More recently, an interest in the materiality of object has arisen in philosophical and art historical discourses where the need to reconstitute the presence of an embodied human within a material world has become more and more pressing. Similarly, to Speculative Realism, New Materialism aims to link current ethical and political concerns related to science and technology—climate change, global capital, population flows, biotechnological engineering, and the digital, wireless, and virtual prosthetics that make our lives what they are today. Thinking materialities in new ways thus entails surpassing Cartesian conceptions of matter and the dualisms that conceived nature as a quantifiable and measurable entity that can be subjugated. Simultaneously, new developments in contemporary art, theory and criticism, have posed new critical questions about the neglect of materiality that has characterized art history.

The current issue of Antennae is dedicated entirely to surfaces while the second instalment that will follow focuses on more heterogeneous notions of materiality. As per every issue, we have attempted to map new territories by juxtaposing works of art and texts that creatively provide opportunities to rethink surfaces in the context of non-human agency and the anthropocene.