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Human perception, orientation, and behavior have always emerged through ongoing relations with material environments. Spatial arrangements, architectures, tools, and material structures have not only shaped how bodies move, how attention is distributed, and how meaning is produced, but have themselves been shaped through human practices, habits, and ways of inhabiting the world. Material environments and human modes of perception have co-evolved, participating in shared processes of becoming in which neither materiality nor the human can be understood in isolation.

Building on this long history of co-becoming, contemporary conditions are increasingly shaped by technological and design practices that remain anchored in digital paradigms of abstraction and control. Despite operating within richly material environments, many current systems are developed through top-down models that prioritize prediction, optimization, and predefined outcomes. Materiality is frequently approached as something to be organized, instructed, or constrained, rather than as an active agent capable of contributing its own dynamics to the formation of relations.

This orientation is closely entangled with how knowledge about human perception and neural functioning is applied in spatial, architectural, and environmental design. Insights into attention, affect, and behavior are often mobilized to subtly guide actions, modulate temporal experience, and stabilize desired responses. Architectural layouts, interfaces, and spatial cues are designed to keep bodies engaged, to delay disengagement, or to steer decision-making in ways that are economically or behaviorally advantageous. Neurological knowledge thus becomes embedded in material arrangements that not only operate below the level of conscious awareness, but transform perception into a resource to be managed and monetized.

What is largely overlooked in these practices is that both perception and neural functioning are themselves grounded in material organization and plasticity. Neural processes do not operate independently of their material conditions; learning, adaptation, and responsiveness arise from intricate material arrangements whose capacities cannot be fully prescribed or externally imposed.

This oversight extends beyond biological systems. Technological developments, particularly in fields such as material science and fabrication, are themselves deeply dependent on engaging with the behaviors of materials. Technological advancement does not proceed by arbitrary design alone, but through sustained interaction with what materials can and cannot do. Structures, circuits, and systems emerge through processes of testing, adjustment, and responsiveness, requiring an attentiveness to material tendencies rather than their complete domination. In this sense, technological innovation already involves forms of learning with material behavior, even when this is not explicitly acknowledged.

Across both biological and technological domains, material systems exhibit capacities for self-organization, adaptation, and mutual regulation. These processes do not unfold in isolation but through relational dynamics in which multiple agencies participate. Rather than being produced by a single controlling logic, such systems come into being through ongoing coordination and co-production – processes that are better understood as sympoietic rather than autopoietic, emphasizing collective becoming over self-contained autonomy.

Seen from this perspective, neither materiality nor human perception can be understood as primary drivers acting upon a secondary domain. Rather, through the lens of the couplings that give rise to material and perceptual processes in the first place, what appears as changing material conditions from one reading and as perceptual reconfigurations from another could as well be understood as different readings of one and the same mode of becoming. It is here that the project at hand unfolds: as a situated exploratory practice, navigating this multi-layered field and participating in the very couplings through which it takes shape.

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