Fabricant Worlds: The power of matter, machine, imagination

Materials are purveyors of potentials, entwined in hidden infrastructures. Our material world is shaped not only by researchers who harness the power of technology but also by artists and designers who interpret the poetics of these scientific advances and imagine new worlds into being. Machines that sustain worlds they create.

Fabricant Worlds joins performance, sound, visual arts and material science to consider how advanced materials research – from semiconductors to biomedical substances – shape cultural imaginaries and possible futures.

Showcasing the results of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Royce at Cambridge, the Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts (CSVPA) Graduate School, and the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, in partnership with the Maxwell Centre, this exhibition positions the artist as fabricant: not only maker, but world-maker.

Fabricant Worlds joins the creative and scientific expertise of artists, designers, performers and lab scientists, to create a multi-day installation. This will begin with a live performance on the opening day at the Cavendish Laboratory’s Maxwell Centre, and will display the works produced by artists responding to the question at the project’s heart: How might artists and designers use creativity and imagination to engage with the material and technological realities that structure our world?