Eine Spurensuche auf dem Tempelhofer Feld
Wo einst Turbinenlärm ertönte, entstehen heute neue Geschichten. Am 16. Juli lädt das Projektseminar »Hazardous Hope« des Masterstudiengangs Kulturwissenschaft der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin zu einem kostenlosen Aktionstag ein. Gemeinsam mit dem Clustermitglied Dr. Léa Perraudin und der Berliner Künstlerin Monika Dorniak haben sich die Studierenden mit der Geschichte, den Kontaminationen und den Zukunftsfragen des Tempelhofer Feldes auseinandergesetzt. Das vielseitige Programm lädt Besucherinnen und Besucher dazu ein, die studentischen Arbeiten mit allen Sinnen zu entdecken – beim Bewegen, Hören, Betrachten und Schmecken. Die Aktionen und Ausstellungen finden sowohl direkt auf dem Tempelhofer Feld als auch auf dem Gelände der Floating University Berlin statt. Am Abend wird die Veranstaltung durch ein Gesprächsformat mit der Kuratorin Tuçe Erel und der Initiative »100% Tempelhofer Feld« abgerundet, um gemeinsam über die Zukunft dieses besonderen Ortes zu diskutieren. Der Eintritt ist frei.
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Public Defense of Anna Schäffner’s Ph.D. Thesis
Join us on June 25th at 2:30 PM for the public PhD defense of Anna Schaeffner (Université PSL / SACRe program) at the Central Laboratory of »Matters of Activity«. In her thesis »Soft Collision«, developed in cooperation with EnsadLab, the Cluster, and weißensee school of art and design, and supervised by Samuel Bianchini, Patricia Ribault, and Carola Zwick, Anna explores safe human-robot interaction through a novel pneumatic membrane that embraces physical collision. The event is open to everyone—come and support Anna on her big day!
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Workshop »Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons«, led by Clemens Winkler and Myriel Milicevic, at PolyFutures – Reimagining Policymaking for Europe, Brussels, April 2026. Photo: Clemens Winkler
EU Policy Lab: Clemens Winkler Co-Led Workshop in Brussels
At PolyFutures – Reimagining Policymaking for Europe, a two-day event organized by the European Commission’s EU Policy Lab in Brussels, Clemens Winkler co-led the workshop »Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons« with Myriel Milicevic (Potsdam University of Applied Sciences). The event brought together researchers, designers, foresight experts, behavioral insights practitioners, and policymakers to explore how creative, participatory, and forward-looking methods can transform European policymaking. The event was organized by the EU Policy Lab, which is part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
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STS Conference »Before Ruins« 2026, Case »Toxic Heritage Ruhr«, photo: Clemens Winkler. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Clemens Winkler on the Fleeting Legacies of the Ruhr Region
At the STS conference »Before Ruins« at Ruhr University Bochum, Clemens Winkler participated in the case study »Toxic Heritage Ruhr« case study. During the Case Day, participants were taken from the German Mining Museum in Bochum to the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex and PACT Zollverein, where they focused on industrial sites whose ecological and material legacies persist to this day. Clemens contributed his research on atmospheric infrastructures, air samples, and microclimates to the case study's field-research format. Using simple sensors, agar plates, adhesive sampling films, and notational forms, he examined air as an archive of dust, moisture, microbes, and industrial residues. In this way, »toxic heritage« became legible not only as a matter of soils, buildings, or landforms, but also as a fleeting, shared atmosphere. This work combines design research, STS, aerobiology, and speculative methods, and views atmospheric measurement as a practice of paying attention to »invisible« ecological and political interconnections.
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Talk and Artistic Research Workshop with Clemens Winkler in Zurich
This workshop, led on 14 January by Clemens Winkler at Zurich University of the Arts, invites participants to explore dark, invisible materialities as active agents in artistic research and design-led inquiry. It draws on practices and conceptual frameworks developed within the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« and elaborated in the publication »Stretching Materialities. Negotiating Boundaries in Exhibition Research« (2025), presented through selected material samples, their natural–cultural histories, and key concepts. In a hands-on session, participants collaboratively build three cloud chambers to make cosmic radiation and everyday radioactive phenomena perceptible as matter–energy. Concepts such as intra-action, material efficacy, entanglement, cosmos, and dark matter are explored not only theoretically, but through experimental practice.
