Installation »Raummaschine - Wann ist Raum?«, +ultra (2016)

Raummaschine

Installation 
2016

When is there space? For the past three years, issues surrounding the subject of space as an agent, or the interplay between movement and space, have been the central interdisciplinary concerns of the team of architects, designers, media scientists, art scholars and ethnologists at the Cluster of Excellence »Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory«. The installation Raummaschine was developed for the exhibition »+ultra. knowledge & gestaltung« (Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin) on the basis of this work.

Since the 1920s and even more so beginning in 1945, artists have explored spatial modification forms through kinetic experiments. Kinetic installations offer the viewer a chance to intervene within a physical space, thus opening up new perspectives for perceptions of spatial reality. Artists like Gianni Colombo were forerunners of this idea, creating spatial installations that used the grid and the line as a point of departure for Gestaltung, and actively involving the viewer in the artwork.

The machine hangs over the viewer’s head along with 384 small motors and coils, allowing for precise control of the many ball-chains attached from above. These are hung loosely on a grid, thereby generating successive shapes out of vertical lines that define the space’s width, and thus producing a direct sensory experience as well as unique configurations of physical relationships and movement. Though spatial relationships are drawn from two-dimensional lines, their effect is three-dimensional.

Data

Name Raummaschine 
Date 30 September 2016 - 8 January 2017

Location +ultra. gestaltung schafft wissen at Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin

Designteam Finn Geipel, Sabine Hansmann (project leader), Jan Wind (technical developer), Giorgia Coluccia, Christine Feistl, Patryk Kujawa, Benjamin Meurer, Marin Roche

Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Excellence Cluster »Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory«, Mobile Structures (MOS) and the Laboratory for Integrative Architecture (LIA), Finn Geipel, Technische Universität Berlin

Assisted by Gerüstbau Tisch GmbH (structure), hhpberlin (fire safety), Ingenieurbüro Rüdiger Jockwer GmbH (statics), Peter Koval (theoretical exploration), Friedrich Schmidgall (observer), Stefan Vollmar (electronics developer and programmer)

Sponsored by Gerüstbau Tisch GmbH, Berlin hhpberlin, Ingenieure für Brandschutz GmbH Ingenieurbüro Rüdiger Jockwer GmbH

Future events 20 - 23 November 2016 »open lab: moving body – moving space« with artist and choreographer Kristina Veit

Film by Felix Zimmermann
Music by Freddy Knop