A guest on Lebbeus Woods’ blog, Manuel DeLanda writes on Material Expressivity. An excerpt below:

Physical information pervades the world and it is through its continuous production that matter may be said to express itself. Material expressivity, on the other hand, crossed an important threshold when it ceased to be a mere fingerprint and became functional in the form of the genetic code: groups of three nucleotides, the chemical components of genes, came to correspond in a more or less unique way to a single amino acid, the component parts of proteins. Using this, correspondence genes can express themselves through the proteins for which they code. This implies that expression has gone beyond the production of information to include its active storage and processing. And this, in turn, implies that when populations of information-storing molecules replicate themselves, and when this replication is biased in one or another direction by the interactions of proteins with each other and with their environment, the expressive capacities of material entities may evolve and expand in a multiplicity of novel ways.

More DeLanda on materiality, including smart materials, here.