Embodied Futures. Knowledge and Movement

How do movement and the formation of knowledge relate to one another? The answer is as profound as it is exciting: Movement is not merely a physical act, but a fundamental catalyst for understanding! The new Public Engagement Hub at Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (ZfK) – Embodied Futures. Knowledge and Movement – is dedicated to this groundbreaking connection. This hub serves as a dynamic platform for projects and courses that utilize creative movement as a rigorous research method and a transformative educational tool. By integrating scientific, artistic, and practical perspectives, the hub fosters a participatory form of knowledge production. We are delighted that Cluster members Anna Schäffner, Léa Perraudin, and Shintaro Miyazaki are participating in the very first round of collaboration to explore these innovative research areas! The Hub currently has 10 members, of which 8 are working within tandems of researchers and body-based artists.

While interaction designer Anna Schäffner explores the field of soft robotics with multidisciplinary artist Michela Filzi, environmental media scholar Léa Perraudin, and artist Monika Gabriela Dorniak, together with the community, reflect on the contamination of Tempelhofer Feld. Media scholar Shintaro Miyazaki and choreographer Irina Demina explore how students can embody social interaction patterns through movement. In the fourth collaboration, social scientist Jeanette Ehrmann and dance artist Laurie Young, are working together on the theme of the body, gender, and the public sphere. Finally, Saskia Kroonenberg, a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study inherit, and ethnomusicologist at SPK Sydney Hutchinson are complementing the Hub.

Detailed project descriptions, including biographies and dates, can be found further down on this page.

Intermediate stages and final results will be shared through various public formats. Stay tuned to our website and Instagram for updates on the next dates.

The Public Engagement Hub at Zentrum für Kulturtechnik was conceptualized by Irina Demina and the team for Knowledge Exchange with Society Leonie Kubigsteltig & Xenia Muth.

Embracing Collision – Exploring Proximity to Robots Through a Performance-Based Approach
Anna Schäffner & Michela Filzi

Robots are conventionally programmed to avoid all physical contact with humans. But what if collision, rather than being an accident, became a mode of interaction in its own right? Starting from a fundamental observation that our bodies learn and communicate through touch, adjustment, and confrontation with the physical environment, interaction designer Anna Schäffner and dancer Michela Filzi have collaborated to reframe how we perceive and engage with existing robotic systems. Their process draws on dance’s influence on robot design, exploring what emerges when movement and machine meet.
This project invites participants to discover a new perspective on human-robot coexistence through embodied exploration guided by contact improvisation. You will be invited to enter into a soft collision with a robot, experiencing firsthand how its material qualities can shape and transform our relationship to it.

Social Media and Social Movements
Shintaro Miyazaki & Irina Demina

How does social pressure emerge? How does polarization take shape? Does assimilation feel easier than resistance? What individual decisions can contribute to more stable forms of diversity? And what role do the body and embodied experience play in a post-digital knowledge culture?
Social media not only informs us about global political and societal developments; they also profoundly shape everyday life. It is now widely acknowledged that they contribute to polarization and reinforce existing opinions. This raises a question: to what extent can social media still be shaped - and how might they support sustainable social movements?
This interactive project explores an experimental approach that combines a role-playing activity from media pedagogy (after Mitchel Resnick and Uri Wilensky) with choreographic methods. Developed within a lecture in collaboration with students, the format understands itself as an embodied experiment: it makes tangible how social dynamics emerge from situational decisions - and how they can be influenced through minimal shifts in the space for action.
Participants are invited to embody social interaction patterns through movement and simple choreographic scores, making emerging collective dynamics visible and physically perceptible.

Hazardous Hope. Explorations Through Contaminated Berlin
Léa Perraudin & Monika Gabriela Dorniak

»Hazardous hope« — this is how Ayushi Dhawan and Simone M. Müller (2024) describe a practice that, amid the reality of permanently contaminated environments, experiments with new forms of coexistence rather than hoping for purity or salvation. Within this context, the project seminar explores approaches to hope as a material, embodied, and site-specific practice.
In collaboration with the anti-disciplinary Berlin-based artist Monika Gabriela Dorniak and in exchange with civil society actors and community initiatives, the team explores the material politics, concrete modes of use, and layered histories of Tempelhofer Feld. One point of departure for these activities is the group exhibition »ever-permeable boundaries«, curated by Dorniak at POV gallery, which also serves as an observation deck overlooking Tempelhofer Feld. Through speculative methods, attunement, and storytelling practices, new modes of research will be developed to make contaminated sites, their material exchanges, affective ecologies, and afterlives tangible.
To mark the end of the summer semester 2026, a participatory student-led public program will take shape as an experimental infrastructure of critical care in contaminated Berlin: a space in which this emerging practice of »hazardous hope« can be shared and tested. A collaboratively created artistic cartography and poetic score by Dorniak and Perraudin will offer visitors a more-than-human perspective onto Tempelhofer Feld, its sedimented memories, and possible future relations.