VIBRANT ARTIFACTS | ACADIA 22

Professor Barry Wark | ACADIA Workshop Expansion | Fall 2022

“A life thus names a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body. A life tear the fabric of the actual without ever coming fully ‘out’ in a person, place, or thing. A life points to ... ‘matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them. A life is a vitality proper not to any individual but to ‘pure immanence,’ or that protean swarm that is not actual though it is real: ‘A life contains only virtuals. It is made of virtualities.”

- Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

“A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.”

- Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

The following project involved exploration with architectural artefacts that were meant to be designed with the intentions of weathering and display of their interconnectedness with the environment. This could encompass notions of erosion, non-determinate plant growth, as well as the idea of ageing and patina. The workflow for this project entailed a series of tasks working with a combination of 3d modelling and procedural design instances using Houdini FX. This project’s initial design eploration, prior to finalizing a specific application, aimed to differentiate depending on its specific ecological and environmental condition, and all still cohesively emphasize the ability to represent similar modes of direct and indirect nature as a design principle that follows closely with biophilic interpretations. By transcending these design explorations the project’s response to harmful anthropocentric exceptionalism attempts to establish ecological infrastructure that influences matters of health and biodiversity within polluted and post-industrial urban environments. The concluding intent of these interventions (monoliths) were to to help rejuvenate and heal displaced ecologies of the earth, while also housing and sustaining the inactive human life that would remain. The projected outcome would be to eventually help foster a future society that entails a more ecocentric reality and promotes more humbleness and more interconnectedness between humans and their surrounding biosphere + ecology.