news

Program Board @ Culture Computing Conference 2021

Culture and Computing is an important research area which aims to address the human-centred design of interactive technologies for the production, curation, preservation and fruition of cultural heritage, as well as developing and shaping future cultures.

Hybrid Space @ China University of Geo Sciences

With the rapid development and application of the discipline of human ergonomics, the number of people engaged in teaching and scientific research in the field of design ergonomics in China has been increasing.

Right to Hybrid City @ Architecture Magazine Marlowes

As the use of digital instruments is rapidly increasing during the current COVID-19 pandemic, new options for spatial organization and the possible consequences of digitization are more sharply outlined. This creates the necessity to rethink the digitalization model we want to follow and to address issues such as who should benefit from digitization and what our city visions are.

Inclusive Democratic Digital @ Berlin

Workshop of the Digital City Alliance Berlin on “COVID-19: Lessons learned for the Berlin Digitization Strategy” focusing on observations and experiences during the spring 2020 pandemic and drawing conclusions for a democratic and inclusive digitization policy for Berlin.

Bricks & Bits @ Lithuanian Radio

Interview at the radio program of the Lithuanian Union of Architects on how the physical and the digital dimensions of the city interact, on how to develop them in an integrated way, making the city more fair, comfortable, and attractive.

Hybrid Space @ National Gallery of Art Vilnius

The lecture describes the development of Hybrid Space Lab’s approach to urban and spatial phenomena, coining Hybrid Space as a new set of conceptual tools and a new qualitative space from the encounter of the physical and the digital.

Regeneration & Discontent @ National Gallery of Art Vilnius

The way we encounter urban transformations in the modern city vary sharply — for some, such development marks the emergence of new and ‘smarter’ future whereas for others a grave omen of a tomorrow they will have no part in. One of the most popular terms for describing these fraught changes is gentrification. While the term has been an effective means for expressing how social inequalities manifest in architecture and the urban landscape, it has a tendency of producing overly reductive narratives about predatory outsiders and local victims.

Experimental Space @ Weizenbaum Institute

What should spaces be like in which experiments with digital technologies are made, experienced and further developed? How can we provide access to and knowledge of digital technologies, and above all create ways to shape them, develop them further and experiment with them?

Digital Strategy @ Berlin

More than thirty organisations and individuals from science and civil society sign the statement of the Digital City Alliance of Berlin. Berlin needs an inclusive digitization policy that focuses on people, nature and the common good. The development process of this strategy must be transparent and enable the active participation of civil society.

Deep Space @ University Library Hamburg

Instead of creating a gap in this highly symbolic place, the international think tank Hybrid Space Lab represents the impetus to explore alternative memory narratives to the previously totalitarian narrative of the Valle de los Caídos.

Deep Space @ ARA

The Valley of the Fallen without Franco: the fate of the other 33,847 dead”
This is the title of the article by journalist Sílvia Marimom in the Catalan Newspaper ARA on the future of the Valle de los Caídos with an interview on Deep Space.

Surveillance Capitalism & Cognitive Architecture

Surveillance Capitalism is becoming an established notion with a number of meanings around the commodification of personal information and Berlin lecture the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff on 6 November 2019, organised by our partner Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society

Exhumation Finissage

On 24 September 2019 Spain’s Supreme Court approved unanimously the exhumation of the former dictator Franco from the underground basilica of Valle de los Caídos mausoleum. Hybrid Space Lab’s project “Deep Space: Re-signifying Valle de los Caídos” investigating what transformations are still needed at the Valle de los Caídos so as not to create a cenotaph – an empty burial monument – is becoming increasingly urgent.

Kiez@Lab @ Alliance Digital City Berlin

The challenges of digital transformation are becoming more and more tangible in the daily lives of Berliners. There is an increasing need to get involved and take the city’s digital future into its one’s own hands. From 2019 Berlin will develop a digital strategy in which goals for the digital future of the capital are to be formulated.

Deep Space @ Magazine for Architecture Marlowes

The Valley of the Fallen is a large memorial erected near Madrid in the mountain range of the Sierra de Guadarrama on the initiative of the dictator Francisco Franco. It is dedicated to the fallen of the Spanish Civil War. Within the scope of the project “Deep Space” it is proposed to transform the monument by digital means.

City to Go @ HIIG

Ubiquitous digitization is increasingly transforming urban life in all its aspects and Smart City technologies promise unlimited efficiency to urban mobility solutions. It is however worth reflecting on why digitally supported and automated negotiation concerning, amongst others, mobility does not necessarily equal objective and fair decision-making.

