Experiments in SCOBY skins by Maru Garcia, 2022. Image courtesy of artist.

Material Acts: A Symposium brings together artists, designers, and architects experimenting with material processes and systems. Understanding materials as process-based events with human actors, rather than artifacts found in stasis, this symposium on new materials explores the rich milieu of ideas that accompany their making, including practices in bioregional design, waste economies, and living systems, alongside perspectives of care, constraint, and regeneration. 

Anupama Kundoo, Ben Loescher, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Matthias Kohler, and Meredith Miller present their research and thinking against the backdrop of accelerating environmental degradation, framing materials as a chain of operations, rather than fixed objects.

Schedule

10:00am Symposium Introduction
Kate Yeh Chiu (USC) and Jia Yi Gu (HMC)

10:15am-11:10am Re-thinking Construction
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (ETH Lausanne)

11:15am-12:45pm Sourcing 
Presentation by practitioners working on before-building processes including material sources, bioregional design, and sites of labor, followed by a moderated Q&A. 

12:45 pm-1:45pm  Intermission

On view in USC Fischer Museum of Art: Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation Getty PST Art: Art and Science 

1:45pm-3:15pm Taking Apart 

Presentation by practitioners working on after-building processes including waste economies, management and regulation of demolition, and processes of disassembling, followed by a moderated Q&A. 

3:15pm-4:00pm Concluding Lecture