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Stretching Materialities, edited by Clemens Winkler, Christian Stein & Object Space Agency, adocs 2025
New Cluster Publication Available in Print and Open Access
We are excited to announce that the latest Cluster publication Stretching Materialities. Negotiating Boundaries in Exhibition Research is now available in print and Open Access with adocs publishing. Stretching Materialities is an experimental approach to rethinking exhibitions in terms of »active matter«: not as a presentation of material knowledge and practices per se, but as an interactive and participatory research approach to new forms of activity emerging from the poiesis of the material. The interdisciplinary exhibition at Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T) Berlin experimented with curatorial processes, the existing environment and its material-energetic resources, sound performances as well as the interweaving of physical and virtual matter. The group of researchers, made up of designers, architects, art historians, computer scientists and anthropologists, expanded materiality into temporal-spatial dimensions and new sensory experiences.
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Still of »MAKING a robot feel« with Anna Schäffner and her project »Soft Collision«. Copyright: Matters of Activity
New MoA Mini Documentary Series Starts with Anna Schäffner
Imagine hugging a robot as soft and comforting as a teddy bear. This could be the future, moving away from the cold, steel monsters we’ve seen in sci-fi films. Anna Schäffner, designer and PhD candidate at Matters of Activity, is bringing this vision to life with her innovative project »Soft Collision«. Anna covered a steel robot in silicone membranes that inflate when you touch them. »It’s giving skin to the robot«, Anna says. But how does it work? How might it let us interact with robots in a more intuitive and secure way? And what’s a caterpillar got to do with it?
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Teaser »MAKING« with Anna Schäffner and her project »Soft Collision«. Production: Richard Ley & Maxim Landau. Copyright: Matters of Activity
New Documentary Series Takes Viewers Behind the Scenes of Matters of Activity
How can we make a robot feel? What does it take to build an artificial reef? And how do we design structures that move effortlessly like plants? Find out in the Cluster's new mini-documentary series, MAKING_. Here, our researchers share insights into their groundbreaking work in simple terms. We’re kicking off with Anna Schäffner's Soft Collision. On Thursday, January 23rd, the first episode will be released on the Cluster’s website and social media, followed by Rasa Weber's hidden coral cities on January 30th and Heidi Jalkh's auxetic materials on February 6th.
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Seaweed resonance, presentation by Julia Lohmann (Aalto, Helsinki). Photo: Clemens Winkler
Symposium by CollActive Materials
The symposium »Sensing Common Grounds. Towards Collaborative Speculation«, organized by Léa Perraudin and Martin Müller, asked about the ›how‹, foregrounding the methodologies of such speculations and projections: How to relate speculative design proposals to critical diagnoses of the present and attempts at historical speculation? How specifically can collaborative speculation in inter- and transdisciplinary contexts enable us to sense ›what is in the air‹? What narratives, prototypes, materials, and media hold knowledge (and non-knowledge) of these scenarios?
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Article Stretching Materialities
Open Access Peer-Reviewed Article Published on the »Stretching Materialities« Exhibition's Process
»TATour« is the title of a virtual exhibition based on preliminary fieldwork we conducted in 2020 at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). This collaborative inquiry served as a preamble to creating a physical exhibition in a museum space based in a former veterinary anatomical theater (Stretching Materialities, 2021-2022). Constrained by the COVID crisis, we invested our efforts in creating a digital tour that focused on the visible and invisible activities that remained there even when visitors could no longer access them. This recent paper by exhibition curators Maxime Le Calvé, Natalija Miodragović, Nina Samuel, Felix Sattler, Christian Stein, and Clemens Winkler, published in ethnographiques.org, issue 47, presents the production process for this immersive work, describes the creative process underlying this immersive work and its unusual approach to doing fieldwork through 360° fabulations inside an exhibition space, using sketching as a primary method.
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Book Cover Perraudin, L. 2024. Elementare Ekstasen. Sondierungen der Technosphäre. Series: Future Ecologies, Lüneburg: meson Press.
Monografie von Clustermitglied Léa Perraudin Open Access veröffentlicht
Elementare Ekstasen überschwemmen, erodieren und evaporieren die wohlsortierten Grenzziehungen zwischen Technik, Umwelt und Mensch. Als Neuverortung im Spannungsfeld medienökologischer, neomaterialistischer und technikfeministischer Theoriebildung sondiert Léa Perraudin all jene Widerständigkeiten und Un/Verfügbarkeiten, die von techno-kapitalistisch protegierten Operationen nicht zu tilgen sind.
