Organised as part of the project Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art, Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters". In collaboration with metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin, ZK/U Berlin – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. Hosted by Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin. The number of participants is limited. Please register by December 1 by emailing Till Rückwart at t.rueckwart@fu-berlin.de. Or join online for the performance lecture by Francesca Panetta at 3:45 pm. Please register here.

This workshop will test methods and investigative tools/mappings to raise awareness of climate resilience through narrative and performative interventions. It brings together academics, artists and activists to develop and introduce new prototypes for knowledge dissemination and display. In three sections: Case Studies in Planetary Agencies, Co-Exploring Current Projects and Case Studies in Storytelling and Interspecies Connections we will explore new strategies of Digital Mapping of Contemporaneity, Activism & Ecology.

The workshop will focus on lectures and discussions as well as transdisciplinary networking, brainstorming and co-exploration activities. Methods of storytelling, fictional archives and the rewriting of social constructs through community building will be presented in the form of knowledge visualizations as effective resiliencies against master narratives in the context of questions of sustainability.

Organisation by Annette Jael Lehmann, Till Rückwart, Charlotte Hannah Peters (assistant) and Philipp Conrad (assistant. 

Each presentation includes 15 minutes Q&A

10:00 | Annette Jael Lehmann (Freie Universität Berlin, EXC 2020, metaLAB (at) FU Berlin) & Jeffrey Schnapp (Chair of Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature, Founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard): Welcome & Introduction

Case Studies in Planetary Agencies. Moderator: Annette Jael Lehmann

10:15 | Matthias Einhoff (ZK/U Berlin – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik): Planetary Agencies - how art can create a space of agency for non-human stakeholders

10:45 | Stefan Koderisch & Clemens Gruber (ZK/U Berlin – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik): ClimART and GPTree – an emotional and artistic access to climate change to enhance climate resilience

11:45 | Lunch Break (Catering)

Co-Exploring Current Projects. Moderator: Dario Rodighiero (University of Groningen)

12:45 | Giacomo Nanni (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Urban Complexity Lab): Mapping, exploring and sensing infrastructures

13:15 | Till Rückwart (Freie Universität Berlin, metaLAB (at) FU Berlin): Glitches as Storytellers – Symbolic Potential of Errors in Satellite Image Depictions of Climate-Affected Environments

13:45 | Jan Fillies (Freie Universität Berlin): Advancing Hate Speech Detection in Online Communication of Adolescents

14:15 | Short Break (Coffee)

Case Studies in Storytelling and Interspecies Connections. Moderator: Jeffrey Schnapp

14:30 | Kara Oehler (Institute for Climate Sound & Society, Copenhagen, metaLAB (at) Harvard): Decentering Humans: Creating a new institute for climate sound

15:00 | Marie Koldkjær Højlund (Aarhus University): Transductive Wind Music – Sharing the Danish Landscape with Wind Turbines

15:30 | Short Break

15:45 | Performance Lecture (virtual)

Francesca Panetta (AKO Storytelling Institute, University of Arts London): Storytelling for Social Impact: UAL's AKO Storytelling Institute's Mission

16:30 | Wrap-Up & Closing Remarks

Time & Location

Dec 07, 2023 | 10:00 AM - 05:00 PM

Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF)
Robert-Koch-Forum
Wilhelmstraße 67
10117 Berlin

Further Information

The number of participants is limited, please register with Till Rückwart, t.rueckwart@fu-berlin.de.

Biographies of the Speakers

Matthias Einhoff is co-founder and director of ZKU - Center for Arts and Urbanistics, an interdisciplinary hub for urban research and artistic practice located in a former railway station in Berlin.

In 2022 ZK/U was one of initial 14 collectives participating at the documenta15 in Kassel. Their projects Citizenship and BeeDAO tested the limits of collective work of humans and non-human agents.

As member of artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK he has been working in the public sphere exploring the potentials of art to (re)activate social and spatial relationships of individuals and groups usually divided. The collective has been realising site-specific projects in Jakarta, Lahore, Ulyanovsk, Washington, the Ruhr Area, Berlin and many more.

Matthias is co-founder of numerous learning platforms and publications, such as www.cet-ka.net, City Tool Box and Grounded Urban Practices (Berlin iteration). He has been a visiting professor and teacher at UdK-Berlin, KHS-Kassel, FHNW-Basel. He recently was elected representative for the Council of the Arts (Rat der Künste) in Berlin.

Matthias is a board member of Haus der Statistik, a 60.000sqm co-creative development project right next to Alexanderplatz, he is co-moderating the process and has co-directed "Statista" - public arts section.

In 2019, Jan Fillies received his Master’s degree in Information Systems from the Technical University of Munich. During this time, he worked as both a data scientist and a technical consultant. His master thesis focused on AI-based pattern identification in telecommunication data. Since early 2020, he has worked as a data scientist, a software developer for machine learning and, most recently, as a scientific researcher in the field of research and development for the Institut für Angewandte Informatik (InfAI) at the University of Leipzig. The focus of his work is on Natural Language Processing within the context of cultural and social application. He is pursuing a Doctorate degree in Computer Science from the Freie Universität Berlin, researching the influence of youth language on the algorithmic detection of hateful language.

