In collaboration with the Cultural Studies Programme at Leuphana University of Lüneburg and Guest Professor Marcelo Tramontano (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil) this project seminar will focus on the role of digital culture within the contemporary built environment. It will theoretically explore and empirically analyze the metaprocesses such as mediatization, hybridization and globalization. Interdisciplinary design teams will then develop new models for media support within living spaces and the urban environment. It is our aim to research the interface between digital media and urban development on different scales. The results will be presented in an exhibition.
First of all we try to identify existing examples of everyday urban hybridization and collect, conceptualize and categorize the data. Then we will explore the questions that arise from this catalogue and transfer them into projects on urban reality. One aim is to try to understand how digital media could enhance the local dynamics.
Another important base of our work will be the hybridisation of the work process itself. We try to develop an approach that we call open research: a research based on media and media-based presentation combined with face to face interaction. Since we will work with two units from two different universities and a technology base in Sao Paulo the work process can only work with media. Thus we aim to intensify the exchange experiences with media as ongoing development. The process is immediately recorded and thus provokes new ways of representation: when everything is written, we have to be much more organised, more precise. At the same time communication can take place in a more neutral way with lesser hierarchal burdens.
Everybody can develop an idea, place it on the platform and then somebody else takes it up and creates different layers of work- flow. In this way we intend to learn and to invent how to work and to produce knowledge together. The outcome will not only be the results of our open research with it’s catalogues and the media- based internet platform but also the projects and the possibility of a low tech transformation as a real project or intervention in 1:1 scale.