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Verbautes Wetter. Copyright: Literaturforum am Brechthaus
Cluster Member Michaela Büsse in Conversation with Joana Moll and Diego Rybski
The building masses produced by humans have a direct impact on the weather. Buildings and construction account for 30 percent of Germany's CO2 emissions. The concretization of the land not only creates new heat phenomena with urban heat islands, but also a largely uncontrolled and far-reaching exploitation of natural resources such as sand and gravel. Cluster member Michaela Büsse was part of the lecture performance and talk »100 Neue Wörter für Wetter: Verbautes Wetter«.
Ernest Cormier, Thermometer. ARCH252051 Ernest Cormier fonds, CCA. Copyright: Fonds Ernest Cormier, CCA
Virtual Exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal
What does climate accountability look like for architecture? In an online exhibition curated by Arièle Dionne-Krosnick at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the participants in the »2022 Toolkit for Today: Carbon Present« seminar and the »2022 Doctoral Research Residency Program«, such as Cluster member Iva Rešetar, were invited to collaboratively re-read objects from the CCA collections in ways that highlight how carbon shapes our present built environment. »Researchers generated dynamic terms to frame how we have historically engaged with and continue to manage carbon: to regulate design expertise, to shape social and lived experience, to be comfortable, and to relate to (and profit from) built and natural environments« (CCA).
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Interview mit Martin Müller, Tagesspiegel, 22. Oktober 2023. Copyright: Tagesspiegel
Martin Müller im Interview mit dem Tagesspiegel
Clustermitglied und CollActive Materials Co-Projektleiter Martin Müller wurde nach der Eröffnung von »Airbound« am 19. Oktober 2023 im CLB im Aufbauhaus zur Ausstellung interviewt. »Die Luft spielt eine existenzielle Rolle in der globalen Klimakrise. Die Ausstellung soll die Aufmerksamkeit darauf lenken, dass mögliche Zukünfte sich auch an der Luft entscheiden, an unserem Verständnis davon, was es bedeutet zu atmen, mit der Luft zu leben. Wir sind ›airbound‹ – luftverbunden.«. Mehr zur Ausstellung und das ganze Interview gibt es im Tagesspiegel vom 22. Oktober 2023.
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Gosia Lehmann, Breathless Choir. Copyright: CollActive Materials, Foto: Michelle Mantel
A Report on the Exhibition »AIRBOUND. Sensing Collective Futures«
Ubiquitous and yet invisible: Air accompanies us daily and is an essential foundation of life. More than that, air will play a fundamental role in determining what futures become possible for us as humans. The exhibition »AIRBOUND. Sensing Collective Futures« (Oct 20th-Nov 9th, 2023) by CollActive Materials offered new perspectives on air as a material, a connecting social element, and a decisive space for negotiating futures.
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Exhibition Opening »Airbound«, 19 October 2023. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Speculative Exhibition by the »CollActive Materials« Experimental Laboratory
Invisible, and yet everywhere. Air is always already on its way to becoming something else. From molecule to atmosphere: the global climate crisis and thus the possible futures of our coexistence will be decided by means of air. How could a new sensorium emerge for the coming? What will connect us in the future? »Airbound« runs until November 9th and provides space for discussing geopolitical urgencies of the present through climate fictions and speculative everyday scenarios.
As part of Berlin Science Week »CollActive Materials« also organizes the workshop »Introducing: The Breathless Choir« November 4th at Naturkundemuseum.
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Workshop »Aerial Witness/ing«. Copyright: The Future of Life School, Clemens Winkler
Speculative Workshop on July 25th-29th During »The Future of Life Summer School«
Air does not obey nor care about human-made territorial borders, yet it affects and activates various material thresholds! Cluster Members Léa Perraudin, Emilia Tikka, Martin Müller and Clemens Winkler come together at the interstices of critical humanities scholarship, speculative design and new material practices July 25th–29th during »The Future of Life Summer School«, an exploratory summer program organized by the Bio Design Lab, an incubator for collaboration within Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.
