INbetweenSTITUTE

The future of culture is hybrid.
Cultural innovation lies in the cross-pollination between different fields, approaches and expertise.

Cooking, Discussion, Lecture, Presentation
2021/2022/2023

@ Hybrid Space Lab
Berlin

Marleen Stikker, founder and director
Waag Future Lab for Design and Technology

Presentation and Discussion
18.00-20.00, 30 November 2021

@ Hybrid Space Lab
Berlin

Merlijn Schoonenboom, cultural historian and journalist
Hybrid Face
Presentation and Discussion
18.00-21.00, 16 February 2023

@ Hybrid Space Lab
Berlin

FM Einheit, musician, sound researcher, actor, composer, producer and founding member Einstürzende Neubauten
LI Zhenhua, master chef, curator, poet, filmmaker and artist
Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, media archaeologist, writer and curator
The Common Meal
Cooking and Music
February 2023

@ Hybrid Space Lab
Berlin

Hybridity

Hybridity captures this and cherishes the intersection and dialogue between digital and the physical; heritage and critical perspectives; nature and the built environment; the biological and the technological; human and other-than-human lives; trans-disciplinarity within arts and culture and with other approaches to knowledge production, including scientific, research-based, and crowd-sourced knowledge creation.

Hybrid cultures are anchored and embedded in physical spaces and increasingly disseminated, shaped, and negotiated in trans-local media networks. Cultural hybridity – with co-creative, polyphonic, plural and heterogeneous hybrid cultures – is therefore a central feature of our current situation in today’s globalized world.

Hybridity promotes mutual enrichment, and ultimately that is all cultural innovation is about.

And now, picture an un-disciplinary experience where cultural innovation can take place. Something which is at once rooted and mobile and versatile. A platform for cultural institutions, activists, laypeople and audiences to co-create cultural innovation. A project that grows organically from ongoing, past and future contributions, incrementally shaping up to a constellation of ideas, projects and contexts.

A creative open space between a playground for cultural innovations, a museum and a place of trans- and un-disciplinary research – and this is where INbetweenSTITUTE happens.

INbetweenSTITUTE is a platform where multiple transdisciplinary collaborations are grounded and aired. INbetweenSTITUTE hosts and coordinates wide-ranging projects, backgrounds and programs, whilst accelerating the cultural innovation processes that make them possible.

INbetweenSTITUTE combines and merges the best of both worlds – the physical and the digital one – fostering collaborations on innovative hybrid, transferable and versatile co-creative formats. Through the support of a mobile, modular media infrastructure, the program engages with practices that can make culture ā€˜go-round’ in its hybridity, embedding and merging digital social communication spaces with physical urban/natural environments.

Involving artist, creatives, cultural professionals from a very broad from very different fields (painting and sculpture, performance, dance, video, film, theatre, music, and sound as well as media and digital arts, gaming, and other interactive and online formats) and bringing them together with scientists and experts, activists, entrepreneurs, and decision makers in transdisciplinary international meetings and workshops enables the INbetweenSTITUTE network-building and exchange.

INbetweenSTITUTE is characterised by openness to multiple generations, languages, thresholds of engagements and species, as well as being alert to multiple futures.

The INbetweenSTITUTE trajectory includes scanning and evaluating existing practices as well as transdisciplinary speculative artistic/design research. As an exploratory project, INbetweenSTITUTE experiments with testing and prototyping, it disseminates results and provocations. As a learning and growing project INbetweenSTITUTE consists of a chain of programs incrementally building on one another.

Hybrid
Face

Presentation, Discussion
Merlijn Schoonenboom

18.00-21.00, 19 May 2023

@ INbetweenSTITUTE
Berlin

 

In the Digital Age, the face has become the most important representation of our identity. Firstly, to show ourselves to the world we use selfies and Zoom-meetings, which focus almost solely on the face. Secondly, digital facial recognition and emotional detection promise to identify the other on the basis of the face, and even unveil their most secret feelings. This focus on the face is not only the direct consequence of fast technical developments, but is also the result of a deeper desire stirring contemporary society.

In his cultural historical analysis, Merlijn Schoonenboom explores the ways in which the face has become so important in today’s society, and how this focus changes the way we use our face in daily life.

Merlijn Schoonenboom is a Berlin-based Dutch cultural historian and journalist writing on contemporary culture for international media. In Spring 2023, he is publishing his new book ā€œThe Face. A Cultural History from Veil to Selfieā€ (Amsterdam, Atlas Contact).