City Making in the Digital Age

City Lab provides a platform for Smart Citizens, bridging the gap between data- and city-experts and civil society and governance and addressing compelling issues at the merging of the Digital Age and the Urban Age.

Mart Stam Talks @ MakeCity

Lucas Verweij will moderate presentations and a panel discussion with leading artists and architects from the Netherlands and Germany who work at the interface of architecture, theatre, and material & surface design in the public space and develop remarkable, often participatory concepts.
The Mart Stam Talks are organized by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Mart Stam Stiftung für Kunst + Gestaltung and the Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.

Lectures + Panel, Mart Stam Talks @ Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Klosterstrasse 50, Berlin, 19.00-21.00 29 June 2018

Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos

“Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos” is a workshop at the Medialab Prado in Madrid from 25 till 27 October 2018 in Madrid. Hybrid Space Lab is co-organizing an international conference and executing workshops with public interventions and pop-up exhibitions in Berlin at the transmediale and in Rotterdam at the New Institute in 2019.

Technology & The City

BPD Magazine will publish in June 2018 a double interview with Prof. Frans Vogelaar, Partner at Hybrid Space Lab in Berlin and Prof. Dr. Elphi Nelissen, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) on how digitization is changing mobility and the city. They explore the possibilities of digital technologies for citizens and cities and the design of future cities.

Design Model

Lecture Design Model at the Communication University of China in Beijing, P.R. China
24 November 2017

Biotecture

Today’s agriculture is pioneering ‘smart’ developments such as robotics and autonomous driving on farms, drones and satellite monitoring or transponder-implants. With the help of green infrastructures, precision farming methods are informing Smart City development and enabling NatureTecture, a hybrid architecture integrating nature in built environment.
25-26 November 2017

Soft Urbanism

The exhibition New Silk Road at the Xi’an Art Museum in China facilitates the re-imagination of the cities along the network of the Silk Road.
Soft Urbanism, a vision of the urban in the digital age, based on a “Network Paradigm” approach to urbanism, reinvents the historic networks, connecting them to today’s hybrid, combined urban and media, networks, accelerating them into the future.
16 September-3 October 2017

Smart & the City

The exhibition Silk Road, Portal to World Imagination at the Xi’an Art Museum in China re-imagines the cities along the Silk Road. Smart & the City showcases the integration of Smart Technologies and the Urban, as tools for a sustainable New Smart Silk Road.
16 September-3 October 2017

Avant Garden

Humboldt Volcano is exhibited at the Crossing Border | Border Crossing, International Festival of Intermedia in Hong Kong. Humboldt Volcano, a hybrid building and vertical garden, is such an ‘inter-media’, as it opens up and enables the appropriation of the Berlin Humboldt Forum by an international multicultural public.

Mobility Immobility

The conference A2B is an initiative of architect Jacques Herzog. This year’s exhibition “We are building the future for you” was presented by the prominent lecturers as designers of the future. International luminaries of architecture in real space like Toyo Ito were placed alongside pioneers of virtual architecture: Elizabeth Sikiaridi explained the term ‘idensity’, which has already been protected by her, which describes the density of media and urban networks and the fusion of virtual and real spaces.

STRELKA Institute

Soft Urbanism is a new interdisciplinary field of design and planning.

Hutopolis

The social and economical transformations which are happening in both Russia and China are parallel in many ways and both countries are experiencing the shift from a planned economy to new models of development.

Cognitive Architecture

Contemporary theory on architecture and the mind.

projects

Hybrid Platforms

Hybrid Platforms develops concepts and ideas for new cultural formats and is organized and curated by the NRW KULTURsekretariat and Hybrid Space Lab.

G AI A Green Artificial Intelligence Architecture

In the Anthropocene, the juxtaposition between nature versus artifact and designed environment is becoming obsolete. In the dissolution of this polarity lays a great chance: architecture (which in the allegorical depiction of the Vitruvian Primitive Hut by Marc-Antoine Laugier and Charles Eisen of 1753 had emerged from nature) merges with nature once again. Concept Architecture [...]

Reboot Culture

Reboot Culture experiments with collective cultural experiences deeply rooted in urban space, combining public physical space and public digital space. Through hybrid formats and the support of a mobile, modular media infrastructure, the program engages with practices that can make culture ‘go-round’ in its hybridity, embedding cultural co-creation in the city fabric. With floating stage and studio facilities at the riversides Reboot Culture merges (urban) landscapes with Hybrid Staging, developing a strong symbolic momentum for the rebooting of culture.

(Re)Venue

As museums and cultural institutions face the prospect of a 1.5mt-apart life and economy, how to offer meaningful visitors’ experiences whilst keeping afloat of financial needs has become a most pressing question.

