Fictional Materials:

New material sciences and material technologies work ambitiously to come up with materials that do not exist in nature yet, such as space-time crystals, ghost cloaking devices or superabsorbant surfaces. Through transforming the inherent properties of physical matter and energy into new visible and audible phenomena, new material technologies potentially recompose and narrate imaginative worlds of human wishes.

From a cultural perspective, an awareness is growing towards an anthropocentric environment, understanding ecologies, material and energy flux in everyday life, meeting technology there.

Out of that, an emphasized new understanding – a reinvention of new universal material languages could be seen concerning human experiences, desires and cognition – plausible enough to unbound risks, benefits and desires to re-imagine new relationships with our surroundings –how to act, emphasise or collide, how to disappear and reappear.

In narratives, protagonists, such as in H.G. Wells or A. Doyle´s novels, are discovering, surviving, rescuing, taking revenge or convicting through synthesised substances or forensic material samples. Unusual materials here, enforce us, besides their technical performances, to affect our ways of belief and thought in new ways, like once in alchemy. So, is there an encounter of newer alchemist´s to build on stories, or in other words, a far-reaching web of thought in scientific experimentation?

Fictional Materials propose a critical approach to the genuine advances of physical resonances between human´s needs, narratives, and upcoming technologies. The project is based on the thesis Fictional Material, are you there? – An Exploration into Technology, Alchemy and Imagination to find the Desirable Substance (2012).

Hallucinogenic Black (Category Superabsorbers):

Since we are getting used to consume high amounts of news from ‘objective’ sources through digital media, this material is going to invite us into our individual perspectives, and to train mental stability with a flood of media coming towards our senses through immersive technologies.

Hallucinogenic black does this by depriving our visual sense until we belief just in what we belief to see. If we look at it, it appears from only our point of view as it is and the material literally becomes functioning in a cognitive manner.

It´s material architecture is based on NASA´s developed Superblack. Not by Carbon Nanotubes, rather made carbon flakes, which fit electrostatically charged on the surface, it highly absorbs light, as we are not used to see colors in real life.

Its latent potential has to be gauged by handling its rigid, sharp and static form. Informations out of the ‘black’ appear, disappear and getting absorbed and born out of it. They create an understanding of illusionary objects, which we need to tune in.

alter the way we need to deal with upcoming cognitive challenges in new immersive and interactive technologies..

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related literature:

Barrow, J.D. (1999) "The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits"
Brooks, M. (2008) "13 Things That Don´t Make Sense"

Husserl, E. (1907) “The Idea of Phenomenology”

Ingold, T. (2010) "Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials"
Sacks, O. (2012) "Hallucinations"