ATELIER

WUNDERKAMMER

‘

This year’s ‘Atelier’ was inspired by the GIDE network’s Mobile Museum event held in Dundee in February 2019. We are one of eight nations who reinterpreted this mobile museum trigger. We were tasked, in small interdisciplinary groups, to conceive, design and make an interactive object or an interactive space as a physical response to the title 'Wunderkammer for the 21st Century.'

​

Machine for Being is an experimental installation which questions the social landscape of the art museum. In galleries, we don’t just interact with the curated pieces, we have curious interactions with the space itself and interactions with others who temporarily occupy it. These interactions are often very subtle, and mostly invisible. 

Between queues, spectacular cafes and gift shops and you can lose the tranquillity of being alone in space and time, reflecting on your position between the past and the future, or maybe contemplating nothing at all, just being. 

​

Wherever a human body is detected, the space deconstructs around you; offering visitors the experience of controlling the environment. It activates through participation, which is why it is placed in a temporary in-between space in a museum. We aim to inverse the more common interactive exhibit at a museum which requires voluntary and sometimes tiresome physical intervention (touch, push, feel). Your presence is your interaction.

 

Heightening the sense of bodily self-awareness and inter-subjectivity is central to Museum for being. Museums are social landscapes, blank canvases for interaction, which is central to our blank aesthetic. 

​

Museums, where your mind and imagination are catered for (if not completely over-saturated) your body is fundamentally under-served. Our most important design process was exploring body storming, where we physically experimented at full scale with proximity and way-finding. This is a design for the body and not for the eyes. We aimed to make invisible interactions visible from afar and tangible up close. This architecture by activation simply aims to be a delightful relation between people and technology.