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.
#Hybrid Space
Hybrid Space focuses on methodologies to explore and develop in an integrated way the fusions of media space and physical place, these hybrid ambivalent spaces that are at the same time analog and digital, virtual and material, local and global, tactile and abstract.
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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.
Newsletter May 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic forces us to develop visions for future hybrid (combined physical and digital) public cultural spaces.
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.
Workshop”Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos”, @ Medialab Prado in Madrid , Lecture, @ TRACES in Milan, January 2019, Lecture, @ transmediale in Berlin, February 2019, Films, Talks, Discussions, Installation, Event @ Goethe Institut Madrid 6 May 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.
Hong Kong Jockey Club, 9-22 October 2017
Lab
Article “Politics of Space” for the Lab publication of the Academy of Media Arts.
The segregation processes in media environments are nothing but the enhancement of tendencies manifesting themselves in the “real” space with the creation of the urban ghettos and their counterparts, the (suburban) protected social reservoirs for the upper classes.
These access-controlled residential areas can be found today all over the world, in Third World and in western democracies as well as in the east neo-capitalist countries.
They range from heavily protected impenetrable fortresses to retirement towns for well-off pensioners or projects like Walt Disney’s Celebration – an entire residential town (not a theme park).
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.
Mediated Body
Media Art Festival in Hong Kong