The Making of Things – Proximity

Let us go back to the beginning and ask the initial question again: What is material? Tim Ingold provides a very general and broad understanding: “I mean by materials the stuff that things are made of.”(3)
So Ingold does not ask what things consist of. If we take this approach seriously we have to slightly revise our abovementioned concept of material. The material description of a given artwork then does not suffice with the listing of oil, canvas, pigment, solvent, wood, etc.—also the making has to be included. Put concretely, the material I am currently using while I sit and write at my computer now would be next to impossible to grasp: It starts with the computer I am writing on, the heating that gives me warmth in winter and allows me to think and write smoothly, then there are the thoughts that emerge during writing, my social and economic status that enables me to ponder this topic, and surely does not end with the light that helps me to recognize the keyboard. Beyond just this immediate point in time, I must also acknowledge things from the past as material, things without which I could not work on precisely this text and thus are inherently in use: Texts I have read, my biography hitherto, the invention of electricity, the design of the text processing program, and much, much more. All of this is contained as material in the text before you. What is interesting here is that this text would be completely different if the circumstances were not exactly as they are. All of these conditions—hence materials—must find the right constellation (in terms of time, place, intensity, etc.) in order to enable me to write in this moment.(4) In this light, material not only consists of matter but also of relations, a vast array of connections and relationships, which manifest in one moment only to fall apart again and establish new connections. Material is then something processual that even interacts with us.