https://michaelkargl.com/materiality
performative materiality was an artistic research PhD-project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, conducted by Michael Kargl.
About
Following the debates about immateriality around the turn of the millennium, an increased awareness for the materiality of works can be observed in current artistic production. Parallel to artistic-practical discussions of this topic, theoreticians and philosophers have also identified a turn from a purely intellectual view of the world toward notions of the integration of things: things that can be touched; things that possess tangible corporeality; things that also exist beyond human perception – material things.
In this research project, the trajectory of inquiry was led by the notion that material and materiality are performative entities in themselves that let artworks emerge in different processes of co-creation with the artist. Moreover, the artist him/herself is to become material in this processes as artists are only entanglements of performative materiality themselves, not separable from an environment or other materials they work with.
The focus laid on emerging methods in these processes of creation. Methods that are understood as open fields of action, and which have to be negotiated through intra-actions between material and artist in a practice.