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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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Hybride Formen. Copyright: Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch
A Participative, Artistic-Research Theater Piece of the Master's Program »Spiel und Objekt«, Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, Taught by Clemens Winkler
The participatory, artistic-research theater piece by the students of the Master's Program »Spiel und Objekt« at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts is divided into »Three Perspectives« and »Playing Emissions«. In »Playing Emissions« you enter the theme park of air futures! Experience the production of steam, body heat, sweat, feelings, breathing exercises in various eventful dramaturgies. How do we transform strong personal emotions from moments of crisis into new forms of collaborative play? The piece was created in collaboration with the experimental lab »CollActive Materials«, the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
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Futures of Air. Copyright: CollActive Materials
Speculative Workshop Series in May
Ungraspable! Air is invisible, yet it is eyerywhere. Always already on its way to becoming something else. From molecule to atmosphere: the global climate crisis and thus the possible futures of our coexistence will be decided by means of air. Does the air belong to all of us? What stories lie in the air? What will connect us in the future? Our workshop series invites you to speculate about »Futures of Air« – together with researchers from »Matters of Activity« and »Science of Intelligence«. In three different co-design workshops, we explore and negotiate the critical role of air as a collective, active, and intelligent material. An exhibition will present the workshop conversations and outcomes in the fall of 2023 at Aufbau Haus (CLB Berlin).
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Dis/Entangling Material Futures. Copyright: Claudia Mareis
Lecture Series by Cluster Co-Director Claudia Mareis Continues
The lecture series takes up the ambiguous role of materials in future-making practices along with the possible geo and bio-political precarity they may generate. Different materials from sand, water, or air to living cells and whole ecosystems are the objects and interface of a range of technologies that generate images of the future. Their probabilistic methods prepare the ideational and physical ground for large and small-scale design interventions (e.g., climate-resilient infrastructures). Register now and take part in the lecture series that continues until July 18th, every Monday 4.15 pm.
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Cover of the publication »Atem/Breath. Gestalterische, ökologische und soziale Dimensionen/ Morphological, Ecological and Social Dimensions«, edited by Linn Burchert and Iva Rešetar.
New Anthology Co-edited by Cluster Member Iva Rešetar
In the course of breathing – in the process of constant exchange and crossing of boundaries between the organism and its environment – air as an »immaterial» material becomes active. For the first time, this anthology, edited by Linn Burchert and Iva Rešetar, brings together studies on breath from the perspective of the arts and humanities, as well as experimental scientific and design practices. Focusing on the period from 1900 to the present day, the publication covers an era during which air has become a precarious medium: whether in the context of climate change or global pandemic, space technology or gas warfare, air is now co-created and manipulated by humans. Against this backdrop, breath appears as an elusive yet vital substance that reveals the interconnections between the physical, symbolic, technological and social realms.
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Anne Duk Hee Jordan, »Making Kin 3.0«, 2021, KIOSK, Ghent, Belgium. Site specific Installation, with works included »Atmospheres of Breathing«, 2020-2021, »Singing Saw«, 2018, »I am so ashamed«, 2020, »Staying with the trouble«, 2019. Curated by Simon Delobel. Photo: Paulius Sliaupa
Lecture and Artist Talk Now Online
Are there aesthetic links between clouds, robots and the sea? The lecture by Babette Marie Werner, the performative talk with visual artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan and artistic and design researcher Clemens Winkler explored relations between visual interpretations of metabolic formations, biodiversity and new ecologies in art and design. This event was part of the exhibition »Stretching Materialities« by »Object Space Agency«. Follow the link to watch the full artist talk online.
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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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Nutrition Clouds. C. Winkler. Exhibition at STATE Studio Berlin. 2020. Copyright: A. Freitag
Clemens Winkler at Morphing Matter Lab
Cluster member Clemens Winkler was a guest at Morphing Matter Lab on Friday, April 2nd, 9:30–10.30 pm (3:30–4:30 pm EST). His studio talk dealt with the questions: How can we give people agency in a vague, cloudy present by reflecting on a Heterotopia through speculating materials? And how can a material-oriented approach in design emphasize the organic interplay between activation/synthesis/assembly and inhibition/degradation/disruption? Also, this talk reflected on the potential of matter as a mediator between various disciplines, spaces and timescales.
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»Macht Natur« at State Studio. Copyright: Samuel Henne
What Power do We Exert on Nature? And How Much Power Does Nature Have Over Us?
The exhibition presented innovations, potentials and risks of bio-economy in the fields of insects, plants, soil and air, offering the opportunity to try out different perspectives and deal with new phenomena in a playful way. How far do we want to go and where do we draw boundaries? ›Air‹ was investigated by design researcher and Cluster member Clemens Winkler.
