Newsletter February 2020

Animal Club connects creatives, ecologists, biologists, artists, philosophers and other experts with professionals from the club scene to generate new concepts and develop new business models for a sustainable future of clubbing and culture.

Presentation, Workshop, Panel, Party @ Amsterdam Dance Event @ SEXYLAND World, Amsterdam, 16.00-24.00, 2022

Animal Club connects creatives, ecologists, biologists, artists, philosophers and other experts with professionals from the club scene to generate new concepts and develop new business models for a sustainable future of clubbing and culture.

Presentation, Workshop, Panel, Party @ Amsterdam Dance Event @ SEXYLAND World, Amsterdam, 16.00-24.00, 2022

The way people communicate and connect around the world today, is being radically redefined by digitalization. With the acceleration of digitization as one of the most obvious consequences of the pandemic, the use of digital tools is experiencing an unprecedented rise among arts and cultural institutions and practices.

Publication @ tanz Yearbook 2022, Germany, 15 August 2022

The notion of a circular city has taken to occupy center stage as a main concept for sustainable zero-waste urban futures. And yet, as one takes a closer look, the circle expands in multiple ripples and loops, revealing the sheer complexity that envisioning – let alone developing – circular cities entail.

Lectures, Workshops, Symposium, FieldLab @ Hybrid Space Lab, 2022 – 2024

The workshop “Conflict Space” taking place at the International Symposium on Electronic Art ISEA2022 in Barcelona deals with the re-signification of a very contentious Franco monument and is part of the ‘Deep Space’ research on the politics of memory and heritage in the digital age.

Convers(at)ions engages creatively with exchanges over border phenomenology and performativity, it transforms negative spaces such as military demarcations and borders by adopting a ‘more-than-human’ perspective and taps into the potential of nature and environmental conservation activities.

What are engaging, inclusive, and sustainable hybrid formats and spaces for art and culture?

Hybrid Workshop “The Future is not Digital. Hybrid is the Future!” @ HoloLab – dive in Program for Digital Interaction, 13.30 – 18.00, 14 October 2021

In our globalized world the accelerating speed of socio-political and cultural change collides with the longue-durée of heritage sites and territories. As social and political contexts around places with a public meaning change, controversies often arise.

Publication Re-Charting Places @ Contested Spaces – Concerted Projects: Designs for Vulnerable Memories, LetteraVentidue Edizioni, Syracuse, Italy, April 2021

Club Futures is an international laboratory with the aim of developing new perspectives for the club and cultural scene.

Exchange, Ideation, Research, Panels, Parties, Prototyping, Workshops @ Club Futures, Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin & Amsterdam, 2022~2023

Investigating and speculating on the future of social and cultural spaces requires considering physical spaces in combination with digital media networks, emphasizing the hybrid qualities of spaces in the interplay of the digital and the physical.

Publication Hybrid Space @ @ Regeneration [and its Discontents], Lithuanian Architectural Foundation, Vilnius, Lithuania, 4 June 2021

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Publication Post COVID-19 City
@ KHM #0 Magazine, Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne, Germany, 1 July 2022

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.

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

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.

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 one’s own hands.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

Lectures, Discussions, @ Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, 2019-2020

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.

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.

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.

Publication @ de Architekt, The Netherlands, June 1998

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 systems are replacing the logics of the industrial age, where the creative ones designed for the non-creative masses.

Publication @ World Architects, WEB, 11 May 2012

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

From Smart City to Smart Citizen: mapping the Smart City, empowering the Smart Citizen.
Smart City is the fusion of the Urban and the Digital Age.
Ubiquitous digitalisation together with the increasing complexity of global challenges demand for interdisciplinary co-designing processes, involving society at large.

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.

Floating Media Laboratory, Cologne to Amsterdam, 8-15 October 1999

INbetweenSTITUTE is a strategy for strengthening the Beijing art district 798 as a resilient creative cluster and as China’s Creative Lab.

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

This general trend reflects on all aspects of our existence: culture, politics, economics, etc. and, of course, on cities. One of the most significant achievements of the 20th century – network technologies – have provided our planet with a totally new digital layer: virtual reality. This has given rise to a whole new sphere of interplay between urban and media networks. Communication networks are changing our society.
Interview by the STRELKA Institute in Moscow for the Future Urbanism project – forty one interviews with contemporary writers, architects, sociologists, economists and city planners.

Anastassia Smirnova, Programming Director @ Strelka Institute, Moscow,  15 December 2013

The workshop focused on hybrid space and its notations. 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.

Workshop, Installation & Lectures @ Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland, March – April 2011

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.

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.

Article, Research & Lecture Architecture of Succession @ European Forum Alpbach, Austria, 1 August 2006

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.

Interview Many to Many @ Deutsche Bauzeitung, Germany, 1 March 2006

The property becomes the interface, the house develops into a “smart”. Network environment. Similar to the car, the connected car, which is not just a project from Microsoft, but has long been a reality.

Interview social construction of technology @ Bundesgartenschau 2005, BUGA, Munich, 1 September 2005

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.

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

Concept @ European Cultural Capital Ruhr, German, 2003

Infodrome is a think tank for the Dutch government in the information society. The objectives of Infodrome are gaining insight into the social consequences of the information revolution , organizing and feeding the public debate about the role of government in this, and advising the government on relevant strategic choices.

Research & Publications @ Infodrome, Den Haag, The Netherlands, March 2000

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.

Publication @ KHM Yearbook for Art and Apparatus, Academy for Media Arts, Cologne, Germany, 1 October 1998

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

Professor Hybrid Space @ Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany, April 1998

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. 

Publication Media & The City @ de Architekt, den Haag, the Netherlands, July 1997

The new image of Man looks roughly like this: we have to imagine a network of human interrelations, a ‘field of intersubjective relations’. The strands of this web must be conceived as channels through which information (ideas, feelings, intentions and knowledge etc.) flows. When these strands knot for a moment, they form what we call ‘human subjects’. The totality of the strands constitutes the concrete sphere of life and the knots are abstract extrapolations.

Article @ Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, July 1999

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.

Exhibition Demand your Right to Broadcast! @ Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, 24 July 1991