Self-Matter

Self-Matter explores self-organizing physical processes to create materials with emergent lifelike features. The exhibition presents installations and a performance that showcase current scientific research that blurs matter and intelligence. Through simple interactions between common substances, Self-Matter offers a perspective for more symbiotic futures.

At various scales around us, physical elements self-assemble to give rise to the shapes and life that form our world. In Self-Matter, we contemplate such processes to design emergent functional systems in symbiosis with our natural ecosystem. We present pieces that stage the self-organization of artificial lifelike features from interactions echoing the most common elements on earth: water, grains, and stones. These “self-materials” blur the distinction between inert matter and embodied intelligence, which the exhibition explores through the functionalization of an inherent balance between self-organization and entropy in nature. Emergent narratives are revealed through external forces, reconfiguration, material memory or energy dissipation, in fluid, granular, and robotic installations. The stories that the materials tell invite questioning of our relationship with nature and technology, as well as imagining sustainable futures where designed objects are a transient state of symbiotic elements. The exhibition will showcase four installations and a performance developed at the University of Chicago through collaborations between physicists, technologists and artists. It will stage recent scientific research on self-organization in reconfigurable architecture, collective robotics, and fluid growth. It will involve the live cinema collective Shapes of Emergence (directed by B. Saintyves), the Jaeger, Ax (directed by K. Nakagaki) and the Nagel Lab as well as the Visual Art program.

Credits: 

Director: Baudouin Saintyves / Assistant Director: Ken Nakagaki / Installation Artwork: Yousif Alzayed, Severine Atis, Yuntao Gao, Luke Jimenez, Noah Lawson, Ken Nakagaki, Baudouin Saintyves, Willa Yunqi Yang, Yifan Zou / Performance Artwork: (Shapes of Emergence collective) Severine Atis, Roiel Benitez, Otto Briner, Ben Kinsinger, Baudouin Saintyves / Production Assistant, Documentation : Nora Ryan / Laboratories: AxLab (Computer Science), Nagel Lab (Physics), Jaeger Lab (Physics)