Max Rubner Award 2024. Foto © Charité | Sabine Gudath
Interdisciplinary Team Wants to Empower Patients Through VR Experiences
Last Monday, April 22nd, 2024 the Charité Foundation awarded the Max Rubner Award 2024 to three members of »Matters of Activity«, Zeynep Akbal, Moritz Queisner, and Igor Sauer, among others. Our warmest congratulations on this prestigous award!
The researchers and their colleagues from the Experimental Surgery /Digital Surgery Lab at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin want to use the award money to advance the PERISKOP project, which focuses on reducing preoperative anxiety and uncertainties of patients in the operating theater environment. As part of a cinematic journey in virtual reality, patients will be given an understanding of the typical procedure on the day of the operation, from arriving at the clinic to anesthesia and waking up. more
The researchers and their colleagues from the Experimental Surgery /Digital Surgery Lab at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin want to use the award money to advance the PERISKOP project, which focuses on reducing preoperative anxiety and uncertainties of patients in the operating theater environment. As part of a cinematic journey in virtual reality, patients will be given an understanding of the typical procedure on the day of the operation, from arriving at the clinic to anesthesia and waking up. more
Keyvisual Coding IxD
Interactive Exhibition of the Semester Project »Coding IxD« kicks off February 14 at Weizenbaum Institute
Save the date for the opening of the final exhibition and panel discussion of the interdisciplinary semester project »Coding IxD« on February 14h, 2024, at 6 p.m. at the Weizenbaum Institute to explore the interactive student projects. As we enter a world where technology does not only surround us, but is also inseparable from and inside of us, it is time to rethink how we design for and with the human body. The rise of wearables, body tattoos, and e-textiles demonstrates the increasing ubiquity of technology in capturing vital body data.
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Micro Phenomenology Crash Course, Workshop 7-9 February 2024, Stone game by Katrin Heimann. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé.
Detailed Workshop Report Out Now
From February 7-9th, 2024, the Micro-Phenomenology Crash Course, instructed by Katrin Heimann, Associate Professor at the School of Culture and Society - Interacting Minds Centre of Aarhus University, took place at the Cluster. The event, organized by MoA members Maxime Le Calvé and Zeynep Akbal, had to objectives: first, providing participants with tools to dissect intricate first-person experiences of all kinds, secondly, analyzing collectively the benefits and the challenges of VR and Mixed Reality experiences to bridge art and science.
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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 was mapped into the virtual environment of the TA T through avatars. On February 24th at Mercedes Benz Kino in Berlin, »Paar« was 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« was 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« was 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 explored 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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Poster Stretching Senses School Festival. Image »Subterenaen Matters« Baris Pekcagliyan, Warja Rybakova, Nayeli Vega, Paulina Greta, adapted by NODE Berlin. Copyright: Matters of Activity
VR Worldings for Planetary Emergency at Tieranatomisches Theater
Feeling limestone grow from the inside and seeing its dispersion as urban landscape; experiencing an amphitheater through vibrations of willow branches; reaching out to the hidden electrical energies of things around us; touch the surface of cellular tissues. The »stretching senses school festival« exhibits site-specific virtual reality artworks from ongoing research at the Cluster at TA T, in the continuation of the »Stretching Materialities« exhibition.
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Paar. Copyright: Gamelab Berlin
On June 9th in the Tieranatomisches Theater
On Thursday, June 9th, at 7 pm, the premiere of »Paar« took place in the Tieranatomisches Theater. »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 Veterinary Anatomy Theater (Tieranatomisches Theater, TA T) 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 was mapped into the virtual environment of the TA T through avatars.
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Poster »Viral Theatres: Pandemic Past/Hybrid Futures«. Copyright: Francesca Sciarmella
Exhibition Organized Together with ExC Temporal Communities
How hybrid is the future of theatre? In what ways has the pandemic changed how we work in theatre and gather in it as a public space? The opening symposium »Viral Theatres: Pandemic Past/Hybrid Futures« explored these questions. In three days of events, it took stock of how pandemic time has moved from a state of exception to new normality between viral outbreak and containment and what that means for theatrical production. You can visit the accompanying exhibition in the Tieranatomisches Theater (Veterinary Anatomy Theater) in Berlin until June 3rd.
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3D printed prototypes by B. Pekcagliyan, W. Rybakova, N. Vega, & P. Greta for »Subterranean Matters« Project, in »Stretching Senses School«, Matters of Activity.
New Publications present Findings of Stretching Senses School at TA T Berlin
Playful approaches can directly affect our sensory faculties beyond the realm of power and knowledge. The »stretching senses school« was an education-as-research project at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin (TA T) attached to the exhibition »Stretching Materialities«. This workshop-based contribution to the exhibition was framed as a collaboration between anthropology and immersive interaction art. Cluster members engaged with creative coders and digital artists in experimental curation work, with the intention to raise awareness of the public on the multiscale and embedded interconnections between humans and other earthly beings. Four new publications by MoA members and participants now introduce the method and implementation of the workshop which was carried out last fall in the Tieranatomisches Theater and discuss the experimental testing in three specific projects.
