Adrian Forty has, in recent years, set the tone for cultural analyses of physical materials. His points of opposition, concrete’s dual status as modern-unmodern, historical-ahistorical, natural-artificial, and local-universal, were in this class applied to plastic and wood. After engaging with his ideas theoretically, and deciding that a new category of transitory-permeant might here be required, students were asked to get out onto the street, the campus, their Kiez, and photograph uses of plastic, wood, and concrete.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFO4eyNhDov
Expanding Forty’s central thesis, #MetaphysicsOfMaterials was created on the mass observation archive more commonly known as Instagram. The students’ photos ranged from plastic pseudo-terracotta roof tiles, to Ost Moderne, in both precast concrete panel (Tina, Hendrik, Solveig) and in-situ, planarly-intersecting concrete and steel forms (Nathalie, Tina, Luca, Lukasz). Generally, the most beloved materials appeared to be those with the imprint of human activity, e.g. concrete cast in-situ into wooden planks or footprints in the still wet cement (Nathalie), or those impregnated with John Ruskin or Alois Riegl’s notion of Age Value. Crumbling concrete blocks come to be seen eventually as evocative of the coarse bark of a mature tree (Solveig). Nature reclaiming a wooden shed probably built once by an ardent hobbyist (Jan). All kinds of aged concrete paving stones and wooden gates (Tim, Pia). The least beloved were attempts by plastic to mimic ceramic, as with the roof tiles (Denise), or wood, as with brown PVC windows on Plattenbauten that might deserve better (Solveig). If art and architecture is the conscious application of skill and wit to materials at hand, then it is nothing but artificial, and all the better for it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFVlZ1oJdAc
The Metaphysics of Materials is an ongoing project with my AFG students at Hochschule Anhalt. If you would like to add your photos to the project, upload them to Instagram with the hashtag, #METAPHYSICSOFMATERIALS.
this filthy modern tide 
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