design: dematerialized

scientists, artists, cyberpunks, professors, and architects from the hague, sheffield, new york, denver, toronto, montreal, and singapore met virtually to discuss the complexities of dematerialization.

in a two-part series by designto, dematerialized discusses the process of breaking down our relationship with matter and converting physical experiences into virtual realms—and visa versa.

​​following are symposium highlights.

meandering on neo-futurist walks.
long walks that begin with a route and end in a chat. neo-futurist walkers drift through cities to study the glitches, gather historic and scientific data, develop the sixth sense, and create new stories. they believe in wild nature’s right to thrive, stimulating collective imagination, and the urgent call to form new habits.

“walking is our closest immaterial form of architecture.”
—spatial designers aušra česnauskytė and goda verikaitė

storing data to propagate wildlife.
design interventions that turn parasitic situations into mutualistic ones. by integrating cloud computing (gaming, media, transactions, servers) into earth’s natural patterns, like taking excess heat to desalinate water, green deserts, and protect animals, co-existence in the technological anthropocene possible.

“instead of attacking relationships, create new ones.”
—multidisciplinary designer justin park

defining the self through telco’s past.
collective and evolutionary phone identities. redefinition design, a speculative research method, suggests our devices are more traditional than we think. drawing on lessons from the historic, telco-disrupting carterfone, what if our devices reflected our uniqueness, connectedness, and stages through life?
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“can we step beyond the system of the international mobile subscriber identity (ismi)?”
—interdisciplinary research professor austin houldsworth

seeding the sky with poetry.
a return to cloud-seeding experiments to geoengineer climate mitigation—and maybe rethink our interactions with the sky. put on hold after military use intensified geopolitical risks, renewing exploration of cloud-making bacteria and technology could look like embedding its DNA, and our skies, with literature and music.

“the most valiant motivation of science and art is that of discovery.”
—ecologist and research professor joel ong

pixelating the five (plus) senses.
sensations capable of 0 and 1 translation. while digitization offers an infinite number of outputs like the analog world, we can’t yet broadcast all a pixel can do—or pixelate all we can sense. because few senses are measurable with quantifiable data, the sensory experience remains exclusively analog, for now.

“our worlds are made up of what we can sense.”
—artist and research professor lynne heller

getting serious about archiving.
archives in the era of ‘mnemophagy,’ or of devouring memory. the walls of the web are mutable, with (often shock) interface changes, purgeable content, and changing terms of service. with platforms a repository of artifacts for 21st century life, a loss of the era’s lore would mean a future based on pre-digital history.

“forget what you’ve lost and save what you can.”
—cyberethnographer and professor ruby thélot

reading the particulate signals.
material representation based on inherent logic, not outward appearance. by ‘rehearsing’ with materials and zooming on the behaviour of substance, we can understand how it’s held up, manipulated, and formed. computation allows us to think through time, gravity, energy, and geometry to understand our activities.

“how do we draw and represent the immaterial?” 
—architect and practice owner alex yueyan

actualizing what’s imagined in cyberspace.
‘machinima’ or making movies in virtual realms to tell stories and conceive futures. with customizability to make avatars, live in improbable spaces, and time travel to historic events, immaterial places are a medium to explore our heritage, experiment with our imagination, and practice bringing new ideas into the physical.

“making them in real life is realizing the imaginary.”
—cyberpunk and multimedia artist skawennati

reference:
designto.org/event/designto-talks-dematerialized