A handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times intended to help readers imagine and make their world anew.

In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time-from the deep past to the unfolding future. The authors search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus. The book explores the many different kinds of knowledge, and the diversity of instruments needed to invoke and actuate the potency of human and nonhuman agencies. Four key phases in our ways of knowing are identified: material, strengthening, reconfiguring and extending, which are exemplified through case studies that take the form of worlding experiments.

This pioneering work will inspire architects, artists and designers as well as students, teachers and researchers across arts and design disciplines.

Rolf Hughes is professor in the epistemology of design-driven research at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, and director of artistic research for the Experimental Architecture Group. An interdisciplinary artist and performer, his writing spans creative and critical genres.

Rachel Armstrong is professor of experimental architecture at Newcastle University and visiting professor at KU Leuven. She pioneers the interdisciplinary field of "living architecture," which engages the material and technological potency of life within spatial agendas.

1. Introduction

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes

1. Acknowledgement
2. Overview

2. Material Knowledge

Rachel Armstrong

1. Primordial

Big Bang origin of universe

Everything is entangled

Strangeness of the mind

Where does agency reside?

Origin of planet Earth

Biogenesis

First Great Enfolding

A new kind of extinction

2. The first civilisation

3. Strengthening Knowledge

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes

1. Origin of Human Thought

Origin of Humans

Origin of Thought and Language

Early Origins of Formal Knowledge

2. Communities of thinking
3. Development of Modern Science

4. Reconfiguring Knowledge

Rolf Hughes

1. Beyond giving an account: the dark continents of research
2. Epistemology and subjectivity
3. The formation of artistic research
4. The description problem in artistic research
5. The concept of exposition in artistic research
6. The challenge of evaluating "unconventional" research outcomes
7. Epistemic plurality
8. Transverse epistemologies
9. Epistemic partiality

5. Extending Knowledge

Rachel Armstrong

1. Organa Paradoxa
2. Nonhuman dimensions
3. Worlding Experiments

Sym-practices

Sym-biosis

Sym-biogenesis

Sym-poiesis

Sym-pathy

An Ethics of Care

Worlding as an Entangled Practice

Vulnerability

Imagination

Familiarity

Empathy

Care

Provocation

Repetition

Non-innocent Perspectives

6. Worlding Case Studies

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes

6.1 Performance

Creature Box

The Capsule of Crossed Destinies

Trace Hall

6.2 Artefacts

Brick Dialogues

Caustic Ophelia

Cracked Hermione

Living Architecture

Exploring Interfaces

Synthetic Ethics

Expressing Outcomes

Monstering: A Transdisciplinary Method for an Unstable World

The Temptations of the Nonlinear Ladder

Making Monsters

Monsters in Utopia

Learning from Landscape: Forging Folklore, Tallinn Tales

From Victoria Tunnel to Quantum Tunnelling

Wicked Home: Sacred Spaces

1. Towards an Ecological Era of Knowledge Exchange

7. Conclusion

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes

1. A new kind of knowledge: Organa Paradoxa
2. Change-making

Developing appropriate toolsets

Establishing new figures for thinking through

Reconfiguring power relations

Expanding the nature of experiment

3. Activating Knowledge

8. Epilogue

Rolf Hughes

8.1 An Art of Unfolding

Index