Digital Materials

The practice-based research project Digital Materials examines possibilities to make digital processes directly operative and tangible in physical materials and is located in the interdisciplinary field of Active Matter.

Conception, development and analysis of possibilities to make digital processes in physical materials effective and tangible.

The aim of the artistic-design research project is to link and interweave the digital and physical worlds through “digital materials” in a visible and tangible way. The fiction of these “digital materials” describes materials whose form, structure and haptics can be controlled directly and dynamically, whose atoms can be configured similarly to pixels today. Creative experiments will deal with how such active, programmable, changing materials look like, how they feel, how they can be designed, realized and applied. The project shows possibilities to think and understand materials that allow human actors to deal with digital technologies in an authentic way and thus to exploit their potentials more comprehensively.