Site-Writing Technologies of Capture. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé
Two-Day Workshop and Installation on Mixed Reality Crafting at Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin
In December 2023, the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin will host the workshop »Site-Writing with Technologies of Capture« in partnership with the ExC »Matters of Activity«. This workshop, curated by Maxime Le Calvé, is a collaboration between the Speculative Realities Lab (MoA, Charité), Shauna Janssen, a visiting scholar from Concordia University in performance studies and site-specific practices, and the Berlin-based artist duo MELT. The dual focus of this two-day workshop is an interdisciplinary exploration of the notions of border and dis/orientation, and the first presentation of Subcortical Matters, an immersive brain data visualization platform developed by the SpecLab.
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Syntopia 1—Soma I Body. Copyright: Karola Dierichs, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, weissensee academy of art and design and Matters of Activity
Paper Published on Augmented Reality (AR) Framework
Elaine Bonavia, Jessica Farmer, Alexandre Mballa-Ekobena, Nikolai Rosenthal, Laurence Douny and Karola Dierichs have published a paper on an augmented reality (AR) framework that uses hand-based motion tracking and data capture. The main contribution lies in the use of haptic data flows rather than visual ones. The AR framework was tested in a one-to-one scale architectural application emulating the spinning behavior of silkworms.
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Copyright: Nadezhda Moryak
Presentation at the Long Night of the Sciences 2023
Are your senses up for a challenge? Dive into our interactive experiment and put your memory to the test as you enter Virtual Reality to explore digital objects using both vision and touch. Will you be able to recognize objects while racing against time? Researchers from the »Virtual Dissection« team of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« invite you to unlock the secrets of working memory performance while delving into how our brains deal with sensory information. Join us at the Long Night of the Sciences on June 17th at Zuse-Institute!
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Borneo Summer School 2023, Photo: Gary Loh Chee Wyai. Copyright: Jürgen Sieck/HTW Berlin
Report on Summer School 2023 at Borneo Cultures Museum, Kuching
From March 1st to 15th, 2023, MoA members Alwin Cubasch and Jürgen Sieck, together with Eileen Klingner, Verena Metze-Mangold, Elisabeth Thielen, Sophie Schauer, as well as several students, traveled to the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo for the Filtering project to conduct the DAAD-funded Summer School »Digitization of Indigenous Knowledge for Extended Reality and Culture« on site. In addition, six Malaysian scholars and 20 students participated who not only have insight into the indigenous culture and way of life of Borneo but are also members of different indigenous groups. The Summer School took place at the Borneo Cultures Museum in the provincial capital of Kuching, the second-largest museum in Southeast Asia.
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Poster Workshop 3D Sketching, 2023, Image: Maxime Le Calvé. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Workshop at Charité on 13 April 2023
During this workshop on 13th April 2023, organized and led by Paulina Greta Stefanovic (HTW) and Cluster Members Maxime Le Calvé and Thomas Picht (MoA) within the Speculative Realities Lab (Charité), we will initiate a group of students and researchers to one of the latest VR sketching tools. Together, we will experiment and discuss the hands-on practice of thinking in space with lines and volumes in VR. We will then further challenge the group to translate the ideas generated during the workshop into a virtual installation sketched into 3D space.
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»Extracting the Surface« workshop at Tieranatomisches Theater during the stretching senses school, 2022. Copyright: Subterranean Matters
Yoonha Kim and Maxime Le Calvé Reported at Conference of the Film Festival at the Royal Anthropological Institute
Cluster members Yoonha Kim and Maxime Le Calvé represented the Cluster at the online conference of the Film Festival at the Royal Anthropological Institute (London, UK), an event bringing together the global scene of visual anthropology. Together, they presented the paper »The patchy paths of the stretching senses school: the coming-of-age of an emerging learning community and immersive media collective between speculative ethnography and creative coding in Berlin« on March 8th, 2023.
