Digital Materiality

Betti Marenko explores the changing status of the technodigital object – and the mobile intensities that characterize the current objectscape – to account for objects’ evolving intelligence. She looks at how hand-held mobile devices (smart phones, IPods, IPads PDAs), are reshaping the nexus object-subject into temporal discontinuities of human and non-human assemblages.

Her talk argues that the shift from object to event delineated by Gilles Deleuze – where space becomes time, form becomes formation, and moulding becomes modulation – needs to be taken on board by design practices and discourses as constitutive of a material-driven epochal shift.

A morphogenetic perspective on matter prompts design to question some of its assumptions around how objects actually come to exist, and in broader terms, design’s own relationship with materiality.

She argues for a shift in design’s theoretical location, from design as a problem solving activity – a task-oriented, performance-measured, linear exercise, that reduces uncertainty, a conventional view of design as a technology of affective capture enforcing and reproducing market ideologies – to design as a problem finding enterprise – that is, an enterprise that veers towards problematizing and complexifying the existent.

Within this morphogenetic framework design should come unhinged from its teleological fixation with form and function, and embrace instead an intuition-based apprehension rooted in ‘following matter’, vagueness and variation.

This perspective is deployed to examine the silicon-based materiality of digital devices and their key component, the microchip. Silicon is examined in reference to both Deleuze’s prophetic ‘revenge of the silicon’ and also by looking at how a new breed of microchips that ‘follow’ neural activity (neuromorphic chips) are bypassing the distinction between carbon and silicon-based life, animate and inanimate matter, and articulating new forms of intelligence.

The convergence of silicon and carbon, via Deleuze’s concept of nonorganic life, allows Marenko to read the technodigital object as the site of diverse material intelligences unfolding morphogenetically, beyond the narrow paradigms of cyborgness on the one hand and dematerialization on the other.