How can you create bodies in a new materialist way using clay?

As part of the New Materialist Research Group event BODIES: Art, Architecture, Archaeology, NMRG co-leads Dr. Victoria Sharples and Dr. Rebecca Howard facilitated a research-led, participatory workshop that extended their investigations into materiality and skin, following their exhibition and symposium An Elastic Continuum (2023). The workshop was built around the question: How can you create bodies in a new materialist way using clay?, while also exploring the immateriality of artificial intelligence. As part of the making process, Sharples and Howard engaged in dialogues with the machine, co-writing a series of performative, step-by-step audio instructions. These instructions were played aloud in the workshop space, prompting participants to respond, both materially and conceptually, to clay as a historically body-associated medium (with permeations across sculptural processes and mythology), and to AI as a disembodied, machinic body. The output functioned as site of research and pedagogical experiment. By applying a speculative methodology, situated with the field of New Materialism, the workshop contributed to contemporary posthuman dialogues. It evidenced how (dis)embodied making practices can function as critical tools for rethinking the boundaries of body, material, and architectural space.