Topologies of Transformation

Topologies of Transformation is an interactive spatial installation that renders bars and coffee houses in Berlin and Hanoi legible as repositories of the economic, political, and social transformations of both cities; it was developed in a cooperation between TH Köln and the Vietnam University of Fine Arts.

“The form of a city changes faster, alas, than a mortal’s heart.” — Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire wrote about the rebuilding of Paris in the nineteenth century; the observation applies with particular force to metropolises that have passed from a socialist to a market-oriented order. Berlin and Hanoi served as the first two case studies. The work proceeds from the assumption that a city’s fleeting appearance tells the story of its transformations most clearly precisely where the evidence of those processes escapes the obvious. Not monuments, therefore, but bars and coffee houses stand at the centre: the small rooms of local interaction in which furniture, objects, and habits are deposited over decades.

Visitors load a specific location from either city into a self-built controller; the system translates that interior into an ordered exploded view through which one can navigate in time. Legible in this way are the changes to the space and the artefacts that have accumulated within it.

Techniques: Unity 3D · Playmaker · Arduino · Photoshop

With: Vietnam University of Fine Arts · TH Köln · Prof. Dr. Oliver Baron · Hannes Hummel · Fabian Schäfer · Steffen Brücken