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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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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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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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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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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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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»Metaphorological Apparatus,« 2018+. An experimental interplay of water-dependent material processes, machine learning, and generative poetry renders air and clouds both readable and sign-making. 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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