Considers the future of conservation and its connection to the human sciences. This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, "Cultures of Conservation," was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long as people have made things and kept things, they have also cared for and repaired them. Today, conservators use a variety of tools and categories developed over the last one hundred and fifty years to do this work, but in the coming decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. Looking ahead to this moment from the perspectives of history, philosophy, materials science, and anthropology, this volume explores new possibilities for both conservation and the humanities in the rethinking of active matter.

All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.

From molecular motors to bacteria, from crawling cells to large animals, active entities are found at all scales in the biological world. Active matter encompasses systems whose individual constituents irreversibly dissipate energy to exert self-propelling forces on their environment. Over the past twenty years, scientists have managed to engineer synthetic active particles in the lab, paving the way towards smart active materials. This book gathers a pedagogical set of lecture notes that cover topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and active matter. These lecture notes stem from the first summer school on Active Matter delivered at the Les Houches school of Physics. The lectures covered four main research directions: collective behaviours in active-matter systems, passive and active colloidal systems, biophysics and active matter, and nonequilibrium statistical physics--from passive to active.

The Explicit Material focuses on objects as complex constructs of material relations, and points to the increased blurring of boundaries between practices of conservation and curation, thereby announcing a shift in sensibilities and understanding of the objects’ material significance.

This innovative volume is the first to address the conservation of contemporary art incorporating biological materials such as plants, foods, bodily fluids, or genetically engineered organisms. Eggshells, flowers, onion peels, sponge cake, dried bread, breast milk, bacteria, living organisms—these are just a few of the biological materials that contemporary artists are using to make art. But how can works made from such perishable ingredients be preserved? And what logistical, ethical, and conceptual dilemmas might be posed by doing so? Because they are prone to rapid decay, even complete disappearance, biological materials used in art pose a range of unique conservation challenges. This groundbreaking book probes the issues associated with displaying, collecting, and preserving these unique works of art. The twenty-four papers from the conference present a range of case studies, prominently featuring artists’ perspectives, as well as conceptual discussions, thereby affording a comprehensive and richly detailed overview of current thinking and practices on this topic. Living Matter is the first publication to explore broadly the role of biological materials in the creative process and present a variety of possible approaches to their preservation. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/living-matter/ and includes videos and zoomable illustrations. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.

This book presents a comprehensive review of various aspects of the novel and rapidly developing field of active matter, which encompasses a wide variety of self-organized self-driven energy-consuming media or agents. Most naturally occurring examples are of biological origin, spanning all scales from intracellular structures to swimming and crawling cells and microorganisms, to living tissues, bacterial colonies and flocks of birds. But the field also encompasses artificial systems, from colloids to soft robots. Intrinsically out of equilibrium and free of constraints of time-reversal symmetry, such systems display a range of surprising and unusual behaviors.​ In this book, the author emphasizes connections between fluid-mechanical, material, biological and technological aspects of active matter. He employs a minimum of mathematical tools, ensuring that the presentation is accessible to a wider scientific community. Richly illustrated, it gives the reader a clear picture of this fascinating field, its diverse phenomena and its open questions.