Liquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality

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dc.contributor.authorArmstrong, Rachel
dc.date.accessioned2024-05-28T08:56:09Z
dc.date.available2024-05-28T08:56:09Z
dc.date.issued2019-12-18
dc.date.updated2024-05-28T08:56:08Z
dc.descriptionPublication status: ACTIVE
dc.description.abstractIf we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive." Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system. Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes’ "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina’s graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away.
dc.description.versionVoR
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0246.1.00
dc.identifier.isbn9781950192175
dc.identifier.isbn9781950192182
dc.identifier.other1e0c7c29-dcd4-470d-b3ee-8c4012ac79dd
dc.identifier.urihttps://thoth-arch.lib.cam.ac.uk/handle/1811/623
dc.languageENG
dc.publisherpunctum books
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
dc.subjectHPJ
dc.subjectPSD
dc.subjectARC009000
dc.subjectQDTJ
dc.subjectangelology. materialism
dc.subjectbiology
dc.subjectdesign theory
dc.subjectecology
dc.subjectmolecular science
dc.subjectsoft architecture
dc.titleLiquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality
dc.typehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_2f33
dcterms.accessRightsEmbargo: none

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