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Exploring Fitering. Copyright: Veronika Aumann, Thomas Ness
A Short Project on the Filtering Process
In the week-long short project »Exploring Filtering«, Cluster member and interaction designer Thomas Ness, and textile designer Veronika Aumann dealt with the topic of Filtering with an open-ended mindset. The goal of this creative exploration of filtering processes was to gauge and express them in a practical and tangible way, respectively.
The point of departure for this was not a particular substance to be filtered or a specific substrate to be attained. Rather, the interest lay much more on the actual processes of filtering in and of themselves and the filter as an object. In the »Design Lab«, different kinds and methods of filtering processes were tested hands-on with familiar prototyping materials and techniques and transformed into six narratively and visually impressive representations.
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Enveloping atmospheres - experiment with structural textiles (knitted willow column). Copyright: Matters of Activity, Clemens Winkler, Natalija Miodragović. Photo Credit: Michelle Mantel
Clemens Winkler
The main interest of our research group lies in an integrative approach for the Cluster »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« in forming walkable 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.
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Entering Nutritious Clouds at Phlegraean Fields, 2017. Seminar »Terranautic Instruments« with Roman Kirschner. Copyright: Clemens Winkler/ Roman Kirschner
The exhibition space can also be understood as a space for processes metabolizing substances and forms. As a blob-like organism, a relational concept of activity and space makes it necessary to experimentally experience not only human and object-related perspectives, but also their energetic and material permeations. Hereby, it is more likely to link environments known to metabolisms from a human-scale perspective, such as volcanic grounds, to the exhibition space. Metabolic formations such as sediments or traces are in constant intentional and unintentional interaction with techniques and at the same time determine the energetic and material modes of the exhibition space. How can we make these modes more tangible for critical futures acting as systems designers?
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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, making 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.
If you are interested in a visit, please contact us via moa.activarium [at] hu-berlin.de to visit!
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Speaking, Dissipating, Transmitting. Copyright: Iva Rešetar and Clemens Winkler
»Thresholds in situ« develops a transdisciplinary framework and critical intervention to tackle the otherwise intangible, minor and transitory aspects of materials in the Anthropocene.
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Project »Per-Forming Clouds« of Clemens Winkler, 2018. Installation view: Investigating in a potential language of highly dynamic, complex material formations through machine learning at Zurich University of the Arts. Copyright: Clemens Winkler
Clouds have long oscillated between classification and resistance: from Lamarck and Howard’s taxonomies, the atmospheric ambiguities sought by Constable and Friedrich, to the praise bestowed upon the language of clouds by Goethe. The modern International Cloud Atlas now even includes anthropogenic cloud types. Today, clouds appear not only as meteorological bodies but also as computational »clouds,« infrastructures of storage, perception, and inequality. Thinkers such as Sloterdijk, Latour, and Vogl highlight airspace as conquered, critical, and in need of new cognitive, embodied, and phenomenological techniques. Artistic precedents—from Duchamp's Air de Paris to Manzoni's Corpo d'Aria—frame air as material. In parallel, cloud chambers have shaped science, from Wilson's detection of ionizing radiation to Schäfer’s climate-engineering reflections. Within this lineage, Clemens Winkler's Cloud Apparatus—commissioned by the Designmuseum Denmark in 2018—connects cloud morphology with a tightly controlled AI, questioning how language is produced and asking whether clouds, as forms of natural intelligence (NI), might unsettle our habitual modes of reasoning.
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First observations of Cirrus-shaped Cloud Layering in the control room, from outside and inside, Dragoner.02—Super Contemporary Arts Fest, Dragonerareal, Berlin 2024, photo: Clemens Winkler
Site-Specific Installation with Performance
Who is in control in the control room—humans, clouds, or the environment itself? What, if anything, can still be sustained or maintained? Over the course of Dragoner.02—Super Contemporary Arts Fest, the installation by Clemens Winkler and Tim Winter unfolds as a temporary climate laboratory—concerned less with control than with attentiveness, position, and response. Moving between data clouds and the fog of not-knowing, the work asks whether meaningful action remains possible, and how intuition and the entanglement of bodily, emotional, and cognitive experience might guide responses within climatic—and thus living—environments that increasingly resist prediction.
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