Self-Assembly

Self-Assembly is a series of workshops organized by einaidea around the poetics of the collective, the codes of auto-organization and the cosmopolitics of materials in post-digital culture. This multi-session, multi-invitation, open-ended cabinet addresses the current interest in the programmability of matter and materials, processes which have become known as self-assembly. Concepts of unassisted local interaction of non-living entities, and/or parts of them, and/or articulated sets of them, understood as an expansion of the logic of an "Internet of things", have recently produced a wide assortment of narratives about the behaviour and potential autonomy of materials to serve predefined, connected and remotely controlled interests. This cabinet is, in its development, an ironic attempt to counteract dominant technocratic discourses on the investigation of materials and their future uses, to the extent that they end up influencing the reflection of art and design in relation to their own materiality. But we can simultaneously think that it is precisely in these areas where alternative visions and practices can be developed in collaboration with matter and the world of things, fostering their establishment as a counterpower and poetic matrix.

While theorists of such hypothetical self-assemblies promote and aestheticize a general acceptance of a biopolitical instrumentalisation, the social meaning of self-assembly, self-organisation and organisational autonomy is blurred. During the last few years, on the other hand, several artistic practices have been oriented towards an understanding of the politics of materials that rethinks the agency systems that structure the contemporary world, both in its spaces of maximum visibility—such as museums—but also in their warehouses, junkyards or gutters.

Along these lines, Self-assembly will convene relevant figures whose practice revolves around or navigates post-human conceptions of self-organization. With both literal and metaphorical models, the cabinet will constitute an attempt to reset our understanding of essential design concepts such as assembly, fabrication, form-production and articulation; as well as foundational notions of the arts, such as an ecosystemic perspective of composition, organicity and formal unity. With the sedimentation of the meetings and workshops that will be launched, we want to create debate in which self-assembly will not only be understood as a material and mechanical process of programme execution, be it intelligent or not. Rather, we will introduce the political and social notions of assembly and assemblage within material, organic and inorganic ecologies, examining the importance of self-organisation and emancipation within and beyond the human realm. 

This cabinet has included the following interventions:

Self-assembly: Metahaven
Self-assembly: Rio Paraná and OPAVIVARÁ!
Self-assembly: Gabriel Chaile: Traveling Cultural Center
Self-assembly: Adolfo Bimer: Actualization syndrom
Self-assembly: Adriana Knouf: What is a temporal transfer orbit?
Self-assembly: Asier Mendizabal: Ex-futures
Self-assembly: Prem Krishnamurty: Part I. Structures (Describing a System in Real Time): A Collaborative Gathering