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Design & Computation

@designandcomputation

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research based MA in cooperation between @udkberlin and @tu_berlin at the intersection of art, technology, science and theory- part of @new__practice

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Apply now for the Master Design & Computation to be part of the next cohort in WiSe 2026/27. The application period is open from April 1st – May 15th!
D&C is Berlin’s interdisciplinary master program that is tightly entangled with the research platform New Practice in Art and Technology (@new__practice). Both find their space for research, exchange, and transfer in the DC-Studio at TU Berlin, where projects are developed, funded grants come to realization, conferences take place and exhibitions show what can be possible at the intersection of art, science, society and technology. by @designandcomputation

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6 months ago

Are you interested in studying the interdisciplinary master program Design & Computation at the intersection of Art and Technology?

The application period starts today, April 1 - May 15, to apply for the upcoming Wintersemester 2025/26!

You can submit the application with the help of the guides on the TU Berlin Website here, where you will find a step by step application process and the TU Portal:

Guide for Applicants with a Bachelor degree from a German University:
https://www.tu.berlin/studierendensekretariat/bewerbung-einschreibung-master/bewerbung/bewerbung-fuer-absolventinnen-deutscher-hochschulen

Guide for Applicants with a Bachelor degree from a foreign University:
https://www.tu.berlin/studierendensekretariat/bewerbung-einschreibung-master/bewerbung/bewerbung-fuer-absolventinnen-von-auslaendischen-hochschulen

Additionally you have to upload your Portfolio through a separate Portfolio Upload Form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVkg6AOv5WuwutrieG3QkQLyLb5Xw5Da0nYmpK7UGtdCt69Q/viewform?usp=dialog

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at apply@design-computation.berlin or visit our website for a full overview of the application process. https://www.newpractice.net/application.

Applications may also be considered conditionally if the final language certificate is not yet available at the time of application.

We’re excited to receive your applications! by @designandcomputation

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6 months ago

“UNIversalräume – Dynamische Systeme in Lehr- und Lernraumarchitekturen” is one of the Raumlabore funded by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation and the Stifterverband (@stifterverband ). This space, created in collaboration between TU Berlin and UdK Berlin, serves as a versatile environment, functioning as a lab, studio, exhibition space, and conference room.

In this context, our research associate, Johannes Pointner, serves as a Learning Architecture Agent, exploring the possibilities of this dynamic environment through a participatory experiment with students here at New Practice.

A special thank you goes to Christian Schröder, Vice President for Studies and Teaching at TU Berlin, Lara Kolbert, Program Manager for Learning Architectures, and David Joshua Schröder, Research Associate in General Sociology, for their invaluable support, as seen in the video.

We would also like to extend our gratitude to the Stifterverband team: Volker Meyer-Guckel, Oliver Janoshka, Matthias Winde, and Carlotta Esser. by @designandcomputation

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2 years ago

Congratulations on this impressive Master’s thesis by our student Timo Nikisch. Read more about the project in the appended abstract.

Masterthesis by Timo Nikisch: Generative Artificial Intelligence for Early-Stage Urban Massing
Development of a Context-Aware Generative Modelling Approach for Regulation-Grounded Urban Massing
Supervised by Prof. Albert Lang and Johannes Pointner
This thesis investigates how generative artificial intelligence can support early-stage urban planning and design through the generation of parcel-scale building volumes in context-sensitive infill situations. It asks whether machine-learning models can infer plausible building forms from the surrounding urban fabric, respond to target values for site coverage ratio, floor area ratio, and building height, and generate controlled variants while maintaining contextual and regulatory fit.

Using Berlin as a case study, a voxel-based dataset of 13,164 parcel-centred samples is constructed from CityGML LoD1 buildings, cadastral parcels, and street-network data…

The results show that deterministic, context- and target-conditioned voxel prediction can generate plausible parcel-scale building volumes within the developed setup. The surrounding urban fabric provides a robust basis for prediction, while regulatory conditioning improves alignment with prescribed targets and enables controllable responses to changes in site coverage ratio, floor area ratio, and building height. The thesis demonstrates how generative modelling can connect urban form, selected regulatory metrics, and machine-learning methods for early-stage infill studies. Reliable generation of controlled stochastic variants, however, remains unresolved in the present latent diffusion setup.