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Christopher Salter takes over Professorship »Immersive Arts« in Zurich
Cluster Member Salter Welcomed as New Professor and Director of the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts on May 1st, 2022
The Department of Performing Arts and Film is pleased to welcome Christopher Lloyd Salter as the new Professor of Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space on May 1st, 2022. Salter is an artist, professor of computer arts at Concordia University in Montreal, co-director of the Hexagram Network for Research-Creation in Arts, Culture and Technology, and a Member at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«. He studied philosophy and economics and received his PhD in theater from Stanford University, where he also taught and conducted research at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
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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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Poster »stretching senses school«, Image: Jemma Woolstone’s Audio-Visual Full Dome Project »Of Fragile Tings«. Copyright: »Matters of Activity«
VR Worlding for Planetary Emergency – Apply now!
The ongoing climate disaster puts many worlds in imminent danger. But conveying the entanglements of the more-than-human relations is an arduous task. Playful approaches can directly affect our sensory faculties beyond the realm of power and knowledge. The »stretching senses school« is an education-as-research project at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin (TA T) attached to the »Stretching Materialities« exhibition, co-partnered with the Node Institute Berlin. Through this workshop-based contribution to the exhibition, we intend to foster collaboration between anthropology and immersive interaction design. We will engage with research creation in order to raise awareness of the public on the multiscale and embedded interconnections between humans and other earthly beings.
»stretching senses school« was issuing a call for application to the VR community until September 15th. The participation will be compensated.
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Flyer of Exhibition »Code & Materiality in Art and Culture«. Copyright: University of Applied Sciences Berlin
Interactive Exhibition in Cooperation of University of Applied Sciences Berlin (HTW) Media Theater and »Matters of Activity«
What does materiality mean for art and culture from today’s perspective? How can materiality be understood in our post-digital age, where digital technologies permeate creative work from start to finish, both in terms of tools and materials and conceptually?
The exhibition »Extended Reality – Code and Materiality in Art and Culture,« September 3rd to 30th, 2021, illuminated various aspects of (digital) materiality through selected works from design, art, literature, music, performance and science that have been created with Extended Reality technologies (Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality).
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Making process of installation »Between Night and Day« at exhibition »Extended Reality«. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé and Mareike Stoll
Cluster Members' Contribution to Exhibition »Extended Reality«
The project proposed and explored a space in-between, using virtual reality (VR) technology and a digitized archive of images, it wants to invite reflection and research on various modes of knowing in connection to materiality and code, activity of images and the space needed for this. Can digital humanities open up to new comprehensive experiments around the presence and the absence, on the material picture-relations and the gaps of the in-between, moving toward regions of human knowledge which meaning cannot convey?
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»Many Virtual Hanboks: Traditional Korean Garment Provoking Alternative Ways of Being in This World«. Copyright: Yoonha Kim
Cluster Members Maxime Le Calvé and Yoonha Kim Contribute to Virtual Group Exhibition at UCL's Multimedia Anthropology Lab
UCL's Multimedia Anthropology Lab (UCL MAL) presented »Multimedia Encounters«, the latest exhibition created to coincide with UCL MAL’s first academic conference took place January 12th - 15th, 2021. Multimedia Encounters attended to the relationship between anthropological thought and virtual intelligence. Our Cluster Members Maxime Le Calvé and Yoonha Kim had ethnographic artworks shown in a virtual group exhibition called »Multimedia Encounters: Experimental Approaches to Ethnographic Research« using the digital platform Mozilla Hubs.
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Golem Labor Performance. Copyright: Carly Lave, Gamelab Berlin
Gothe-Institut Prague and Gamelab host Conference on XR on 15 October 2020
The international workshop series Golem-Labor by the Goethe-Institut in cooperation with the Gamelab brought together contemporary dance and mixed reality technologies. In an online conference, XR experts and artists addressed the question of how the (performative) arts and (XR) technologies can interact.
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Copyright: Julien Letellier
Lectures from Prof. Stefano Bertocci und Julien Letellier
On Friday, January 24th at 10am, Prof. Stefano Bertocci and Julien Letellier gave a lecture on »Remote Sensing in Archaelogy and Architectural Heritage: Digital Documentation for Knowledge and Conservation« (Bertocci) and »Virtual Reality with High Resolution 3D Models for Research and Education« (Letellier).
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Augmented Reality for Designers
In cooperation with the International Design Centre e.V. and the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material«, AURORA School for ARtists (HTW) was holding a one-day workshop on Augmented Reality for Designers on Dezember 12th, 2019.
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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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Open Space Event, 9 November 2023. Copyright: Matters of Activity
MoA's Showroom and Workspace
With the »Activarium«, we want to actively engage with potential partners from the industry, start-ups, NGOs, politics and society as a whole to initiate an exploratory exchange on active materials, bio- & culture-inspired innovation as well as sustainability approaches. We want visitors to experience our prototypes to make MoA’s intentions and research tangible and accessible. The »Activarium« serves as a work-in-progress showcase of different research strands and processes. Our visitors can dive into the research as it's happening, before its published results.
Walk in and experience the »Activarium« Tuesdays, 10.00 am–12.15 pm or Thursdays, 2.00–4.00 pm! If you are a group of more than 5 people or if the opening hours do not fit your schedule, please contact us via moa.activarium@hu-berlin.de to schedule a visit!
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