Maxime Le Calvé is a postdoctoral research associate at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activities”. He was trained in general ethnology in Paris Nanterre and has a PhD in social anthropology and in theater studies, from EHESS Paris and FU Berlin.
How can one sense a cell? Cells are tiny creatures. They seem utterly foreign to our human scale – and yet they are the fabric of human and more-than-human bodies.
“Sensing Knife” aims to convert the technology of the Atomic Force Microscope into a surgical instrument – a machine that could sense and cut living tissues simultaneously, “like the hand of a surgeon.”
Crawl into the tubular willow installation and imagine environments in other scales inside this Textile Space. Imagine you are inside a yarn, vessel or lichen filament on a rock.
This Korean structural textile made out of rattan is a personal cooling climatic device. It lifts hanbok away from the human skin to keep perspiration from clothes.
What is the cloud doing here? Enveloped in the centre of the rotunda by weak circular winds, a damp atmosphere entangled with various bodies of the exhibition space can be experienced.
Employing various forensic methodologies, Algorithmic Weathering explores the complex entanglements and metabolic processes laid out in Enveloping Atmospheres.
Through practice-based design methods and experimental formats on knowledge production, Imagining Suspended Care-riers invites you as a learning site to draw on the processes of capturing and measuring air qualities and components.
In this exhibition, the virtual is not a simulation that functions independently of the physical outside world and has nothing to do with it. On the contrary: here, the virtual becomes tangible and walkable.
The artist Anna Kubelik and the musician Oliver Schmid were invited to exhibit and perform the sculptural installation “Wohl-temperiertes Hygrometer” in the Objekt Labor.
Textile techniques have developed an immense knowledge throughout centuries. Upscaling these techniques is an alternative route to reach the architectural scale.
In the VR experience of Studio Above & Below visitors enter an alternative time capsule that allows them to perceive the dynamic changes of weathering – a process so slow that is usually impossible to detect by the naked human eye.
Quick illustrated report on the first round of installation of the “Stretching Materialities” exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin, with the Object Space Agency team.
Combining interaction design, architecture, art history, computer science and anthropology, this exhibition stretches the disciplines in order to enter into sensuous resonance with the vibrant material world.
Playful approaches can directly affect our sensory faculties beyond the realm of power and knowledge. The »stretching senses school« is an education-as-research project at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin (TA T) attached to the exhibition Stretching Materialities.
The vitrines of the Tieranatomisches Theater date back to the 19th century when they originated to protect exhibition objects from visitors and their physicality: from their exhalations, their touch, their body heat. To this day, the quarantined object is our museum standard.
“When I draw with pen and paper in front of my patient the brain, the tumor, and how we are going to remove it, (…) I have the impression that something happens: we can really exchange about the situation and make a better decision together.”
Getting an impression, understanding a certain technique or picking up a strategy for solving a problem can be very thrilling incentives to ›just watch‹.
Juggling the different devices while walking around the surgical facility, the chief is always in motion when he is not standing in a state of absolute tranquility at the operating table.
Acting as a co-pilot and providing a second pair of hands, she is always part of the process and could instantly take over the role of the main surgeon if it were necessary.
The collaborative workshops with InKüLe are focused on the potential of artistic education to change our relations to the environment through an engagement at the level of anthropotechniques.
We joined them to design shape-shifting shading devices, protocols for sensing emotional territories, outer heart fountain flows, plant ritual accessories for extra-planetary life, mycelium spatial collaborations, and garden-based divinatory systems.
Critically referencing classic anatomy lessons—like that of Doctor Tulp, portrayed by Rembrandt in 1632 — »Dissect« is an updated theatre for the analysis and discussion of contemporary works of art and design in the presence of the works.
“The idea of the exhibition project was to accompany the interdisciplinary research process on African materials and by doing so activate a space of reflection for each discipline to go beyond its normal procedures.”
What is an exhibition-as-research? The multifarious experimentations to relate space to objects-in-process is part of what “curation” meant in the first place.
That week at Matters of Activity, we switched methods to a more interventionist style: constituting a « fermentation club » is a participatory and collaborative way to investigate on the relation between human and microbiome.
Amid this fascinating but somewhat nebulous discourse, the idea of a collaboration between Matters of Activity and Driving the Human emerged. It was a glimmer of balance in a sea of ideas; a potential solution to the missing piece of this intricate puzzle.
In the labyrinthine heart of the Berlin State Library, we gathered under the guidance of Horst Bredekamp for a special session of our Second Breakfast bi-weekly seminar, dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of energy.
Entering the Central Laboratory that day, participants were greeted with balloons to inflate with their breath and a 285-hertz “Theta” sound bath, which they were invited to explore haptically through to the red latex bubbles.
How can we use 3D sketching to further develop neuroanatomical education, in particular to teach spatial understanding of anatomical landmarks and neurosurgical approaches?
We explored how to attend to more-than-human collectivities at different scales, from the built environment to cellular activity, the workshop was designed as an inventive anthropological design inquiry within the heavily mediated sense worlds of bio-design, HCI, and Medicine.
How can we use 3D sketching to further develop neuroanatomical education, in particular to teach spatial understanding of anatomical landmarks and neurosurgical approaches?