Thinking through Human-Material Interactions: Sourcing, Making, Knowing

Prof. Pamela H. Smith
Seth Low Professor of History, Director of the Center for Science and Society
Columbia University, New York

What do practitioners – artists and artisans – learn by working with and in materials? What is the material sense or material intelligence they gain through this work and how do they articulate it in words and things? How did and do practitioners interact with materials – through sourcing and making – to form conceptions about them? Early modern metal workers, for instance, employed (in their words and actions) sets of binary material properties – fat and lean, sour and sweet, and brittle and workable – to describe their metals. Such working and thinking through materials provided a way to meet the challenges that natural substances presented, and it gave rise to everyday exploring, hypothesizing, and testing through which a practitioner came to understand the behavior of materials and the processes and products they made possible.