As digital space is redefining almost all the common terms of physical space, materiality seems to be a top priority to be updated with this new order. Multiple tendencies actualize this new wave of reinventing materiality. We are dealing with a revolution of different methods and totally new tools to actually manipulate and fabricate the traditional materials. At the same time, a huge amount of the current research is being held on how a material is transformed to a media that carries information, dematerializing in this way materiality.
In the first category, materials such as concrete and glass are treated in such a way that we eventually "question" their rules and disciplines. We are able to interfere in the material and make it contradicting itself while the principle of its origin remains the same. Unexpected characteristics to traditional materials introduce stimulating spatial mutations. Francis Bacon comments on this inevitable replacement that enriches the experience of an action. In one of his paintings he represents a foot opening a door (instead of a hand that would make sense to everyone). He is convinced that if you represent a particular action by replacing a common feature of the action with an unexpected one, the experience of this action becomes even more powerful.
- bending concrete - 
In this sense, concrete can be trasparent, flexible and lighter in weight and can be used for ephemeral architectural structures, features that were not familiar with concrete in the past.
Of course it is not only a matter of a strong stimulus. The idea of "hypermaterial" that puts together the advantages of multiple materials and examines the behavior of composite materials in order to create improved versions and promote innovation is equally popular among the researchers. The University of Michigan has developed a new type of fiber-reinforced bendable concrete whch looks like regular concrete, but is 500 times more resistand to cracking and 40% lighter in weight. Tiny fibers that comprise about 2% of the mixture's volume partly account for its performance. Traditional concrete has many problems including the lack of durability and sustainability, failure under severe loading, and the resulting expenses of repair. U-M's Victor Li beleives that Engineering Cement Composites (ECC) addresses most of those problems. It looks exactly like regular concrete, but under excessive strain, the specially coated network of fibers veining the cement is allowed to slide within the cement, thus avoiding the inflexibility that causes brittleness and breakage, Li said.
Another example is the Concrete Canvas Shelter (CCS) is a shelter that conists of a cement-impregnated fabric (Concrete Cloth) bonded to the outer surface of an inflated plastic inner structure. The CCS is a rapidly deployable hardened shelter that requires only water and air for erection. It can be deployed by two people without any training in approximately thirty minutes and is ready to use in twelve hours.
The latest research on artificial intelligence and robotics is the frame of the second category, a process that tends to dematerialize materials and almost introducing to them "software" that interacts with the environment in order to gather and give back information. An almost sculptural form that invites people to touch it and sweats as a response making a sharp comment on the "wet" domain of nature and the "dry" domain of electronics. When multimedia is built in the material's own fabric, the material itself is more like a complicated system, an "installation" that is more powerful than the material itself. That affects the haptic and optic experience of space redefines human perception.
"Light-Emitting Roof Tiles" is an example that allows the intergration of additional functions within roof tiles are intergrated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and designed to display text, pictures, and other graphical content in multiple colors. Information may also be animated, such as with an illuminated news trailer.
- bubble sccreen strip - 
Another example is the Bubble Screen is a dot-matrix display that uses air bubbles as pixels. Developed by Eval Burstein at Beta Tank, this display can show images, text, and patterns and may be used as a low-resolution screen. The project required two years of development during which experts in the fields of automation, pneumatics, and academia were employed to solve a fluid dynamics challenge. The Bubble Screen is the intended to reveal alternative methods of information display and consumption and is exemplary of Beta Tank's ongoing ambient information-design project. [Contact: Beta Tank, London, UK]
All the examples are from the site of the book Trasmaterials:
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0304/msg00011.html
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