From 2021 to 2024, OK-RM assembled a group of artists, designers, architects, researchers, musicians, and dancers to create new propositions for collective working and making. A year after their initial dissemination, these propositions continue to reverberate widely, convening new publics for collaboration. Reimagined in a revised edition, Nature of Materiality is once again primed to facilitate these world-making endeavours. 

Originally commissioned by Goldwin 0 as part of OK-RM's multi-year residency, the book's function remains resolute: a means to influence and inspire through new forms of creativity; to test out new modes and practices of collaborative work; to create forms that would be enriching to us, our communities and participants; and to set off a generative cycle of extended learning. 

The book is a report of the five stages of exploratory research—Enquiries— in which the collaborators pursued a dynamic synthesis of creativity, practice, and communication through the creation of films, performances, publications, poetry, images, sculptures, and musical compositions. Exploring alternative methods of publication and design, it is guided by the principle of ‘orchestration’: the act of creating a single project from the choreography of multiple parts.

The book’s materiality embodies the Enquiries’ working methods of transparency,
hybrid combinations, lightness, curiosity, and participation. Printed in silver and constructed as a single, circular object, the reader is invited to engage with the book as an open-ended, non-linear experience, and to become a participant in its spirit of inquiry.