In the beginning…

Byung-Chul Han (Non-Things 2022) notes that the explosive rise of today’s “digital order” is displacing humanity’s indigenous “terrestrial order” and causing people to lose touch with material things. As a consequence, we have begun to confuse choice with work and are losing our will to care for difficult matters. How will these broad cultural changes impact aesthetics, design, society, and sustainability?

By reintroducing the characteristic tangle of affordances and propensities of physical materials into digital creative workflows — to foster a traditional craft spirit of “working with” a substance as opposed to imposing form upon it (Ingold, Making, 2013) — this project will move towards a more Earthbound (Latour, Facing Gaia, 2017) formulation of digital art and interactivity that remains open to the invention of unprecedented new digital materialities. We will develop and co-teach a new undergraduate course based on entangling digital workflows with printmaking and hand-weaving, to be taught at Stanford University in spring quarter of 2026. We will make experimental objects and systems as material waypoints for our flow of ideas and document their evolution in this online project blog, leading to a public exhibition and symposium in spring/summer 2026.