Find out more about the project on Timo’s website: https://timonikisch.de/projects/generative-ai-for-early-stage-urban-massing by @designandcomputation

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6 days ago

Ars Electronica 2026 – Cluster ‚Network Excavation‘ I

The platform ‘Network Excavation’ explores data visualization methods, by integrating fragmented archaeological data into a knowledge graph using AI-driven methods and through a game about identity and surveillance where players search their data traces in an expanding archive.
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Memento Mori//Abyssus
by Jack Conwell, Daniel Luca Donovan-Achi

Memento Mori is an experimental game, that deals with digital identity and surveillance. Players become digital archaeologists as they search for their own data records within an anonymised archive. Players can upload their own google takeout datasets, anonymised through the upload process. Players then search for data-chunks, collecting what they connect with to form a memento.
By playing the game a digital-double is constructed, mirroring the mechanics of an online platform’s extractive logic. The game works on the socio-economics of big-tech that remain unexposed due to their scale, explaining their structures through philo- sophical and spatial theories. Identifying extraction of data and enclosure of identity as key mechanics while tying them to your personal data creates an intimate form of exposure.
Within the prologue we are making use of biblical aesthetics inspired by tech-bros’ plans for future city-states and referencing the feudalistic structure of big-tech platforms. The game then shifts into a darker cyber-gothic aesthetic, in what we call the Abyssus.
Within the ocean of anonymised data the nostalgic feeling climaxes at a moment of aesthetically content-driven déjà-vu; digital identity caught within extractivism that has been in place since its birth.

Ars Electronica 2026 – Cluster ‚Network Excavation‘ I

The platform ‘Network Excavation’ explores data visualization methods, by integrating fragmented archaeological data into a knowledge graph using AI-driven methods and through a game about identity and surveillance where players search their data traces in an expanding archive.
___

Memento Mori//Abyssus
by Jack Conwell, Daniel Luca Donovan-Achi

Memento Mori is an experimental game, that deals with digital identity and surveillance. Players become taken in Linz, Austria by @designandcomputation

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12 days ago

Ars Electronica 2026 – Cluster ‚Computational Dramaturgy‘ I

‘Computational Dramaturgy’ brings together reconfigurations of theatre, television and radio, this research cluster investigates emergent forms of storytelling enabled by artificial intelligence, where narratives are generated through the real-time interaction of computational and human actors.
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For Your Consideration
by Stefan Yovchev, Lucia Claus

For Your Consideration is an interactive installation, developed as part of a ongoing body of research into interactive narrative, that subtly reverses the passive logic of broadcast media.
Using eye-tracking technology, a viewer‘s gaze is silently translated into the primary input of a procedural narrative system, wherein the act of watching determines how the story unfolds in real time. The work draws on the aesthetics of mid-century broadcast television airing an episode of a fictional TV series – an episode in which the tenants of a building, who live above a mysterious nightclub need to navigate their relationships to it, to one another, and to the viewer.
The piece asks what it means to be watched by the very system that appears to be simply broadcasting to you. As attention becomes input and observation becomes authorship, the boundary between viewer and viewed collapses. For Your Consideration makes the act of watching inseparable from what is watched, implicating the audience in the very systems of surveillance and narrative control it depicts.

Ars Electronica 2026 – Cluster ‚Computational Dramaturgy‘ I

‘Computational Dramaturgy’ brings together reconfigurations of theatre, television and radio, this research cluster investigates emergent forms of storytelling enabled by artificial intelligence, where narratives are generated through the real-time interaction of computational and human actors.
___

For Your Consideration
by Stefan Yovchev, Lucia Claus

For Your Consideration is an interactive installation, developed as part of a ongoing body of research into interactive narrative, that subtly reverses the passive logic of broadcast media.
Using eye-tracking technology, a viewer‘s gaze is silently translated into the primary input of a procedu taken in Linz, Austria by @designandcomputation

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13 days ago

Ars Electronica 2026 – Cluster ‚False Negatives‘ I

‚False Negatives’ reveals the invisible architecture of virtual surveillance and data-harvesting systems. Using modified surveillance hardware and an AI-powered desk lamp, it questions the limits of human influence over automated systems and explores potential methods of resistance.
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look into the sun
by Fionn Heron, Jack Conwell, Paul Kron, Linus Ziegler