Post COVID-19 City

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital instruments is rapidly increasing. As the possible consequences of digitization are more sharply outlined, this opens new possibilities for spatial organization. This urges us to reconsider the guiding principles and models for the urbanization of technology we want to follow and what our city visions are. We can still choose.

Hybrid Staging

With its physical distancing measures, the COVID-19 pandemic is destroying public space as we know it. The current crisis creates the necessity – and emergency – to rethink cultural space.

Networked City

What is the relationship between city visions and urban concepts from the past and today’s Smart City narratives?

Climate City

Climate City explores how digital technologies contribute to addressing climate adaptation and develops digitalization strategies that take urban sustainability into account. Climate City focuses on digitally supported participatory climate adaptation and is committed to the idea that a smart city should be a climate-conscious city.

Kiez Lab

Voiced Space

Human activity and its far-reaching interactions have always transformed territories by moving people, plants, goods and animals. As such, territories have become richly stratified – and interactions are always mutual and two-way. Countries and cities projecting their influence elsewhere have, in turn, been transformed by external inputs.

City Making in the Digital Age

Digitalization transforms our cities, with far-reaching efforts towards technology-powered increased efficiency, sustainability and at times participation. This raises new questions on privacy, data governance and (digital) design, historically unaddressed by city planning, architecture, civil society and governance. With cities worldwide striving to earn a “Smart City” reputation, it is however disputed who exactly benefits from these concepts.

City to Go

The classic means of transport – car, bicycle, public transport and walking are increasingly supplemented and integrated with upcoming forms of mobility. Which user groups are the target of the new digitally supported and data-powered mobility services such as car sharing, ride sharing, rental bikes and electric scooters?

Tools for Heritage

By unlocking the potential laying at the intersection between arts, technology, memory studies and sciences, the workshop has cracked open the interwoven, historically painful meanings of the monument, envisioning its possible futures, once Franco’s remains will be exhumed from the site. Opening, Exhibition, Lecture, Discussion 5 June 2019 @ Goethe Institut Madrid Hybrid Heritage The [...]

Hybrid Heritage

In a globalized world, the polyphony of voices gaining and demanding recognition generates the necessity and the possibility to reconsider contested heritage. The collective reckoning with controversial history and the processes of re-signification and restitution deal with complex issues that have to account for a multitude of claims. We therefore need a fresh, radically innovative outlook with a solutions-oriented approach to address the various forms of contested heritage – be they objects, monuments, sites – in a way that is fit for the 21^st century.

Future Narratives and Immersive Experiences Symposium

The “Future Narratives and Immersive Experiences” symposium addresses the challenges posed by these developments by bringing together interdisciplinary co-creators in the audiovisual sector, companies with a background in media, VR / AR / MR, games, 3D sound, in the staging of productions, in communication and advertising as well as cultural and heritage institutions and players from other fields with the urge of delivering high-quality storytelling in the digital era.

City Making Lab

City Making Lab is a series of programs focusing on digitalization and the city. City Making Lab is a co-operation between Hybrid Space Lab and Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). City Making Lab investigates ongoing developments at the intersection of cities and digital technology, engaging with urban mobility and public space, new patterns of space utilization for living and working, circular city, climate adaptation and healthy cities.

Deep Space

Deep Space is a long-term investigative program initiated to deal with politics of memory,controversial space and monuments, digitalization and heritage.”Deep Space: Re-signifying Valle de los Caídos” was initiated and conceptualized in February 2018 by Hybrid Space Lab as an element of the long-term “Deep Space” exploration and intervention program.

Networked Urbanism

To reinforce the significance of public space we have to deal with at least two “public”, the global and the local public, by creating spheres where local and global public space can fuse and interchange.

Hybrid Prosumer

The workshop is an experimental laboratory that strongly interacts with the public. During the workshop the participants learn how to use a Do It Yourself (DIY) 3D printer and how to share the digital design information of physical objects through online communities.

Virtual Friction

The development of Virtual Reality (VR) is closely linked to the exploration of unknown territories. Virtual Reality, slowly emerging since the1920s, really took off in 1966 when NASA introduced this technology for flight simulation systems in its space program. As it was too expensive and too risky to train the astronauts by practising the real thing – launching them into the cosmos – methods had to be developed that could provide the trainees with a simulated experience: a small physical stimulus of acceleration, supported by and combined with visual information, was extrapolated and amplified in a ‘knock-on’ effect by the brains of the astronauts, providing them with the mental environment required to practise for the operation in (real) space.

Hybrid Space

Hybrid Space stands for the combinations and fusions of media and physical space. Hybrid spaces are the products of the alliances between physical objects and digital information/communication networks, of architectural/urban and media space.

