This paper presents exploratory research on the materiality, aesthetics and ecological potential of soft robots. Within the still emergent paradigm of soft robotics research, bio-inspiration is often hailed as being of central importance. The paper argues that soft robotics should equally be seen as giving prominence to materiality and the enactive and processual potential of soft matter. The p...

In this article we look at how materiality emerges from complex chains of mediation in creative software use. The primarily theoretical argument is inspired and illustrated by interviews with two composers of electronic music. We argue that computer mediated activity should not primarily be understood in terms of simple mediation, but rather as chains of complex mediation in which the dominatin...

Although Wallace’s revitalization movement model has been successfully utilized in scores of ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of societies throughout the world, revitalization is considerably less well documented in archaeological contexts. An examination of the materiality of revitalization movements affords an opportunity to redress this lack by investigating how material culture crea...

We organised an elven day intense course in materiality for musical expressions to explore underlying principles of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in higher education. We grounded the course in different aspects of materiality and gathered interdisciplinary student teams from three Nordic universities. Electronic music instrument makers participated in providing the course. In ele...

Online communities like Wikipedia have the potential to transform our global society. Despite their growing importance, however, the extant literature has theorized only little about how member contribution behavior in a nascent online community emerges in interaction with the materiality of the technology platform. Studying this is critical for understanding the important early stage evolution...

Sustainability reporting is the process by which companies describe how they deal with their own economic, environmental, and social impacts, thus making stakeholders able to recognize the value of sustainable practices. As stressed in the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines, which act as a de facto standard for sustainability reporting, sustainable reports should take into account the stake...

Gramsican approaches in International Relations (IR) have sought to outline the relationship between ideas and material forces in the construction of world order. Scholars working within this broad school have sought to emphasise that ideas are material forces, and must be considered as concrete historical structures (Cox, 1987) central to the establishment of particular historical and hegemoni...

I would like to thank the contributors and HAU for this symposium. It is a great privilege to receive such insightful and challenging comments, which have expanded and clarified my thinking on a range of fronts. I'll begin with the comment of Stephen Lyon and David Henig because they raise fundamental methodological questions. I am very pleased that they see my book as having significance for d...

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be ‘systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’ (Malafouris 2004, 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the t...