In the last years a new focus on material phenomena has become increasingly oberservable in the arts and sciences. Most diverse disciplines are stressing the momentum and the agency of matter, material and things and underline their status as agents within the web of relationships of culture and nature. The book "Power of Material / Politics of Materiality“ deepens this current discourse and for the time brings materialist tendencies within the arts, design and architecture into a direct dialogue with a range of scientific approaches from a "New Materialism“ within the humanities and social sciences.

This publication is the result of the first year of program at the newly established cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

Editor’s Preface
Power of Material/Politics of Materiality – an Introduction
Susanne Witzgall
New Materialism: The Ontology and Politics of Materialisation
Diana Coole
“We need a much better appreciation of the material structures…”
In Conversation with Diana Coole
Text and Texture: On the Materiality of West-Eastern Transfers in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Marianne von Willemer
Cornelia Ortlieb
An Ecology of Materials
Tim Ingold
“I was literally sticking my hands into materials”
Max Lamb
“Materials are constantly astonishing”
In Conversation with Max Lamb and Tim Ingold
Project of Class Lamb
The Promise of Intelligent Materials
Nicola Stattmann, and Thomas Schröpfer in Conversation with Karianne Fogelberg