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Exhibition »Materiales en Expansión«, Buenos Aires, March 2023. Structural Textile Project: Miodragović, Suarez, Singer, Object Space Agency; Complex Web Structures by Daniela Castillo. Copyright: Christian Stein
Exhibition Opened at Universidad de Buenos Aires | Exposición Inaugurada en la Universidad de Buenos Aires
Together with the Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sivorí we invite you to the opening of »Materials in Expansión«, on Wednesday, March 15th at 6:00 pm, where a conversation between Daniela Castillo Cortez and Christian Stein will take place, entitled »El Entramado - Nuevas Formas de Exposición Entre Tecnología, Ciencia y Arte (The Interweaving - New Forms of Exhibition Between Technology, Science and Art)«. It is an interactive experience of Virtual Reality and textile art by Daniela Castillo, participant of the 27th Textile Art Salon, currently exhibited at the museum. This performative installation could be visited every Wednesday until May 9th (extended), 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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Film Poster. Copyright: Carly Lave
VR Dance Film »Paar« Directed by Carly Lave, Supported by MoA
»Paar« is a VR dance film split between a physical world and a virtual world, using 360° video together with motion capture technology, to dance the theater to life in VR. The virtual environment of the Tieranatomisches Theater is created from the 3D photorealistic rendering of the theater, making for 180° of the virtual world and 180° of the physical world. In »Paar«, the dancers’ movements are tracked via motion capture technology. This recorded movement data will be mapped into the virtual environment of the TA T through avatars. On February 24th at Mercedes Benz Kino in Berlin, »Paar« will be in a movie demo from a Hamburg-based VR startup.
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Rain-sheltered pathway at the University of Technology Sarawak, Sibu, 2022, Photo: Christian Kassung. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Filtering Project Prepares DAAD Summer School in March 2023 at University of Technology Sarawak in Malaysia
In December 2022, MoA Principal Investigators Christian Kassung and Jürgen Sieck traveled to Malaysia for the Filtering project in preparation of the DAAD Summer School »Digitisation of Indigenous Knowledge for Extended Reality and Cultural Heritage« taking place on-site at the University of Technology Sarawak in March 2023. The journey was dedicated to visits of several cultural institutions and museums, meetings and workshops with managers of local project partners, and field trips.
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Poster of the exhibition »Sprache im technischen Zeitalter«
Vernissage on 17 November within the Exhibition »Sprache im technischen Zeitalter«
On November 17, 2022 at 3.00 pm, an exhibition will open that explores the subject of language in the technical age. In several interactive installations. The occasion is the 100th birthday of the poet, literary scholar and literary mediator Walter Höllerer, who taught at the TU Berlin from 1959 to 1988. Under the direction of Cluster Members Christian Stein and Claudia Blümle as well as Hans-Christian von Herrmann in collaboration with the design studio »Above & Below«, the interactive VR installation »Die Umgebung der Wörter - Ausstellung eines Romans« (the environment of words - exhibition of a novel) invites visitors to explore Höllerer's novel »Die Elephantenuhr« (the elephant clock) in an immersive exhibition space.
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Paar. Copyright: Gamelab Berlin
The VR dance »Paar« directed by Carly Lave, which premiered at Tieranatomisches Theater in June 2022, has been accepted and awarded into several global festivals, including the FIVARS VR Film Festival Toronto and the DigitalMediaFest Rome. »Paar« won Best Short Film in Virtual Reality at the OneEarthAwards film Festival on September 30th in India. The project was supported through Gamelab Berlin, »Matters of Activity«, and the Tieranatomisches Theater.
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Stretching senses school logo with a photo of mycelium growing on willow, 2022. Copyright: Natalija Miodragovic & Dimitra Almpani-Lekka, Biomaterials Lab TU Berlin and MoA, 2022
at UdK »InKüLe – Innovationen für die künstlerische Lehre«
The stretching senses school, an MoA project curated by Cluster anthropologists Yoonha Kim (OSA) and Maxime Le Calvé (Cutting), is starting a longer teaching collaboration with the UdK-based project InKüLe »Innovationen für die Künstlerische Lehre«. The stretching senses school is an emerging learning community around immersive arts, creative coding and speculative ethnography. It aims to explore more-than-human perceptions through making practices bringing in conversation various immersive media. The collaborative workshops with InKüLe were focused on the potential of artistic education to change our relations to the environment through an engagement at the level of anthropotechniques.
