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.
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.
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.
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.
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 21st 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