Mixed Matters

open to environmental influences working through fundamental material
relationships. While the limits imposed upon these interactions by genetic
information provoke creativity, the aesthetics produced at the dark gel interfaces
discuss alternative possible evolutionary pathways of events and even
suggest new kinds of nature that given the right propagative fields could
potentially persist within the site as soils, bodies, or architectures. The gels
are always moving. They duck, dive, and advocate alternative configurations.
They resist formalisation leading us towards an aesthetics in continual motion
whose qualities evade fossilisation through preordained forms but enable
new kinds of image making and spatial expressions through revealing
connections that were previously unseen.
Procedurally, the modified Liesegang Ring experiment speaks of an origins
of life style transition that is unconstrained by naturalised aesthetics, where
the 'qualia' of interacting lively materials orchestrate new independent acts
of creation. Stephen Jay Gould proposed that replaying the Tape of Life could
test whether the natural realm had been generated through a dominant program,
such as one produced by an omnipotent divinity (Gould, 1990). Gould
argued that if we lived in a predetermined universe—then biological species
would be very similar to those we recognise today. However, if environmental
influences played a significant role in evolution, we might encounter seemingly
alien kinds of life—in keeping with those that arise from the experimental
fields of activated gels and enlivened minerals. Poetically, the ensuing
experimental events are read through the text of Paradise Lost to graphically
discuss how this alternative Nature is not of divine origin, but is borne from
a new collaboration between empowered matter and secular human agency,
which share a common project in their mutual, continued survival. Each drawing
is therefore entitled using the two key design phases used to produce the
experimental work—namely, the dominant oceanic pedagogy in the drawing
(interface, oscillator, selective permeability, massive parallelism) followed by
a quotation from Paradise Lost that relates the graphical events to acts of
secular synthesis that produce soft, living architectures.
Oceanic Multi-Material Aesthetics
By directly engaging the generative potency of the material realm, designers
move one step back from the traditional site of production—the predetermined,
fetishised object—akin to God creating mankind fully formed
from dust. Instead of this sudden act of genesis in which the homunculus
design object is preformed and valued through the geometry of its lines, dimensions,
curves, and energies of geometrically bounded materialities—the
architectural move becomes an evolutionary, musical engagement between
the multiple agencies influencing the production of space. The choreography
of material tensions shaped by human and non-human activity generates
an ongoing series of probabilistic events in which the designer is not
made redundant, but displaced from centre stage of the design process.
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