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Interactive Slideshow. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvè, Mareike Stoll and Dionysios Zamplaras
Cluster Members Maxime Le Calvé and Mareike Stoll Present their Work from September 28th until October 20th at HBPG Potsdam
The VR installation »Immersive Slideshow« is invited to be presented part of the »Best Practice« exhibition of the SPUR.lab, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, on September 28th and 29th. The »Immersive Slideshow« is a collaboration of Cluster Members Maxime Le Calvé & Mareike Stoll, with the interaction designer Dionysios Zamplaras and the team of Spatial Media at ENSAD Lab in Paris. It explores the virtual presence of the digitized slide collection of the Berlin-based art historian Peter H. Feist (1928-2015).
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Poster PhD presentations 2022. Layout: Ada Favaron
Doctoral Presentations at the MoA Retreat 2022
The 2022 presentation of the Doctoral Program »Matters of Activity« at the MoA Retreat in September at Landgut Stober was both a review and an outlook of the doctoral research conducted at the Cluster between 2020 and 2022. Under the title »Scaling Matters: From the Lab to the Field, «Pre-Doctoral Researchers at varying stages of their research — from the very beginning to the final phase of their theses — presented their heterogeneous work whilst continuing to negotiate common themes, methods, questions and tools. The format combined talks and an exhibition and invited MoA Members to engage individually with the presentation and a selection of their research objects.
Thanks to everyone involved for making possible this all-around successful event. Enjoy some visual impressions of the exhibition, as well as the talks and have a look at the booklet.
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MoA Exhibition »Stretching Materialities«. Copyright: Offshore Design
Hidden Activities in Objects and Spaces at Tieranatomisches Theater
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.
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Sensing Knife
Achieving a minimal level of lesion is often essential when cutting and manipulating materials. For this, we foresee an immense advance with the invention of cutting tools able to detect and distinguish materials based on their properties at the relevant scales.
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The »Virtual Dissection« setting aims to conceive a prototypical toolbox for experiencing anatomical information in virtual environments through its parameters of spatiality and resistance. The datasets to be employed are drawn from evolutionary biology and medicine. This approach is inspired by contemporary 3D scientific illustration practices and by the haptic dimension of knowledge in the historical practices of dissection.
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The Speculative Realities Lab. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé
The SpecLab is a space connecting neurosurgery, anthropology, and the immersive arts. It contributes to expanding their respective disciplinary equipment – conceptual, material, and digital – in order to animate brain-related knowledge for navigation, prediction, and inspiration. We want to make neurosurgery appear strange again in order to unsettle certain ›status quo‹ of the clinical practice.
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Subterranean Matters, by Baris Pekcagliyan, Warja Rybakova, Nayeli Vega, Paulina Greta, stretching senses school. Copyright: Matters of Activity
The »stretching senses school« is an education-as-research project between »Cutting« and »Object Space Agency«, which stemmed from the exhibition »Stretching Materialities«. Through this workshop-based contribution to the exhibition, we fostered collaborations between anthropology and immersive interaction art.
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A young XR enthusiast in the museum – using a VR headset modification with gesture recognition and stereo camera. Copyright: Christian Stein
Looking at the virtual in the real, our museum spaces are already amalgamated of the physical and the virtual. Looking further at the virtual possibilities reveals activities that are invisible otherwise. Virtual Reality is a new medium for the interactive exploration of these activities. The idea is to digitally model the exhibition space itself and make it experienceable in virtual reality with head-mounted displays. By mapping the virtual representation onto the physical architecture, the virtual space becomes tangible – virtual columns can be felt and begin to speak when one listens to them.
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VR Film »Paar«. Copyrigth: Christian Stein & Carly Lave
Paar is a VR dance film split between a physical and virtual world. Filmed in the iconic Tieranatomisches Theater (TAT), Paar uses 360 video together with motion capture technology to follow a journey of discovery between linked bodies, material, movement and spaces. Drawing on the eerie past of the site’s animal anatomical research, two ghostly beings dance across parallel spaces, whilst discovering their human bodies and physical environment.
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