This volume gathers more than a dozen voices from a diverse group of architects, designers, performing artists, film-makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians, programmers, researchers and educators. While originating from Austria, Colombia, Finland, Mexico, New Zealand, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the USA, they are all intellectual migrants – scholarly nomads – scattered around three continents, speaking eight different native languages. Diversity in this book is also a function of a convergence of well-established authors who pioneered the discussion on architectural materialisms and the emerging figures of the younger generation who are currently researching the subject. With the exception of the recently published Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine and Philosophy, and after a long period of silence and apathy in the literature on architecture and creativity, due to a preoccupation with hands-on experimentation and tooling as well as with isolating domain-biased research, it is now high time to reflect on this matter critically and globally as such contemplation is not just timely, but essential.

The Vitality of Matter

The belief that humans were driven out of their natural habitat or environment immediately after their creation is deep-rooted and has been cultivated since the ancient myths of human origin depicted in Greek cosmogony and other religious discourses. This belief was based on the notion that humans differed in relation to all other beings, thus justifying the human imperative stance towards all other beings around them. Their further development and evolution were not only dictated by their distinctive natural characteristics, but were primarily defined by the consequences of sin committed either by divine forces, as in the Epimethean and Promethean narratives, or by the humans themselves, as in the case of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious testaments. To cope with the consequences of this sin, according to Bernard Stiegler, humans had to act upon matter, developing techniques which, although regarded as the horizon of all possibilities to come, were, nevertheless, repressed as an object of thought throughout the anthropocentric tradition.

Life and matter were conceived as separate entities, parsing the sensible world as vibrant life – beings – and dull matter – things. In this division, matter was thought as passive, raw, brute or inert, moving or being transformed only on encountering an external force or agent, following a linear logic of cause and effect.