MDes

Sensing Bodies – Poetry of the Material, Body, Space and Identity

Advised by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Malkit Shoshan

What is the role of materiality in our contemporary culture? How can materiality perform as an extension of the human senses and be refashioned to address the issues of identity and expression in the age of crisis in public space? This project explores materiality and its relationship with time, memory, and space as a poetic mean, and architecture as the cyborg and the second skin. Through a series of studies in technology, computation, and textile methodologies that are a mix of digital and analog, this project examines the role of materiality in relationship with the “posthumanist” bodies in public space. Materiality is not the question of material itself but the substance of material relationships and, historically, textiles significantly represent this material relationship in art and architecture as the initial space-making methods. The warp and weft of textiles have metaphors of culture and poetry, and the lines of the surface are the lines of expression of the self. Poetry of the material is the graph of time on the surface that allows architecture to make memories visible, corelating directly with light and layers. Poetry of space is the fragments of the language that is assembled and disassembled. Through this process, this project brings into play identities and visibility in public space.