Networked Participatory Design

Networked participatory design systems are replacing the logics of the industrial age.

Hybrid Urbanism

Soft Urbanism is a new interdisciplinary field of planning, investigating the transformations of space in the emerging information and communication age and designing the interplay of urban and media networks.
Hybrid Urbanism investigates the transformations of space in the information and communication age and develops and designs hybrid urban and media networks.

Cognitive Space

Media networks are influencing and interacting with ‘real’ places. These digital information-communication networks are changing our physical environment and also the social, economic, and cultural organization of our societies in general.

Demand your Right to Broadcast!

Media Babies on CHANEL NO.5 derives its strength from fragmentation in order to develop a truly public “narrow/broadcasting/catching media network. A local-based public interface the “Media Baby” is instrument that seduces its public to use and abuse the television medium, maximizing its possible spontaneity by hijacking the public’s imagination.

Soft City

Soft Urbanism is an interdisciplinary field that examines the “soft” aspects, the communication aspects, of the contemporary city.

Copy Culture

Hybridization is an evolutionary strategy of cumulative, dynamic cultures that are based on intercultural connections and fostered by cross-fertilization.

Media Babies on Chanel no.5

Telecommunications lacks the tangibility of real space. Conversely, the culture of the city needs to integrate digital technology

Global Challenges Smart Solutions

Highly innovative, creative and pragmatic Dutch approach to develop technology solutions for global challenges at the Hannover Messe 2014.

Soft Urbanism

In architecture’s role of defining and materialising the spaces for social interaction, designing the relationship between the physical and digital public domain is becoming THE challenge: investigating the relation and interconnection of the ‘soft’ city with its finite material counterpart, the living environment, speculating about interfaces between the ‘virtual’ and the material urban world, and designing hybrid (analog-digital) communicational spaces.

Soft Urbanism deals with information/communication processes in space, the soft aspects overlying the urban sprawl.

Idensity®

To understand the fusions, the superimposition and the interactions of media and ‘real’ architectural/urban spaces, the new term ‘idensity®’ replaces the obsolete conventional terms of spatial distinction.

Smart & the City

From Smart City to Smart Citizen: mapping the Smart City, empowering the Smart Citizen.

reBoot

For a week, from 8 October till 15 October 1999, a boat descended the Rhine, the archetypal symbol of connection between Germany and the Netherlands, as a floating media-laboratory, from Cologne on its way to Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

Infodrome

Infodrome is a thinktank for the Dutch Government. With research and the article “the use of space in the information- and communication age” we contributed to the publications, workshops and discussions.

Hybrid Design Institute

The merging of the three Dutch design related institutes, architecture, design and media, into a new hybrid design institute.

Hybrid Notations

The workshop focused on hybrid space and its notations, and participants included architects, urbanists, landscape architects, software and hardware engineers, philosophers, theatre makers and media artists. The workshop tackled the hybridity and complexity of urban environments, relying on a wide range of fields of expertise and artistic approaches.

Shrinking Car City

Electric vehicles are regarded primarily as regards sustainability, ie as a vehicle to support the entry into the post-fossil age. At the same time, the introduction of the new electro-powered motors opens up opportunities for the redefinition of the car with far-reaching consequences: the car is shrinking – and the public space of the city can grow again.

Neighbours Network City

Neighbours Network City: a project proposal for the city of Essen and the Ruhr region in Germany as the Cultural Capital of Europe.

Hybrid Habitat

Is there no security in the global world? The longing for more certainty in an increasingly complex world – and innovative solutions for coping.

Trust and certainty play an increasingly important role for people in the globalized world. Globalization does not only take place “outside”. For one’s personal environment is also becoming globalized – actual living space is expanded to encompass the virtual space of the Internet.

Network Space

Hybrid Space Lab is concerned with how the expanding media networks interact with the physical, the public space. Their work is to be seen at the International Architecture Biennale 1ab in Rotterdam. International Architecture Biennale 1ab in Rotterdam.

Domotica

Developments in the field of Domotica, the house is becoming SMART.

New Spatial Paradigms

New interdisciplinary fields of planning and design are introduced: Soft Urbanism, exploring the interaction of urbanism and the space of mass media and communication networks, and Hybrid Space Design, developing fused analog-digital / architectural-media spaces.

Media & City

Public urban space and the “space” of communication networks are usually considered to be competing, even mutually exclusive frameworks for social interaction. In fact, the traditional functions of public urban space are being taken over by telecommunication networks, their input/output devices implanted in (private) interiors.

Professor Hybrid Space

The seminars explore hybrid (fused physical and digital) space and how the urban can be read as a layered communication-sensitive membrane.