The Evening of Doctoring Matter

During The Evening of... Doctoring Matter, crystals, organisms, medicines, and machines reveal what matter does when it refuses to remain passive

What happens when we stop treating nature and matter as passive materials and listen in to what they do? Through lecture-performances, experiments, sound and living systems, Martin Howse, Joost Rekveld, Fara Peluso, Gökay Atabek and Jerry Galle explore the hidden agencies of technological and biological matter.

Martin Howse subjects computation and the human voice to processes of dissolution, sedimentation and crystallisation. Joost Rekveld revisits an extraordinarily slow salt-crystal precursor to the transistor as a model for transparent, non-toxic and anti-fascist technology. Fara Peluso listens to the regenerative intelligence of diatoms and earthworms.

Jerry Galle medicates electrical circuits of liquids and metals, allowing their unstable responses to emerge as sound. Across crystals, soils, organisms, medicines and electrical signals, the evening asks what technology and ecology might become when we allow matter to resist and wander.
Featuring:
Martin Howse
Martin Howse presents a monologue co-authored with voice-recognition algorithms, exploring feedback loops between material substrates, the sentience of the geological earth and computational infrastructures. Drawing on automata, masks and masquerade, he considers how technology might be betrayed by the matter that enables it. During the monologue, his voice undergoes dissolution, sedimentation or crystallisation.

Jerry Galle
Jerry Galle medicates matter, introducing medicines into electrical circuits of liquids and metals and allowing their changing conductivity to emerge as sound. Rather than removing noise, he lets the drugged signals wander. The experiment considers medicine as an ancient biological behaviour, in which organisms produce and respond to chemical compounds while noise keeps these processes adaptable.

Joost Rekveld
In 1938, Robert Wichard Pohl demonstrated an extraordinarily slow salt-crystal precursor to the transistor, with electrical currents visible inside it. He refused requests from the Nazi government to work with potentially more useful materials. Re-enacting this experiment, Joost Rekveld explores non-toxic, anti-fascist and fully transparent technology whose slowness connects it to a history of technological refusal.

Fara Peluso
Wisdom from the Underworlds
Fara Peluso explores diatoms and earthworms as agents of regeneration, remediation and transformation, operating at scales and rhythms beyond human perception. Drawing on Theca, DIY Hack the Panke and Living Library, she shares how observing and listening to these organisms challenges ideas of subjectivity, temporality and life, opening other understandings of community, care and coexistence.

Gökay Atabek
In B10d13$3L-LLM, Gökay Atabek uses a small AI model powered by DIY biodiesel to reveal the energy, materials and infrastructure needed to make AI work.