Research Associate, BU Wuppertal
Design of Interactive Media · Faculty of Design and Art
From April 2023 to March 2026 I was a research associate in the sub-programme Design of Interactive Media at the University of Wuppertal, based in the Media Design + Spatial Design division of the Faculty of Design and Art.
There I taught interface and interaction design, from interface technologies to the question of which actors, apparatuses, and infrastructures an interface mediates between and which actions it invites, permits, or forecloses. Media theory formed part of the teaching, as did the supervision of student projects.
Among them was Zusammenspiel by Maximilian Petzold, a musical instrument for two players that only sounds when their fingers touch: the interface lies between two people rather than between a person and a machine. It was shown in 2026 at Kunsthalle Barmen in the exhibition Effort + Flow, which was realised in cooperation with the Collaborative Research Centre 1701 Port-Hamiltonian Systems at the university and brought together works on energy flows, interactions, and couplings between systems. Together with Prof. Kristian Wolf I also supervised O8, a second project from the sub-programme shown in the same exhibition.
Alongside the teaching I continued the research on robot-assisted telesurgical operations begun in Cologne. The essay Beyond Boundaries, a phenomenological inquiry into the exteriorisation of the surgical gesture in teleoperative systems, dates from this period; it resulted from the field research project Robotic Operations and was published in TETI Journal in 2024. I had already presented the project itself in the Wuppertal series somehow affected in December 2022, a few months before taking up the position. In April 2026 I moved to Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as a doctoral candidate and research associate in the Research Training Group 3064 “Technologies of Witnessing” (Techniken des Bezeugens).