Led by curiosity, experiment, risk, Radical Matter Research re-imagines twentyfirst-century material culture at the intersection of poetics, contemporary art and wild science, with emphasis on the sensuous, often malicious, generative-AI/human-interspecies-machine co-evolution.
At a glance
- Radical Matter is a profoundly interdisciplinary art-science research lab situated in the RCA's School of Arts & Humanities (SoAH) and working across the College.
- It is linked globally with art-philosophy-wild science curiosity-driven environments (including at Angewandte (University of Applied Arts, Vienna), Cavendish ArtsScience (Cambridge), Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow), Living Architecture (Waterloo, CA), Experimental Moving Image (London), with researcher-artist-scholars at all stages of enquiry (independent, PhD, postdoctoral, ECR, mid-career, well-established).
- Radical Matter develops a different approach to AI as ‘distributed intelligence’ – closer to an emergent multi-modal poetics – where pattern, colour, tone, mood and atmosphere create a new, twenty-first-century knowledge system, away from Enlightenment thinking, enabling a new form of democratic imaginaries to circulate and grow.
- We focus on a new logic of sense, one that includes holographic spatialities, human-interspecies-machinic co-evolution, generative AI and distributed ‘intelligences’ from the common octopus to point cloud assets.
Key details
Gallery
More information
Micro-labs
There are six research micro-labs to Radical Matter:
- Topological aliveness
- Ana-cartography
- Metabolism
- Pineal eye
- Proximal poetics
- Pinky promises.
Partners
is an artistic research project in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Royal College of Arts London.
Funders
Radical Matter is funded by AiDesign Lab and PEEK FwF Science Foundation.
Outputs
Art and Research
Art is one of the driving forces behind the project, because we think that only through artistic thinking we can meet the challenges of the future.
For more case studies visit the Radical Matter website.
Journal
Throughout the duration of the Radical Matter project, two journals will be published at irregular intervals, presenting current activities and interim results.
radical⇌matter Journal # One was presented on 7 March 2023 as part of the opening of the troubling the story event and workshop, that took place at the Iklectic gallery in London. It features contributions by Sonia Bernac, Jonathan Boyd, Johnny Golding, Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba, Manu Luksch, Janis Neumann, Mukul Patel, Maggie Roberts, Dario Srbic, Linn Phyllis Seeger, Shira Wachsmann and John Wild. Read the digital version of Journal One.
radical⇌matter Journal # Two was presented at the opening of the radical⇌matter exhibition, which took place in Vienna between 25 January and 16 February 2024.
Events
Find out more about upcoming and past events that were initiated in the context of the Radical Matter project and the artistic activities of its core team on the Radical Matter website.
