Surface is mediatic space where materials, humans, and technology make each other

What is it about?

We tend to think of surfaces as the outer layer of things. But surfaces are where materials, tools, bodies, and technologies meet, interact, and transform each other. In a very real sense, we are surfaces. This book brings together artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, and historians to explore how surfaces are made and how, in turn, they make us. From electrochemically grown copper textiles and hand-grooved silver drawings, to nuclear waste storage and algorithm-generated art, the chapters show that surfaces are always in the process of becoming. When we pay attention to how surfaces are made – scored, layered, grown, woven, carved, scanned, or printed – we gain a richer understanding of how humans and nonhumans, the living and the non-living, the digital and the physical, are bound together in a shared world.

Featured Image

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Computation is now embedded in everyday surfaces, from smart textiles to facial recognition. The boundaries between the material and the immaterial, the human and the nonhuman, are becoming harder to draw. This book argues that paying attention to surfaces is one of the most urgent ways to understand how technology is reshaping what it means to be human. This volume combines practice and theory across a wide range of disciplines, following surfaces as they are made, in studios, laboratories, archives, and markets, grounding abstract theoretical questions in concrete material processes. The book also speaks directly to current debates about the agency of nonhuman materials, the ethics of digital technology, and the politics of making. It offers a shared vocabulary – surface, surfacing, assemblage – that can travel across disciplinary boundaries and open up new conversations.