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).

Radiant Crystals (Category Superemitters):

Exploring the mysterious characters of Radiant Crystals gives us the opportunity to investigate and experiment in a magical world full of glowing cosmetics, energy delivering brain-boost pills, utopian rocket trains and skyscrapers or protection suits against detrimental long term effects like during the radium craze in the 1930s.

Radiant Crystals take a playful approach towards energy sources for us as the homo ludens to progress. Like constructing as martian engineers, coming up with energy grids, transportation networks and water systems as main factors for growth, spreading humans, kids imagine a new local start reaching their desired environment, or escapism to another planet through a new energy source. A luminous sugar as building block of many metabolic cycles becomes the link of technology and nature. So for, this material composite questions in subtle way, if we are able becoming autonomous from nature through technologies at all? In his book, Radioactive Hopes and Nuclear Fears describes as nuclear energy tales, the driving factor for change was revolutionized with the exploration of the energy of atoms – no longer relying on canals of physical transport, rather energy. Could science, or simplier said here blending chemicals into glowing crystal formations, be trusted to lead civilization?Full steam ahead!

Special Thanks to Henrik Nieratschker, Daniel Tauber and Teresa Schulten.

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related literature:
Barrow, J.D. (1999) "The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits"
Bennett, Jane (2010) "Vibrant Matter"
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"
Lem, S. (1971) "The Futurological Congress"

Weart, S. R. (1988) “Nuclear Fear: A History of Images”
Wells, H.G. (1897) “Invisible Man” / (1901) “The Firs Men in the Moon”