Workshops

Currently relevant topics are addressed in an inter- and transdisciplinary manner through short workshop formats and intensive block seminars with external guests from science, art, and design. Our approach follows the phases of research & exploration, ideation & creation, prototyping, testing, and evaluation. The work of the student teams is supported both didactically and technically.

Bacteria, kombucha cultures and agar plates were handed out with the instruction to treat them as collaborators rather than supplies. Growth takes its own time and does not accept a deadline.

The results were photographed, measured and mostly composted. What stayed was a different sense of what making means when the material is alive and has opinions.

A construction session with cheap material and expensive ambitions: cardboard, battens, clamps and a structure that had to stand long enough to be photographed.

This page collects the selection — the versions that held, the versions that folded, and the two that did something nobody had drawn beforehand.

The typography workshop banned the keyboard. Letters were cut, folded, projected, poured and in one case grown, until the alphabet stopped looking like a system and started looking like a set of decisions.

The selection here is what survived the wall pinning at the end of the second day.

A collaborative format that puts people from different disciplines at the same table and gives them slightly too little information. The gaps are where the work happens.

A selection of results, kept in the order they were finished rather than the order they were planned.

Peter Wildman, an Australian artist and educational designer in the field of physics, worked with Foucault’s pendulum—an installation that makes the Earth’s rotation comprehensible. An initial introduction was provided by Felix Johannsmann, student assistant at the Institute of Physics at Osnabrück University, using the installed pendulum in the staircase of building 32 (Physics).

Subsequently, applications such as p5.js and Processing served for experiments translating the pendulum’s motion into curve visualizations in order to examine its defining parameters. Thought experiments and “what-if” scenarios enabled the suspension of fundamental laws of natural science allowing for new explorations. Speculative assumptions fostered the development of alternative narratives and visual concepts.

By connecting natural science with art and design, imaginative capacities were expanded and disciplinary boundaries were overcome. Such insights and approaches foster an inter- and transdisciplinary understanding.

Run alongside the festival, this session took whoever walked in. Some stayed ten minutes, some stayed the whole afternoon, and the material had to work for both.

Short formats, quick prototypes, and a table that was never in the same state twice.

A few lines of code, a pen plotter and a lot of patience. Parameters were changed one at a time, the machine drew, and the group decided together which accidents were worth keeping.

The selection shows the sheets as they came off the plotter, unretouched, together with the parameters that produced them.

Motors, microcontrollers and salvaged parts, assembled into machines with no productivity target whatsoever. The brief asked for behaviour, not function.

Some of the results moved, some only twitched, and the difference mattered less than it usually does.

Participants assembled open-source sensor boxes and pointed them at everything within reach: air quality by the window, temperature under the desk, noise in the stairwell. The building slowly became a set of readings.

The second half was about what to do with numbers once there are too many of them. Data became drawings, drawings became arguments, and a few of the arguments made it onto the wall.

A camera rides on a rover, the shutter stays open, and the room records the path rather than the object. Participants drove, crashed, adjusted and drove again until the trails started to look deliberate.

Photography works as a measuring instrument here. What ends up in the frame is not a machine but the evidence that one moved through the dark.

The SteamWalk treats the way from one building to the next as fieldwork. Recorders, sketchbooks and a few improvised sensors turned a five-minute route into an afternoon.

Every stop produced a small collection — sounds, surfaces, complaints about the wind — and the collections were laid out at the end like the findings of a very local expedition.

With alligator clips and a little conductivity, anything that carries a current becomes an input. Fruit, foil, plants and one participant’s left hand all took turns as buttons.

The point is not the trick but what comes after it: once an interface can be made out of breakfast, deciding what an interface should be becomes an open question again.

A drawing robot follows its instructions exactly, which is precisely why the results look nothing like the plan. The workshop spent its time in that gap — writing rules, watching them fail, rewriting them.

By the end the interesting drawings were the ones where the mechanics of the arm were visible in the line. Precision turned out to be less useful than a wobble with a reason.

The lecture put cyanotype and mixed reality side by side and asked what they have in common: both are ways of fixing an image onto something that was not there before, and both are stubborn about light.

Prints were exposed on the windowsill while the headsets ran in the same room. The comparison held up better than expected — exposure time is exposure time, whether it costs sunlight or frames per second.

Blackout foil, one small hole, and a few minutes of waiting for the eyes to adjust — then the street outside arrives upside down on the far wall, moving.

The workshop built several of these, from shoebox to full room, and photographed the result. Every step of the chain stays visible, which is the whole argument.

The workshop started from the hand: what it can reach, what it can hold, what it does when nobody is watching. Sensors were strapped to fingers until the gestures turned into data.

What came back out was rarely useful and often funny. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth prototype the group stopped designing controls and started designing habits.