Expanding the Workflow

As a start, let’s take a moment to explore what the ‘Stretching Senses School’ is: this initiative emerged from within the context of the MoA Cluster and is situated in a long process of testing out the possibilities and potentials of how one may apply exhibition-, practice- and artistic-led research.

Orchestrated by its curators, Maxime Le Calve and Yoonha Kim, the Stretching Senses School is an active learning community around art science and speculative ethnography. Weaving a diverse network of actors, it aims to explore more-than-human perceptions through making practices, while bringing them into conversation with movement, social experiments, creative coding, and immersive media. Like a live organism, the initiative has had different life phases, during which its form and function have evolved. It first evolved out of a continuation of the exhibition Stretching Materialities, where through a series of workshop-based teaching experiments, it sought to explore and expand on the exhibition’s theme.

If this is where the term ”school” comes from, how about the stretching of the senses?
Right from the start, the project expanded on the exhibition in a way that was not neutral, but thematized climate emergency. Here the formation of VR-Worldings was an experiment in the affective communication of the imminent disaster, which the multiple worlds around us are facing. Quoting the clusters co-director Claudia Mareis, this project “is not only for the human experience that is mediated technologically or medially...It is rather about a playful but nevertheless serious attempt of a sensory regime that transcends the human senses also towards a more-than-human register.”

And without further ado, let’s dive into the first workshop: ‘Leaking Bodies’ is an artist-collective that was formed during a residency program of the ‘Stretching Senses School’. Two of its members, Charlotte Roschka and Karolina Żyniewicz, transcribed their artistic approach into a hybrid educational format and led the first workshop of this collaboration. Under the title Capturing Leakage: body flows and material investigations the workshop focused on digital archiving and hybrid expressions of materiality. In parallel, the tutors' core aim was to decode the abstract process of transdisciplinary creative research. Therefore, the workshop was structured in three clear steps, namely a conceptual, an exploratory, and a translatory phase.

The first phase analysed the main concepts associated with “leakage” and material “flow.” Gravitating around 10 main concepts, tutors and participants created together an expansive network of qualities and notions. The students were then invited to break and re-link the concepts, forming in this way individual stories and combined group narratives. The students acknowledged this initial, collective brainstorming as the most impactful phase of the workshop, because it helped them process and relate to the workshop’s theme.

During the exploratory phase, these narratives gradually acquired form. Working in transdisciplinary teams, the students observed and documented elements of the urban space surrounding the workshop’s location - the Bundesallee building of the Berlin University of the Arts. This formed a first archive, which included photographs, 3D scans of found objects, as well as sound and video recordings. It was at this point that the translation of analogue observations to digital assets slowly started to take place.

This transition from analogue to digital was paved through diverse recording media, inspired by the tutors’ backgrounds and art science practice. For example, an endoscope, normally used to view the interior of the human body, was used to explore the interior of a hollow tree instead. A clip microscope was attached to mobile phones, revealing the micro-texture of stones and dry leaves. Each of these tools was easily portable and simple in its use. As a result, each group could intuitively adapt the tools to their own creative exploration, producing diverse and surprising results.
In the last, translatory phase of the workshop, each team combined the digital assets of their initial collection into one multimedia element. For one team this meant a collection of animated autumn leaves, which were found and 3D-scanned right outside the building. For another team, this was the interior of a tree trunk, where hidden stories on free speech were narrated, and captured off Instagram before they disappeared. Each of these elements was then integrated into one common Virtual Reality (VR) installation. Sharing the same scene, this VR application formed the common, final archive of the workshop, where the different group projects were consciously combined and interweaved.

This gradual process was communicated to the students through two modes of thinking, namely “expanding” and “limiting,” which were a consistent part of all three phases of the workshop and organized their transitions. Together with the clarity of the overall structure, the mindset of “expanding & limiting” helped students to navigate and filter their ideas, and to maintain an overview of their creative choices.
But what does it mean to stretch and expand such a workflow further?

So, what do we keep from this process? And why should we enter into such a dialogue with another institution or initiative, and offer workshops or educational formats together? As a start, the collaboration with an external institute and project was a great chance for us to reflect on our own educational practices and consider how we could holistically expand on them. Regarding our existing educational formats, here are three main takeaways from the process:

Enabling transdisciplinary meetings

…between students from different creative disciplines and departments. According to the students’ feedback, such meetings are currently missing, and they consider them important. These include a ‘time-block’ format, to be able to concentrate and open up to a cross-disciplinary exchange.

Making space for varied skills.

In parallel with making time & space for them, such meetings also require open and diversified workflows, which students with different skill sets and creative backgrounds can interpret. For example, in the ‘Capturing Leakage’ workshop, the tutors highlighted from the start that narrative media - such as written poems, sketches, and recorded monologues - could also find their own, unique way into the final VR project. Taking the form of mid-journey prompts, in the second workshop this connection between narratives and digital expressions became an integral part of the creative workflow. This open and fused teaching approach was particularly empowering for the students who were less acquainted with digital workflows.

Photogrammetry: both medium & mediator

Photogrammetry is so far the prime example of such an open, beginner-friendly, and inclusive practice. As a technical possibility, this is due to a variety of mobile apps that make the digitization of 3D objects straightforward and intuitive. As a process, however, it was the invitation to haptically explore their surrounding space, before selecting something to scan, that made the students curious and proactive. Familiarization with new digital tools came then organically and as a part of the overall experimentation. In this sense, photogrammetry functioned not only as a medium but also as mediating phase, negotiating the realm between analogue and digital forms of expression.