Project Z-Form: An Aleatory Modeling Investigation explores overlapping territories of contemporary sculptural practice and physics research related to the study of granular materials. Investigating new approaches and concepts at the intersection of granular materials research and architecture/structural engineering, the research explicitly includes stochastic (re)configuration of individual structural elements and suggests that building materials and components can have their own agency—that they can be designed to adapt and to find their own responses to spatial contexts. Scaling a theoretical research model into human dimensions opens complex questions of meaning. The project simultaneously explores ecological sourcing of materials, aesthetics, and the social dimensions of modular production and presentation.

Heinrich Jaeger is the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD in physics in 1987, under Allen Goldman at the University of Minnesota, working on ultrathin superconducting films. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Chicago (1987–89), Jaeger spent two years at the Centre for Submicron Technology of the University of Delft in the Netherlands. He has been on the faculty at Chicago since 1991, directing the Chicago Materials Research Center (2001–06) and the James Franck Institute (2007–10). Jaeger's current research focuses on investigations of self-assembled nanoparticle-based structures, on the rheology of dense suspensions, and on studies of the packing and flow of granular materials.

Dan Peterman is an artist whose work combines innovative strategies of local engagement and activism with national and international exhibitions, projects, and installations. Among his diverse projects, Peterman explores networks of recycled or discarded materials to produce starkly minimal works that function interchangeably as stockpiles, sculpture, functional objects, and critiques of environmental oversight and neglect. Peterman is a founder and  current board member of the Experimental Station, an innovative Chicago-based incubator of small-scale enterprise and cultural projects. He is also an associate professor in the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Peterman is currently represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York.