Frans Vogelaar was appointed Professor for Hybrid Space in 1998 at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany
The Academy of Media Arts (KHM) was founded in 1990 and offers an educational concept, unique within Germany, which brings film, art and science together.
The Academy of Media Arts is a teaching and research institution for media in Cologne, Germany.
Professor for Hybrid Space, Frans Vogelaar @ Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany, 1 April 1998
The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, KHM) was established in 1989 by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as a new type of art institution focused on media arts. The initiative was driven by the state’s Ministry of Science and Research, aiming to create an interdisciplinary educational model that integrated art, film, and media theory.
The academy commenced operations on October 15, 1990, enrolling 25 students in a postgraduate diploma program titled “Audiovisual Media.” In 1994, the institution expanded its offerings to include an undergraduate diploma program in the same field. Both programs were restructured and renamed “Mediale Künste” (Media Arts) in 2010. The undergraduate program spans nine semesters, while the postgraduate program covers four semesters.
Professor
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Hybrid Space
A new interdisciplinary field of design, researching the transformations of architectural, urban/regional space of the emerging “information age”, explores the dynamic interaction of architecture/urbanism and the space of mass media and communication networks. It develops scenarios for the interplay of public urban and public media space.
The products of these alliances of urban/regional and media networks, of architectural and media space, are bastards: ambivalent spaces that are at the same time analog and digital, tactile and abstract, material and immaterial, expanding hyper-sensuality in the time- and placelessness of media flows. These hybrid spatial morphs act simultaneously in urban (local) and media (global) space and mediate between them, unfolding the undefined space between the local and the global, occupying the vacuum between local place and global space. Within the inversions of identity (communication), within the fluid ever-changing densities in the knitted networks, fused analogue/digital cultures are idensified.
Space
The COVID-19 pandemic forces us to rethink space in a “more-than-human” perspective as a networked interconnected multi-species habitat that considers the humans in their relationship to the global environment, including viruses.
The pandemic-induced lock down creates the necessity to develop new digitally and social-distancing supported public communication spaces, as for large parts of the planetary population the ‘real’ world is and will stay inaccessible and cultural spaces such as exhibitions, museums, conferences, pop-up meetings, workshops and academies are shut down. In this critical situation we have the chance to develop a spatial conceptual approach to support collaborative interactions in order to actively shape these future hybrid (digital and physical) exploratory spaces – and not just the current main mode of collective social contact: the tele-conferencing-formats that have been developed for other purposes.
Examining the relationship of physical spaces with digital and media networks, enables us to explore the potential of hybrid space for artistic research and to develop new cultural formats. By exploring contemporary hybrid spaces in the context of sociopolitical, environmental, climate-related and technological acceleration, this investigation questions and informs the future of cultural space.
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