Clemens Gruber is a graduate psychologist with a focus on human-computer interaction. He has worked for many years as an academic researcher in the field of user experience and usability.

Fascinated by the social interaction of honey bees and their key function as pollinators in our ecosystem, Clemens is also a bee researcher and maker. As a psychologist, he is passionate about quantifying behaviour. So, he co-founded "Hiveeyes" with other beekeepers, developers, and electronics engineers – a group of "techno beekeepers" who use sensors and systems based on open source and open hardware to collect data from bee hives and the environment.

In ZK/U's ClimArt project, he creatively connects trees, plants, and bee hives with humans in an artistic way to raise awareness about climate change and climate resilience. The project serves as a platform to sensitise people to the impacts of climate change by interconnecting nature, technology, and human experience.

Marie Koldkjær Højlund is a composer, sound artist and associate professor of Sound Studies at Aarhus University. Her practice-based PhD dissertation in Audio Design was focused on the soundscape in Danish hospitals. Since then, she has worked in the intersection of health, ecology and soundscapes in e.g. nursing homes and sensory birthing rooms and other complex multi-sensory and vulnerable environments. She engages in in developing sound technologies for alternative listening situations and sound environments for various public spaces. Together with Morten Riis, Højlund is the co-founder of The Overheard presenting large scale sound sculptures in Denmark. As a composer Højlund played in several bands, released albums, composed for TV, theatre and computer games. She is a recipient of the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsens honorary award.

Stefan Koderisch is a versatile professional navigating the realm of collaborative urban planning. He specialises in facilitating creative and co-productive processes, along with artistic interpretations and visualisation of urban planning challenges. Additionally, Stefan focuses on climate resilience strategies, with an emphasis on low-threshold solutions in transdisciplinary settings. During his studies, he conducted research on these topics in Tbilisi (Georgia), Semarang (Indonesia), and Berlin (Germany). He studied urban planning at Technical University of Berlin and the University of California San Diego. Currently, he works as a project leader at AG.URBAN and the Centre for Arts and Urbanism (ZK/U) and is based in Berlin.

Giacomo Nanni is an information designer primarily interested in exploring the intersection of technology, data and design and whose work results in a wide range of methodologies, spanning from data visualisations to investigative aesthetics.

As a research assistant at the ᴜᴄʟᴀʙ, he has been able to deepen and further explore these skills in an academic environment in recent years and expand them to include the aspect of teaching through his current involvement at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee.

Since 2017, he has also been working as a freelancer, which has given him the opportunity to realise projects with organisations and institutions such as the NGOs Airwars and Froh!, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Academy of Fine Arts Bologna and the Design Academy Eindhoven.

For two decades, Kara Oehler has been leading groundbreaking work at the intersection of media, documentary art, technology and data journalism. Her Peabody award-winning stories have aired around the world on shows like Radiolab, Morning Edition and Marketplace, been published in The New York Times Magazine and been exhibited at MoMA. Oehler co-founded metaLAB in 2011 and has been a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, and a United States Artists Fellow.

Oehler is currently incubating the Institute for Climate Sound and Society at metaLAB: an interdisciplinary community of practice that brings together sound-based scientists, technologists, scholars, archivists, data journalists, curators, and media artists to expand research impact, build new research tools, and de-center humans in public culture. This builds on Oehler’s work co-creating the New York Times Magazine’s "Sonic Voyages" issue, the magazine’s first audio-driven issue that featured destinations to visit not to see, but to hear something.

Recently, Oehler reported and produced The COVID Tracking Project Podcast, a three-part radio and podcast series about public health data with "Reveal" at the Center for Investigative Reporting. This grows from her work co-leading the Outreach and Reporting Team at the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, a volunteer organisation who compiled and published COVID data for the United States and was cited in nearly 900 academic papers, used by two presidential administrations and published daily in thousands of news stories.

Oehler has also built multiple institutions to further the fields of documentary arts, including co-founding UnionDocs, one of North America’s leading centres for documentary arts, Zeega, and Mapping Main Street, a collaborative project that documented the 10,466 streets named Main Street in the United States.

Francesca Panetta is Director of UAL’s AKO Storytelling Institute and an Emmy award-winning artist, using emerging technologies to innovate new forms of storytelling that have social impact. Formerly a Creative Director at the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality and an Executive Editor, Virtual Reality at the Guardian.

Till Rückwart is a media researcher and artist who teaches in the Culture and Media Management programme at Freie Universität Berlin. His artistic research practice derives from non-human photography, sensor technologies, satellite imagery, interface studies and software-based glitches. The work includes interactive installations, video works, photography, and participatory net art, and focuses on the interplay of technology and unexpected malfunctions that lead to speculative and critical thinking about the interdependencies of media, society, and the environment. Till holds an MA in Media Studies from the University of Potsdam and the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. His master’s thesis explored glitches in Google Earth satellite imagery, emphasising its aesthetics as a potential for media-reflexive analysis.