Thresholds in Situ

The aim of this research strand is to bring forth the concept of thresholds as a transdisciplinary framework and a critical intervention for Design, Humanities and Natural Sciences.

Materials impose and expose processes. It is particularly in their transformation that materials indicate activity. Various theoretical and experimental efforts – in thinking and making alike – intended to grasp the very moment when something becomes something else. They have brought forth a specific vocabulary of processual terms: phase transitions, metabolisms, emergence, catalysis. This vernacular currently reappears in the contemporary experience of multiple planetary and ecological crises which in itself has to be conceived as a matter of nature-culture-historical thresholds that challenge the prevalent operating modes of scientific practices.

»Thresholds in Situ« provides new conceptual grounds for the material-form-function triad through the merged means of media theory, cultural history and theory, architecture and design. We propose a framework for situated knowledge production that offers possibility to access, perform and reflect on the otherwise intangible, transitory aspects of materials, and their critical status within the Anthropocene. This will be pursued through formative theory work and practice-based experimental-speculative investigations of thresholds. As case studies, they critically re-enact historically charged scientific experiments, apparatuses, instruments, procedures, methods and material relations in order to tackle the material legacies of their un/making.

Recent activities of »Thresholds in Situ« include the intervention My ABC is... active at Stiftung Sitterwerk St. Gallen in March 2023 by Iva Rešetar and Léa Perraudin and the practice-based workshop Aerial Witness/ing by Léa Perraudin, Emilia Tikka, Clemens Winkler and Martin Müller in July 2023 at the Summer School »Future of Life: Elementals«, Bio Design Lab, HfG Karlsruhe / ZKM Karlsruhe.