1 Parikka J, A recursice Web of Models: Studio Tomas Saraceno’s Working Objects 2020

2 Miyazaki S, How to talk about serious matters of complexity with models as agents: A speculative essay on artistic and design-based research, 2015

Designing stretchy alginate polymer