On Friday 30 September 2016, at the Iklectic Art Lab near Waterloo, London, the Informed Matters community of practice held its first symposium. It was entitled “Material Others and Other Materialities”. A Storify-cation of the Symposium can be found at https://storify.com/anotherwindle/informed-matters-flusser-and-bec

In the first presentation of the Phenomenological Materialities panel, Ken Wilder in a paper entitled “The Immateriality of Titian’s Pesaro Altarpiece”, posed the question of how the seemingly ‘immaterial’ (cloud) could be represented (in a material medium, that of paint) so that it could serve as the ground (a material metaphor) for the ascendancy of the Virgin Mary from the material realm to the spiritual (‘immaterial’) realm. His talk was therefore densely allegorical, but allegorical as a mode of the critical relation, while also seeking to show that this seemingly ‘immaterial’ ground and this seemingly ‘immaterial’ destination are themselves grounded in the institution of the Catholic Church, which is…