Beyond the Senses

In the research-based teaching project Beyond the Senses at KISD — Köln International School of Design at TH Köln, I worked as a staff member in the field of design theory and research on the new relations between bodies, environments, and medial practices, examined through the urban experience of Venice. The resulting designs were shown in 2018 at Palazzo Mora in Venice during the 16th Architecture Biennale.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, developments in information technology have reached into the relations between people, space, movement, and affect in previously unknown ways. Bodies communicate with medial, networked environments through data, neural networks control atmospheres and infrastructures, sensors lend things the capacity to sense. What does this comprehensive networking mean for the experience and imagination of urban environments, how do media shape self-perception in space, and how can physical materials be designed as media of communication?

The project linked these questions to the urban experience of Venice. The spaces of Venice constitute themselves in the bodily experience of the flowing and the fluid; they are spaces in which world and imagined world, reality and fiction, overlay one another in complex ways, and their perception is shaped by an immeasurable wealth of historical and contemporary images. From this observation emerged designs for urban medial environments: an interactive installation and audiovisual works that reflect the experience of the physical surroundings within a sensory network of body, structure, light, water, and sound.

The project was led by Prof. Dr. Carolin Höfler; Victor Carlier, Conrad Weise, Oliver Köneke, and I worked on it as staff. 17 students took part, and the project was accompanied by the Echtzeitstadt research unit at TH Köln. The works were shown from 16 to 23 November 2018 at Palazzo Mora of the Global Art Affairs Foundation, as part of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition.

The premise that seeing, hearing, and feeling are not naturally given faculties but effects of assemblages had been tested the year before in the exhibition Sense of Being Here, in three phygital room installations; in Screen Spaces I pursued it further in the image-space structure of robot-assisted surgery.

Cooperation partners: GAA — Global Art Affairs Foundation · European Cultural Centre, Venice

Funding: GAA — Global Art Affairs Foundation · European Cultural Centre, Venice · Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

Images: Michael Barion, Chroma, preview exhibition, KISD, 2018 (photos: H. Freres) · Victor Carlier, Corinna Duschl, Noelle Kalo, Dmitrii Kuznetsov, Andreas Mass, Maja Metzner, Luna Smolka, Hendrik Vohs, Conrad Weise, Translation of Presence, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 2018 (photos: D. Kuznetsov) · Film: Chroma Vaporetto by Michael Barion