Fabricant Worlds: The power of matter, machine, imagination

Join us for the opening of the Fabricant Worlds performance showcasing the results of an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Henry Royce Institute, the Maxwell Centre, and the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge School for Visual and Performing Arts Graduate School.

Materials are purveyors of potentials, entwined in hidden infrastructures. Our material world is not shaped only by researchers who harness the power of technology but also by artists and designers who interpret the poetics of these scientific advances and imagine new worlds into being. Machines that sustain worlds they create.

Fabricant Worlds joins performance, sound, visual arts and material science to consider how advanced materials research; from semiconductors to biomedical substances, shape cultural imaginaries and possible futures.

Fabricant Worlds joins the creative and scientific expertise of artists, designers, performers and lab scientists, to create a multi-day installation. This begins with a live performance on the opening day at the Maxwell Centre and will display the works produced by artists responding to the question at the project’s heart: How might artists and designers use creativity and imagination to engage with the material and technological realities that structure our world?

The exhibition will remain open until 2 April 2026 (opening hours: weekdays, 10:00 am–4:00 pm; closed at weekends).