‘look into the sun’ is a reaction to the expansion of the global surveillance apparatus as well as to local developments in Berlin. In our critical research we are analyzing the increasing overlap between public institutions and private companies in the current surveillance landscape. Additionally we are investigating the way that implicit consent to techno-fascistic narratives leads to changes in private as well as public spaces that stay hidden from the public‘s attention.
This eclipse of surveillance capitalism and state intelligence is not as much a question of changes in the physical space, like the increase in cameras, as it is a shift in the computational capabilities of the present.
The fact that this change is happening more and more in the virtual domain, where it is not visible to the human eye, makes it especially dangerous. For that reason the central goal of the installation is to direct attention to the ubiquity of surveillance and the hidden danger within. It aims to make political structures that make those dangerous developments possible, visible.

Ars Electronica Recap - Cluster ‚False Negatives‘ I

‚False Negatives’ reveals the invisible architecture of virtual surveillance and data-harvesting systems. Using modified surveillance hardware and an AI-powered desk lamp, it questions the limits of human influence over automated systems and explores potential methods of resistance.
___

look into the sun
by Fionn Heron, Jack Conwell, Paul Kron, Linus Ziegler

‘look into the sun’ is a reaction to the expansion of the global surveillance apparatus as well as to local developments in Berlin. In our critical research we are analyzing the increasing overlap between public institutions and private companies in the current surveillance landscape. by @designandcomputation

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14 days ago

ARS ELECTRONICA – Campus Award Nomination

We are happy to announce that the research cluster ‘Evidentiary Syntheses’ is nominated for the Ars Electronica Campus Award. ‘Evidentiary Syntheses’ is a dialogue of two approaches towards methods of reconstruction, making spatial configurations and events legible: ‘Situated Sound Composite: Drone Scape’ and ‘Cementing The Occupation: Pipelines of Bureautic Dispossession’. The Ars Electronica Campus Award recognizes the most outstanding project presented within the Campus Exhibition and we’ll be crossing our fingers for them!
The award ceremony will take place on Sep 12th, 17:30 – 19:00.
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Situated Sound Composite: Drone Scape
by Ava Maria Simonds, Daniel Luca Donovan-Achi

Drone Scape investigates drone flights soundscapes over the Mediterranean in 2021 and their transformation of the horizontal landscape into a ‘space of death‘ (Sabeen Ahmed, 2018).
We cross-reference open-source ADS-B exchange flight data of Frontex drones with reports from Borderforensics and Human Rights Watch. These reports contain testimonies from asylum seekers who were victims of push backs in the Mediterranean coordinated by Frontex drone surveillance over the Mediterranean and the Libyan Coast Guard.
Often the only indication of these surveillance drones, and the subsequent inhumane and life-threatening „migration control“ processes, is the sound they produce. However, this sound is difficult to describe: it is not composed of distinct sounds, but rather a continuous hum. In the aforementioned testimony, it is simply described as ‚Wzz Wzz‘. In this case, the witness is an earwitness rather than an eyewitness.
To understand „What does a pushback sound like?“, we reconstruct the flight path while calculating sound propagation through estimates of the propellers’ rotation and Doppler effects. We relate this to the calculated location of a vessel based on testimony, and the circular loitering motion of the drones. This simulates the unseen experience of the surveillance infras- tructure in the Mediterranean route. by @designandcomputation

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a month ago

ARS ELECTRONICA – Campus Award Nomination

We are happy to announce that the research cluster ‘Evidentiary Syntheses’ is nominated for the Ars Electronica Campus Award. ‘Evidentiary Syntheses’ is a dialogue of two approaches towards methods of reconstruction, making spatial configurations and events legible: ‘Cementing The Occupation: Pipelines of Bureautic Dispossession’ and ‘Situated Sound Composite: Drone Scape’.
The Ars Electronica Campus Award recognizes the most outstanding project presented within the Campus Exhibition and we’ll be crossing our fingers for them!
The award ceremony will take place on Sep 12th, 17:30 – 19:00.
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Cementing The Occupation: Pipelines of Bureautic Dispossession
by Suzan Ela Hanow, Henrik Palmer, Andrii Tinkow, Aris Wiegand, Linus Ziegler

Pipelines of Bureaucratic Dispossession presents the two methods currently used by the occupying Russian power in temporarily occupied Donetsk, Ukraine. Both pipelines provide a veneer of legality to blatant war crimes, violating multiple international laws. All data presented were scraped from official Russian government websites.
This project is one portion of the research from our transnational working group between New Practice in Art and Technology, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, the Invisible University for Ukraine, and Bard College Berlin. The project combines open-source human rights investigation with local wartime documentation. The main outcome is a bi-national human rights report that exposes forced displacement and unlawful reconstruction in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, which will be published in December 2026.

