Exhibition »Stretching Materialities«
Hidden Activities in Objects and Spaces at Tieranatomisches Theater
Video Documentation of the Exhibition»Stretching Materialities. Hidden Activities in Objects and Spaces«, curated by the project »Object Space Agency« as part of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«
Matter is dead? Objects are lifeless? Think again! In the exhibition »Stretching Materialities« the liveliness and activity of matter could be experienced in a completely new way. From September 16th, 2021 to March 4th, 2022, the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin became an interactive playground: an actual cloud levitated in the middle of the room, reacting to body heat and movement, hovering around the visitors like a strange creature. Stones revealed their weathering as a dynamic process of change. Large willow structures, carefully co-crafted by humans and computers, were interwoven with the inhabitable space. Korean ›durumagi‹, a silk overcoat connecting the digital and physical realm, vibrated on the visitors’ skin as they interacted with diverse materials. Walking through the room with VR headsets on, visitors could enter a glass elevator and travel straight down into the materials presented – into the CT scan of a stone or high up into the clouds to interact with air molecules.
With knowledge from the research of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«, a hands-on laboratory space had been created that allowed unexpected insights into thinking about matter, making tangible the activity of the world around us. The researchers and curators understood their role as caretakers and interpreters of the different life forms that inhabited the exhibition space. Combining interaction design, architecture, art history, computer science and anthropology, this exhibition also stretched the disciplines in order to enter into sensuous resonance with the vibrant material world.
»Stretching Materialities« was an open experimental platform engaging theory and practice. Imagine you could stretch your senses to feel, see, hear and touch the material world beyond human sensory abilities. This experience might change the way you engage with your environment in the face of social, political and ecological urgencies.
This website is an online repository designed to document the exhibition and collect current and future activities that further advance the guiding questions of the exhibition.
The exhibition was curated by multidisciplinary scientists and designers of the project Object Space Agency.
In Matters of Activity, researchers from numerous disciplines address the question of what material is, how we view material, deal with it, and last but not least, how we as human actors can enter into a dialogue with the actor material. The module "Stretching into Virtuality" of the exhibition Stretching Materialities tries to translate these questions into a virtual experience space that has never existed before. Virtuality is understood as a material of its own kind, woven from the structures of the digital, translated into sensory perceptibility, and built from connected layers of hardware and software. The virtual is conceived not so much as an addendum, as so often happens in museum contexts, but rather as an integral layer of the entire exhibition that overlays other exhibits, shimmies along them, and thus creates points of contact, extensions, perspectives, and interfaces.
The main interest of our research group lies in an integrative approach for the Cluster »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« in forming walk-able ways of knowing »exhibiting as a research method«. Therefore, this interest follows new forms of witnessing material activities and enacting tacit material knowledge to further co-create and co-speculate on them. Under intensive leadership within our curatorial collective including supervision of responsibilities for the exhibition process over thirteen months, our design research further set the focus on the materiality of atmospheric processes as highly immersive environing mixed media. Through the lens of this media-materiality, situated practices are intended to transform our research across our curatorial collective and guide the Cluster's future exhibition projects.
»Virtual Sensing Knife and Haptic Hanbok« invites visitors to an immersive sensorial encounter ›down the scale‹ with free-floating neurons and brain tissues. This experience was collaboratively shaped as one of the »floors« for the main elevator of the exhibition. Inspired by the work of Karen Barad, Stefan Helmreich, Lee Kiyeon and Chris Salter, we onboarded a sound artist-researcher, an interaction designer, a creative coder and a garment engineer and embarked onto an inventive research endeavor. The multimodal anthropology project unfolded as a making process, documented and blogged in different visual and audiovisual forms. It sparked between us manifold conversations around human-machine perception, soft haptic wearables, force fields, life-energy meridians and the general process of »sounding ›matter‹ to relate to the more-than-human.« We found ourselves repeatedly asking the same key questions: what kind of inventive and iterative ›sounding‹ do the potential intra-actions between physics, design, and neurosurgery need to manifest themselves? Can we imagine technical activities beyond the perspectives of modern science?
This exhibition section is based on the assumption that different concepts of time, of activity and passivity of materials – questions about the relationship between time and matter – are embodied in collection objects. To become aware of them and discuss them, field studies have been conducted in various Humboldt Collections. In this process, the Geological-Geomorphological Collection proved particularly productive for questions about the relationship between time and matter. The design of the vitrine, its changes throughout the exhibition and the exploratory elements that actively involve the visitors' senses are the outcome of this research.
