An Adaptable Structure for Connectivity: A Working Discussion and Exhibition
During my curator-in-residency at Node Center in Berlin, I developed a concept for a public art project called An Adaptable Structure for Connectivity. I organized a working discussion with Hither Yon, a Berlin based architect collective, and Viktor Bedo, an urban mapping specialist to explore its potential. We analyzed different approaches to this concept starting from a series of four key words: adapt, interact, connect, and (hybrid) exchange. Through rigorous examination of these working components, the group searched to define what integrated hybrid space was, and how a structure of this capacity could take form. The group found that this structure, which sought to break barriers of communication networks while defining social connections, could manifest in very different physical and abstract formations as it moved from city to city. By formulating a bottom-up rather than top-down formation in public, decentralized space, while blurring physical and virtual connectedness, people could potentially shape the space they are in by the way they communicate with one another, rather than through a singular, overarching, defining identity. To examine how the present can be visually defined, local, foreign, national, cultural, and regional groups must be taken into account. The way people communicate, and to whom, reflects multiple and conflicting value systems built by multiple constructed cultural identities inhabiting one space.
From this working discussion, an exhibition will document the collaborative process of exploring the possibilities for an integrated hybrid space as a means to facilitate exchange and de-hierarchize existing models of singular national and cultural identity. A visual recording of the discussion will reveal the ideation process of defining how to integrate hybrid connectivity into public space, followed by renderings of the imagined new model of An Adaptable Structure for Connectivity, by Hither Yon,in response to the initial proposal.
The audio and visual recordings reflect the group’s ideation process during the working discussion.
