Nervous Listening Hands-On Workshop. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Workshop and Lecture with Marina Peterson
On Monday, June 26th, anthropologists of art and science Marina Peterson (University of Texas in Austin) & Maxime Le Calvé (MoA) invited to »Nervous Listening«, an experimental ethnography workshop, realized together with cloud designer Clemens Winkler (MoA). Entering the Central Laboratory that day, participants were greeted with balloons to inflate with their breath and a 285-hertz »Theta« sound bath, which they were invited to explore haptically through the red latex bubbles. Blown into tension, they made us subtly reactive to air vibration. Thus attuned, we started listening nervously to the atmosphere around and to each other’s vocal utterances.
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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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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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Design Workshop. Copyright: Felix Rasehorn
Online Documentation of Interdisciplinary Cluster Workshop
Why is the topic of haptics important to us humans and what does this mean for the multitude of scientific disciplines represented in the Cluster? In three dense days of workshop, the participants explored the topic of haptics together through the lens of design practice, history of knowledge, cultural studies, philosophy and computer science. Through experiencing demos, creating rapid prototypes, and reflection experiments, a practice-based mode of exploration was collectively developed. Through this rather broad approach, the participants sought to unfold the layers that make up haptic experiences in order to develop a shared understanding and vocabulary of the term. This is the beginning of a critical exchange on haptics with the goal of establishing a dynamic platform for MoA researchers around the haptic sense(s).
In the online documentation the group shares their abstracts, the workshop findings and questions, and invites to future collaborative formats and projects.
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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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