“The Dance of the Knife.” Ethnographic Reflections on Neurosurgical Experience and Agential Materialism

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction
4. Toward a New Culture of the Material 1
5. Shape and Sensitivity
6. Matters of Vagueness and Articulation 11
7. Atmosphere in the Making: Airborne Metabolic Pathways 21
8. “The Dance of the Knife.” Ethnographic Reflections on Neurosurgical Experience and Agential Materialism 41
9. Collaborative Practices on Active Matters
10. PLEKTONIK: Plasticity and Structural Textile 63
11. The Role of Filtering in Design Processes: Creating Stabilities in Volatile Contexts by Tentative Prototyping 75
12. On Material Grammar: Learning from and Designing with Unstable Behavior in Thin Sheet Materials 85
13. Points in Making 95
14. Growing Form
15. Buckling, Wrinkling, and Folding: Microstructure, Active Matter Behavior, and Geometric Modeling of Bacterial Biofilms 109
16. Entangled Scales: Structures and Environments of Cellulose Biofilms 121
17. Rethinking Growth: A Bio-Inspired Take on Creative Processes 139
18. Indeterminacy, Ambiguity, and Liveliness
19. The In-Between as a Place of Poiësis: Photography of Ambivalence in a Photobook 153
20. Transcending Form: On the Potential of Ambiguous Imagery 163
21. Surface Tension: Venice and the Undercurrents of Mediation 173
22. Material Memories
23. Rubber Frictions: Material Legacies beyond the 1851 Great Exhibition 193
24. Crafting Time: Speculative Archaeology and Inorganic Becoming 223
25. Passivity Matters! Transience and Conservation Practices: Examples from the Eighteenth Century to Today 235
26. Material Energies
27. The Material Metaphysics of Felt 263
28. Matters of Free Energy and a Tesseract 281
29. Material Energy Information: Toward an Analog Code 291
30. Authors’ Biographies 307
31. Image Credits 313