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In this chapter Pia Ednie Brown takes a vitally materialist approach to discussing the nonhuman creativity that comes from the house which, like any creative project, is like a living creature whose personality changes in time and whose vitality of matter is wild. Architecture as assemblages of forces, humans as a force that becomes part of a tangled ecology and the house, acting like any personality, perpetually evolving and being discovered, while in relation to us humans, it is yet another responsibility for which we are never utterly in control of. The chapter attempts to approach anthropomorphising without falling into its indisputable dangers. As the author suggests, new forms of value can be generated if things can be thought of as persons. That way we may manage to usher their activity to attention.

Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another self-organising pile, an assemblage of events operating across scales of temporality, materiality and affectivity and bitumen, a vital and vibrant surface of our living. A language shift away from clichés and stereotypes resets a new ecology of human and nonhuman materiality at work. Impressively vivid, live instances, captured in words, describe the malleability of all agents entangled in the same ecology. Bitumen is introduced through a coagulated dialogue between a poetic and philosophical voice. The labourer is replaced with that of a caretaker, informed by an ethic of care. This call for care is woven as a secondary thread into the context as both a disruptive and a reparative act, much as the roadworker’s high-visibility tribal garbs both screams ‘Take care!’ and reassures ‘I’ll take care of it’.

In 1895, a radical new visual technology was invented. This chapter explores X-ray imagery of the human body as an important coda to the story of portraiture’s changing representations of subjectivity and soma. X-ray imagery was a major aesthetic development, making manifest and somewhat literal much of nineteenth-century art’s imaginative drive inward. Here I explore the first few years of X-ray imagery and practices, focusing on how scientists, reporters, and writers figured the X-ray in writing. In particular, this chapter explores how in those first experimental years, writers were disturbed by the X-ray’s ability to alter human surfaces, particularly the skin.