How can an exhibition (space) become research in habitat? In a unique building from 1790 ornamented with symbols for connection and empathy between species, we treat the exhibition space as an exhibit - between void, matter, and interpretation. Space can trace and leave a trace; it is something. For an exhibition to become a research method towards a new culture of material, the visitors' awareness becomes the active matter itself, like the »emancipated spectator« of J. Rancière. In textiles, the void, the space between filaments, is as essential for the whole as the material that appears as solid - it is analog and virtual. Beyond geometrical space, artists, architects, and craftspeople historically use textile techniques to unfold the ›other‹ space. During the exhibition, we further developed techniques and prototypes in the frame of the interdisciplinary research in textile techniques on the architectural scale for future habitats accessible simultaneously physically and in VR. Like lichens on the rock, we used them to trace the spatial and metabolic negotiations between bodies, objects, and spaces.
Visitors on the elevator platform with the cloud above them, selecting new levels to lift to. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Past Events
Opening
16 September 2021, 6 pm
The exhibition opened on Thursday, September 16th, 2021 at 6 pm with a reception by the Object Space Agency curator team in front of the Tieranatomisches Theater. Afterward, the exhibition could be explored in different time slots until 8:30 pm.
The evening was accompanied by Oliver Schmids' sound performances on the installation »Well-Tempered Hygrometer« by artist Anna Kubelík.
Welcome addresses by:
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schäffner (Director of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«)
Prof. Dr. Sharon Macdonald (Director of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik)
Felix Sattler (Curator of the Tieranatomisches Theater)
Prof. Dr. Claudia Blümle and Clemens Winkler (Project Leaders Object Space Agency, together with Project team and guests)
Berlin Science Week 2021
»Stretching Materialities« was part of the Berlin Science Week 2021.
Wed, 3.11.2021, 4-6 pm
Ausstellungstour Stretching Materialities
Führung und Livepräsentationen im Tieranatomischen Theater
Fr, 5.11.2021, 4-6 pm
Exhibition Tour Stretching Materialities
Guided tour and exhibition and live presentations in the Tieranatomisches Theater
Mo, 8.11.2021, 4-6 pm
Exhibition Tour Stretching Materialities
Guided tour and exhibition and live presentations in the Tieranatomisches Theater
Tours & Performances
- Friday, 25.02.2022, 3–4 p.m. Sound-Performance »Scattered Diffusion« by Mascha Kobylenko
- Friday, 25.02.2022, 4 and 6 p.m. Public Tour
- Friday, 25.02.2022, 5.30-6 p.m. »Singing Matter« by Leila Albayaty. While examining the space of the Exhibition Stretching Materialities, with her voice, artist Leila Albayaty, does not want to look as a human.
Deprived of the appearance of the body, she will let her voice to resonate the hidden activities. By transforming everything into emotions she will explore many layers of identity and more-than human polyphony.
- Monday, 28.02.2022, 2:00–3:00 p.m. Sound-Performance »Scattered Diffusion« by Mascha Kobylenko
- Monday, 28.02.2022, 4–6 p.m. »About clouds, robots and the sea – thoughts on the aesthetics of metabolic formations, biodiversity and new ecologies in art and design« - Artist Talk with Clemens Winkler, Babette Werner and Anne Duk Hee Jordan
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Tuesday, 01.03.2022, 6 p.m. Recital with Philipp Reuver
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Wednesday, 02.03.2022, 6 p.m. Recital with Philipp Reuver
- Thursday, 03.03.2022, 5-7 p.m. »About microbes, stones and orbits – thoughts on haptic knowledge, circulating narratives, and transitions between the organic and the inorganic«, Performance, Conversation, Lecture
- 2, 3 and 4 p.m., Rotunda: Ceremonial Performance »dancing CaCO3« by Kaaren Beckhof
6 p.m., Amphitheatre Hall: Jean-Daniel Berclaz, le Musée du Point de Vue, »L´Attente« (The Awaiting)
From my point of view, the question of the matter is a spatial observation of the thought.
This is why the auditorium contains the sounds of pencils taking notes of what they listen to on the paper.
The professor awaits for the auditorium to fill up before beginning his orations.
»Le Musée du Point de Vue« is the ongoing project of the artist Jean Daniel Berclaz and examines the knowledge that originates in exhibition going and the metabolic processes between the observed and the voyeur, the story-figure and the author, the actor the spectator. - Friday, 04.03.2022, Finissage
Tieranatomisches Theater
Campus Nord, Haus 3
Philippstraße 13
10115 Berlin