Situated Digital Agencies

As a collaborative format between the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity and the Department of Digital and Experimental Design at UdK Berlin, »Situated Digital Agencies« bridged institutions just as much as cultures of knowledge, research and teaching. Along transdisciplinary and dialogic encounter it followed how digital technologies are situated between discourses of arts and design, humanities, and sciences – and suggested how precisely in these moments, they are altered, appropriated and possibly augmented towards epistemological and ontological surplus.

The seminar shifted disciplinary discourses on digital production towards perspectives which are commonly peripheral to Computational Design and Manufacturing. It welcomed guests from the MoA Structured Doctoral Program and related working groups to reveal how contemporary research situates such workflows – nurturing understandings how »[s]ituated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource (...)« (Haraway 1988). Do the convergence of traditional Korean ›Hanbok‹ production and AR workflows allow to challenge market leading monoculture towards techno-diversity? And how may identifying, classifying, simulating and ultimately materializing biological role models help to generate tessellated material systems with complex form-function relationships?

Inputs of our MoA guests were side lined by a series of lectures on the visual agency of data models, historical dimensions of capturing techniques and the emerging field of computational art production. Together with a group of graduate students in Architecture we inquired how such exposures reconfigure realities of computational modelling and making from without and along questions of possibly distributed and diversified agency.

The course was realised by Frank Bauer, Pre-Doctoral Researcher at MoA and adjunct lecturer at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning at UdK Berlin. Guests included Felix Rasehorn and Binru Yang (28 May), Yoonha Kim (11 June), Maxie Schneider (18 June), Michael Tebbe (2 July) and Charlett Wenig (9 July). The course was assisted by tutor Maurice Wald, with a related workshop »Computerized/Computational« held by Christian Schmitds, Research Associate at the same Department.

Department of Digital and Experimental Design, Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning, UdK Berlin