Teaching

Let’s take, as an example, a tree fork.

= strong. Because of its interwoven fibres, it is one of the strongest parts of a tree. Hence it was traditionally used for elements that had to withstand particularly strong stresses, such as boat hulls or ladders.

= suggestive. Because of its idiosyncratic geometry, it was worshiped – after being worked into with an axe and flipped around – as an anthropomorphic “pole god”. Such idols were used in fertility cults and sacrificial practices.

= worthless. Its form is just too irregular and unruly, making it very challenging to standardize. Hence it gets used as fuel or is shredded into fibres and glued together to produce normed stock materials such as MDF or OSB.  

= en vogue. Precisely because it is irregular and strong, it is currently experiencing a revival. It can be used for non-standard building components: digitized, catalogued, parametricised and then minimally yet precisely CNC-machined.

= … 

This term we will explore the fertile tension between the newest of technologies and the oldest of material and ritual practices. In the test tube of our design laboratory, we will mix technological emergence and current desires with lively histories and narratives and probe and develop the results of this reaction as physical prototypes. A collaboration with the Thuringian Museum for Pre- and Ancient History (the Bauhaus’ direct neighbour in Weimar) will be our starting point. Its spaces and collection will become an initial catalyst for the development of our own speculative design practices.

This means we will use technologies like 3D-scanning, digital modelling and simulation, digital fabrication (CNC-machining & 3D-Printing) to rediscover and revive traditional ways of understanding and using materials as »alive«, many of which have been lost through industrialization. We want to learn from the past and, especially in the face of resource scarcity and climate emergency, develop future proof approaches to use resources in mindful, sustainable but also imaginative ways.

Going further, we also want to speculatively re-invent the museum’s cultic and ritual artefacts and the social and spiritual practices they embody. Students will choose a specific artefact, explore it contextually, materially and technically (a.o. using photogrammetry), re-actualise or translate it speculatively using contemporary (digital) fabrication tools and then re-contextualise it in our postdigital world as a speculative praxis. Confronted with your own experiences and interests, we want to take these object as a provocation to design contemporary and future rituals, artefacts and narratives that explore the desires, hopes and fears of our own age.

The specific format of each individual project will gradually take shape from there on over the course of the term. The role of the Museum is not prescribed: it might become a site for spatial interventions, subversions and rituals, but it can also serve »merely« as a initial spark of inspiration or a space of resonance. It is key to see our design processes as open-ended, driven by context, but also by our own curiosity and personal interests. The studio wants to give you the space and time to develop your individual approach and to develop ways of working that are less interested in proving than in finding out. We strive for precision, but are equally lead by intuition, the will to take risks and a spirit of invention.

In addition to weekly supervisions of your individual project, the project module will include:

• a »Prehistoric ≈ Postdigital« excursion to set the stage for the term: Karl-Zeiss Jena (TBC), a prehistoric ritual site (TBC) and the Museum for Pre- and Ancient History in Weimar
• a photogrammetry-workshop (Autodesk Recap): »3D-Scanning for Precision and Speculation« (October, in Collaboration with the Open Process Lab)
• two 3-day workshops (November and December): »Experimental and Collaborative CNC-Fabrication« (Autodesk Fusion, Rhino, in cooperation with the Bauhaus central wood workshop)

*Postdigital: the digital is in the process of dissolving – it is everywhere, like the air we breathe; the digital as such is not very exciting – more exciting is what we do with it; the digital can be fabricated physically and the physical can be digitized, both nearly instantaneously – what is key is that we learn to navigate the in-between fluently and with ease and to use these constant translations playfully and speculatively.

Prehistoric: from the era before written accounts. There are no narrations, only finds – giving us all the more space for speculation.

Ongoingness/Ongoing: a central concept in Donna Haraway’s more recent techno-feminist writing. It can be understood to mean many things:

1. To continue, to follow, to connect, to pick up the threads…: as designers we have to engage with the pre-existing, the inherited (whether positive or negative), the accumulated data set, the slowly grown and the quickly decaying. This is not only an ethical obligation – it is also an invitation to tap into the pre-existing to spark our imagination and inventiveness. It is the opposite of the blank canvas, of the sad grey grid lines of an empty Rhino-file that stares back at us: it is a richly textured point cloud with millions of spatial and colour coordinates, precise and provocative.
2. To survive, to continue to exist, to sustain: how do we, as designers, contribute to our survival, the ongoingness of the planet?
3. To persist, to be tenacious: how do we keep going, how do we fail better, how do we think in iterations and prototypes?
4. To continue, to unfinish: How can we create works that might never be »finished«, that might continue to be productively unfinished, that are active and stay active?

Questions:

• How can we capture and understand the irregularity, the variability and the temporal layerings of a material and use them as design drivers? How can the liveliness and unruliness of a material be used to our advantage?
• How might we tap into the ritual and subversive potential of our contemporary design tools and techniques? Could we regard them not just as instruments for precise capture and translation, but also use their creative agency – perhaps even discovering their phantasmagoric potential? How might we use them with a sense of »unsharp precision«?
  
• What are our contemporary (or future) idols and oracles? How could new technologies (e.g. AI’s such as DALL-E, Midjourney or Instagram oracles) become new instruments of design speculation and divination? How could we translate these into objects and practices?
  
• How can we experience 10,000 year old artefacts and rituals as alive, as ongoing? How might we activate them, through touch, through the body? How could we extend them into our current time, how might we reinvent them, how might we purposely misread them? How might we »steal« or »transport« them without even touching them, how might we translate them to another space or context, how can read them in another, speculative way? How do we fill its narrative and material gaps? What might we find under its surfaces? How can we read them speculatively?
  
• What about an artefact that proves something that never happened but should have happened? How might we use the term »fabrication« in a wider sense, i.e. how might we fabricate this truth?
  
• How would we imagine an artefact from our own time that might be found by future generations (say in 10,000 years) or should be read and interpreted by non-human others (a self-driving vehicle, another creature, a satellite)? Whom or what would it address? Which data sets, which information would be encoded into it, which instructions might it give?
• How could we develop, as designers/inventors/story tellers, new practices, tools and artefacts that are »ongoing« and continue to »go on«, which might develop their meaning and use over time?
  
• …