On the basis of their successful collaboration to date – particularly within the framework of the Initiative Hybrid Platform – the Technische Universität Berlin and the University of the Arts Berlin are planning to create a jointly run, cross-disciplinary research association. The purpose of the research project SHAPING SPACE. CONVERGING ART | SCIENCE | TECHNOLOGY is to develop and open up entirely new research, design and application fields. The central issue here is how by combining a range of new technologies at the interface between digital spaces and those spaces that are available to human experience, both virtually and phenomenologically, spatial designs which to date have not been feasible, which are visionary and at the same time technically simulated and physically built, can be constructed and ‘tried out’ and modulated through the whole body.
Questions and Content
SHAPING SPACE overcomes in reflective practical and theoretical terms the binary concept of artistic here, engineering or technical spatial designs there, as it does the paradigm of singular authorship as a key reference value. When the design process can now open up through the digital representation of its spaces and objects for cross-disciplinary co-production processes, as well as to artistic and social intervention and participation, the social and aesthetic constellations of spatial design and experience are fundamentally changed.
Target Group
With the build-up of interdisciplinary spatial design laboratories for different forms of research, the construction and creation, as well as the provision, of participative spaces for knowledge transfer to society, the excellence cluster is consciously oriented to long-term development perspectives. At the same time, significant new results can be anticipated in the field of spatial design due to the innovative, risk-taking research objectives. The well-advanced digitalisation now enables not only new forms of representation of spatial designs (of objects, buildings, landscapes, cities, installations, or products and services), but also fundamentally new strategies for design. Here, algorithms become an important partner during the design process, and multi-modal interfaces – such as to interconnected light, temperature, sound or surface and material simulation – allow entirely new dimensions of interaction with the (no longer pure) digital representation of spatial designs.
A new dimension of research in the sense of artistic and creative activity, testing and questioning is also enabled by the significant involvement of an arts university for the first time in such a large-scale research association. Visions and the feasibility of technical realisation, the initially entirely open search for new opportunities and critical reflection, the collaboration of people, machines and interfaces and other current urgent issues of the digital age will be broadly and productively interlaced within the joint UdK Berlin-TU Berlin excellence cluster.
Support by the Hybrid Plattform
Initiation and Support