On the Agency and Activity of Materials in the 21st Century

Starting the last decades of the 20th century a shift has occurred in how materials are being considered.
Materials were no more considered as being passive, inert and shaped by an active human agent, as plastic
or iron were usually considered during the end of the 19th century. The rising discipline of materials
sciences during the second half of the 20th century, especially with the recent research on ‘active’, ‘smart’,
‘autonomous’ and ‘bio-inspired’ materials, has started to view materials as having their own agency. In our
contribution we aim to review few examples of this shift, examining also the works of James Gibson, Tim
Ingold and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. We aim to show that in its contemporary uses, ‘agency’ is the
point where the dualisms action/passion and agent/patient are erased and also where the subject/agent is
defined in a new way. The question arises, not only whether situating agency also at the side of the materials
decenters the notion of action itself, but also whether agency has to be understood as being distributed in
an ecology that influences and motivates both the material and the human subject?