Designing Realities, 2018
Scores, participative actions;
Renderings, 3D prints; different sizes
Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil
Wimmel Research Fellowship
Zentrum für Forschung und Vorausentwicklung, Platform12, Bosch, Stuttgart-Renningen
Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart
What are necessary and inherent tendencies to misuse technologies?
What are the possibilities of action for the individual(s) bodies?
Programmable matter is becoming ubiquitous and is currently capable of transforming objects into data, and again data into objects – our thoughts, desires and needs. Using the means of play and fiction, Fabian Hesse and Mitra Wakil investigate technological research, human movement, programmable materials and physical representation during their residency as artists-in-situ at Platform 12 at the Bosch Research Campus in Renningen.
The artists invited researchers and employees of the campus to work with self-developed scores. These choreographic action notations, as borrowed from the Fluxus movement, were transformed into positions that contained specific questions and ideas about their work. How can one physically depict a subject of research? When does one find oneself in the role of representative of the company, in this case Bosch? When is one confronted with one’s own ignorance or doubts and how can one express them? And ultimately, what is the inherent purpose of the material in such processes?
Taking these questions as a starting point, Hesse and Wakil developed a project in which a 3D scanner records the self-developed scores. The scanner is used here as a tool to traverse hierarchies, resulting in 35 scans of actions and movements. The dialogical and performative format merged after multiple translation processes into a multimedia spatial installation of altered 3D prints.
From this process a dialogue between reflection, physical representation, framing and failure emerges, that is conveyed in a playful and funny way, with a high curiosity for trying out the unusual. Daily social structures, models, working systems and ideas are transformed into 3D models and eventually into an installation. Hesse and Wakil use participative and performative concepts to search for open spaces and stages, and alternative forms of expression. The main questions that arise here are how digitization can be used as a tool to reflect our imagination differently, and how can we develop a new ecology of programmed matter, made of things and beings? Can we then ultimately form a new reality and shape a new future? With this project Hesse and Wakil reflect on collateral events as central developments in technology research. In doing so, they resort to the simplest means of expression: the body.
In 2015, the project Platform 12 has been set up as a permanent collaboration between the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Robert Bosch GmbH and the artistic duo Wimmelforschung. The Bosch Development Center in Stuttgart-Renningen is the worldwide development center for technological innovations of the Bosch Group. Platform 12 is an experimental space designed by Wimmelforschung in collaboration with Bosch as part of Bosch’s Corporate Sector Research and Advance Engineering in Renningen. The aim of the collaboration is to establish new forms of innovation culture through an exchange between the arts and research.