This project emerged from the cooperation with the Digital Verification Corps (DVC) of Amnesty International’s global network dedicated to the verification and analysis of digital evidence of human rights abuses. Since its founding in 2016, the DVC has contributed to more than one hundred investigations across ninety countries.

@amnesty @evzfoundation @evzyoung @bard_college_berlin by @designandcomputation

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a month ago

ARS ELECTRONICA 2026

Students of Design and Computation are exhibiting at the Ars Electronica in Linz right now, at Hauptplatz 8 (West Building). The Ars Electronica is one of the highlights every year; giving us the opportunity to come together and have productive exchanges with all the other international groups. We invite everyone to join us and talk about the projects from 09.09.-13.09. (WED–SAT 11:00–20:00, SUN 11:00–18:00).

The exhibition is called ‘Negative Spaces’ and brings together projects that examine how knowledge is shaped through images, data, and technological systems, all the while questioning what remains unseen in the process. Instead of presenting knowledge as fixed, the works foreground the structures that determine what becomes visible and thus, meaningful. Some of the guiding questions include: what is the invisible architecture of data-harvesting? How is the gaze reconstituted under a state of surveillance? What can archaeological fragments tell us about structures of categorization? Negative Spaces repositions the viewer as an active participant, letting them touch the unseen, influence how narratives unfold, and engage with gaps in datasets and archives, revealing how absence informs understanding just as crucially as presence.

@arselectronica by @designandcomputation

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a month ago

Loops — 25.06. | 19:00
Sonic Traces
with Jessica Ekomane (@jessicaekomane) & Hainbach (@hainbach101)
DOCK 11, Saal 4 — Kastanienallee 79, 10435 Berlin

For this LOOPS session, Jessica Ekomane and Hainbach come together through sound as a material of memory, rhythm, and experimentation.

Jessica Ekomane will speak about the compositional principles present in Manifolds, engaging with Afrodiasporic languages, polyphonic structures, and forms of collective listening. Working with layered rhythmic elements, her practice translates multiplicity into spatialisation and sound synthesis.

Hainbach will present his latest experiments with magnetic tape. Today, magnetic tape is mostly experienced in emulated plugin form, as a fancy waveshaper. Yet the medium itself is an expressive instrument, with new ways of playing it still being discovered more than a hundred years after its invention.

Together, their practices trace sound across tape, memory, technology, and listening.

Poster Design by @michelleduong__ & @fernandabraunsantos ⭐ by @designandcomputation

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4 months ago

What does it mean to "copy" when there is no original — only endless feedback loops between data, imagination, and machine-generated forms?

As the final programme update of Reclaiming Data, we have had Abyssial Mimesis by @j.iawenw.ang.

The project draws from Gotthard Günther's polycontexturality and Vilem Flusser's theory of technical images, exploring the ways in which digital tools shape our perception of the world. Mimesis (Greek for "imitation") traditionally refers to art's ability to mirror reality. Here, it is reimagined: Al does not imitate nature but mimics the act of creation itself, generating speculative entities from collective data-cultural, digital, and biological. Like the deep sea—a realm resistant to human observation-these forms reflect not reality, but the hidden patterns and biases of the systems that create them.

Performance: Abyssial Mimesis by Jiawen Wang
7pm - 13 June 2026
9 Flutgraben e.V. @flutgrabenberlin
Am Flutgraben 3
12435 Berlin
Exhibition
' 12-21 June 2026
Opening: Friday, 12 June, 5pm

For the full programme, check the link in bio.

Reclaiming Data is a collaboration by @dockdigitalberlin, @new_practice, @designandcomputation and @ecommemoration / Körber-Stiftung. Supported by @technologiestiftung and @centerforliterature . taken in Flutgraben e.V. by @designandcomputation

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4 months ago