This marks the first in a series of presentations taking place throughout the following year at partner institutions and festivals across Europe, to offer insights into the development process of the individual prototypes. Visitors are invited to join the talents, our artistic directors, and six of the experts advising on the projects for an evening of interactive installations, projections, and discussions at the HKW’s upper-floor auditorium. Here’s what to expect:
Dasha Tsapenko (UA, NL) explores how a polyamorous relationship is best structured in terms of living space, and bases her project LOVARATORY on her personal fieldwork in 20 households. She will share visual aspects of her research with the audience, also using props and objects that represent the body’s movement in a multiperson and multipurpose household.
Artem Kitaev (RU, CH, US) of KOSMOS Architects is producing the prototypes for Three Pillars of A New Home, which shows how temporary housing can be efficiently created from abandoned and unused structures by using portable elements. With a slide show of the project and several free-standing elements, they will explore how empty structures, abundant in contemporary cities, can offer efficient solutions to some of the major issues urban developers must tackle in the twenty-first century.
Lucia Tahan (ES, DE) presents her project Cloud Housing, which probes the contradiction between aspirational design objects and permanent housing and the temporary living models and nomadic lifestyle that are the reality of a younger generation entering the hyperflexible labor markets. She will present an audiovisual simulation of an augmented reality app in its early development stage, which allows users to design a virtual living space and project it onto walls.
Simone C Niquille (CH, NL) of Technoflesh will present the initial results of her video investigations on human and machine cohabitation. In her project Regarding the Pain of SpotMini, she explores a near future in which humans must increasingly coexist with autonomous systems such as robots. Outfitted with a computer vision system to navigate the built environment, a robot has to learn to identify a chair, a dining room, or even a human. Large training image databases are created for this purpose, which reveal hyperstandardized and exclusive architectures. What image is used to teach a computer vision system what a human is?
Mae-Ling Lokko (GH, PH, US) is considered an expert for sustainable material technology. With her project Agrocologies she investigates methods for processing and reusing organic waste for building purposes and how it can be integrated into household recycling management. Her presentation includes a simulation of a system beginning with a household coffee maker, and how coffee grounds can be efficiently reused for germinating future building materials.
Six of the experts that Housing the Human invited to advise on the projects will take part in the presentations to comment and discuss the proposals with the talents and the audience. The team of experts who will be present in Berlin includes museum director Tulga Beyerle, video artist Omer Fast, designer Daniel Perlin, design curator Angela Rui, architect Matthias Sauerbruch, and curator and editor James Taylor-Foster.
Future presentations showcasing further stages in the prototypes’ development will be held at the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (November 2, 2018), the Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) (April 2019), and at Z33/ House for Contemporary Art (August 2019). Final project results will be presented in October 2019 as part of the Housing the Human Festival in Berlin.