The Material of us

a sketch of detailed write-up to come -----------------(draft only. feedback solicited)

Its been a long journey since i first started looking at materials in their various relationships, which is how they exist. Starting with an education in mechanical engineering, I see materials in their physical particle beings, manipulable, gullible, separable....engineering uses terms such as malleable or ductile, to be beaten until expanded or to be beaten until drawn. I learnt processes that ranged from the use of brute to sophisticated force that one unleashes on something that cannot react back. I am temped to conclude that the act of making something is the act of violence. It is a fair degree of departure from acknowledging the details that exist beyond the specific utilitarian tunnel, only articulated through experience.

The first step in objectification is the act of making things, and its in the act of making things that world is first divided into the emotionally relevant and the emotionally irrelevant. Contrary to how we make physical objects (heat, beat and treat) naturally objects are made as a dialectic with each other; object shaping its environment and in return being shaped by it. Maybe then, there is far too much of agency that gets attributed to human creativity because, like a stone it is shaping its environment and is being shaped by it. the fact that a human is far too evolved an entity to only shape its own immediate environment, overturns the naive foundations which the previous argument stands on.

My next experience with a material was to take the spirit of the material, assume all the violence as given and transcend / morph it to an emotional being, to see the material as an emotional content, purged of all physicality and then with this standpoint, start moving towards it, creating a grammar of emotional objectivity, a grammar of taste. As an Industrial designer i was to make material my statement in form, color and composition, uplifting its objective form to a matter of taste, completely reversing its identity by a series of manipulations over an already processed material. (on an irrelevant but interesting note its very similar to how hegemony and the idea of the transcendence function, except that in this case we assume that the material has no agency and that the resistance it offers cannot be assumed to be a kickback.

The movement from being an industrial designer to an experience designer brought me to closer to the exchange that one had with a finished product, of how one used it, touched it, lived with it. In case of the intangible face or the user interface of a software which was a system/product exchange was also how user navigated around it.

This exchange or designed experience was how the material was decoded by the consumer as compared to how it was coded (read designed) by the producer, reducing the material to a dialogue between two entities invisible to each other but visible only to the material, which was now a soul less conduit, transcending into multiple avatars of emotional objectivity where each party was only interested to see the reflections of its own value.

Interested with a brief marxist reflection of objects producing social reality and a space for the drama of everyday lives, i read a bit of Henri Lefebvre and got introduced to Jean Boudrillard's work " A system of objects" very recently. How an aesthetic exercise such as a dining table establish and play out a certain patriarchal agenda became interesting to me and i've become very interested in examining the people-object relationship even more closely. More on that will be coming soon