The Unruliness of Matter looks at ways in which complexity, unpredictability, sensuality, and a vibrant materiality can be introduced into algorithmically driven sensing systems. The current proliferation of technological systems assumes that matter, the experience of being human and agency are calculable, indexical and goal oriented. In response, through three distinct material investigations, this thesis develops a novel framework for reconceptualizing human-machine assemblages. Each investigation constructs its own grid: an affective grid emerging through a series of video-essays that explore embodied narratives and radical presence, a sensory-conversational grid manifested in wearable environments woven with sensors and actuators that investigate gestural communication, and a kinky grid of photographic assemblages in conversation with algorithmic pattern recognition. Together they form a polymorphous framework where affect and encounter become primary–this framework is understood as a porous membrane and atmosphere where pattern moves from repetition to unruliness so that a distributed and disturbed topological surface can emerge. The practice introduces kinetic energy, depth, volume, intensity, vibration, and resonance to typically flattened algorithmic spaces. Through its varied manifestations, it develops an affective modality for representational practices and examines how the symbolic turns literal in encounters with materiality and technology, exposing the epistemological and ontological bearings embedded in algorithmic logics. The Unruliness of Matter charts a progression from an intimate relationship with the self and its immediate surroundings where an atmosphere is established, to a relationship of self with a proximate algorithmic other through embodied and gestural machine learning architectures in the form of two wearables, and finally to a direct and ongoing conversation with the algorithmic 'they'— plural yet singular, disembodied data aggregates consuming vast amounts of energy, both literally and psychically, turning atmosphere into a consolidated environment driven by economic infrastructures. In an urgent recapitulation of the paradigm shift that transverses biology, physics, and philosophy today, the making of the artifacts in the practice is undertaken as a series of encounters that introduce a polymorphous sensibility for describing technological affect. Each chapter weaves its own grid—affective, sensory-conversational, and kinky—coming together to propose a polymorphous framework that suggests new ways for imagining human-machine assemblages. This framework maintains the richness and complexity of human experience while engaging with technological systems in more nuanced, transformative ways. Through these material encounters and their deliberate kinking of established patterns, the work demonstrates how algorithmic systems might be recrafted from processes of reduction into expansive sites of co-creation and possibility.

Funder: AHRC [2066253]