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Research platform fostering a new postdisciplinary practice in light of technological transformations - @designandcomputation @udkberlin @tu_berlin

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Over the past two weeks, we’ve welcomed the seventh cohort to Design & Computation.

Our two-day semester introduction began with a campus tour and an overview of the programme by the DC team. It continued with an important tradition: students from previous cohorts designed and led a series of short workshops for the new cohort, offering multi-perspectival and playful introductions to the ways we work together. Pizza, drinks and plenty of conversation rounded off the days.

Last week, the winter semester began in earnest. First- and third-semester students went straight into shared design and research projects. Alongside these, they began seminars on theoretical and methodological foundations as well as formats for skill sharing and peer learning.

Learning from and with each other lies at the heart of our programme, and we’re looking forward to everything that will grow out of these collaborations this semester.

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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

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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

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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.

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Hello Berlin! ☀️ Do you see yourself as part of a neurodivergent, senior, youth, or migrant community? [edit: migrant representatives group is already full]

Join our interaction tests on Wednesday, 23 September.

We'd love for you to take part in a short session run by @the.storytelling.company (TSC) and @new__practice - New Practice in Art and Technology, as part of the Immersive ECHO project. You'll try out a few interactive scenarios and simply tell us how they feel. There's nothing to prepare and nothing being tested — we just want your honest, in-the-moment reactions. No experience with immersive technology is needed, every kind of response helps. It's relaxed, hands-on, and goes at your pace.

***
What is Immersive ECHO?
It's a cultural project exploring how immersive technologies and storytelling can open up new ways of engaging with cultural heritage, memory, and shared narratives. The project brings together cultural heritage experts, immersive designers, technologists, and storytellers from across Europe to build experiences that are genuinely accessible to a wide range of audiences.

***
Why take part?
Your input directly shapes how future museum and cultural experiences are designed — helping make them more welcoming, accessible, and engaging for all kinds of visitors. It's a real chance to influence design decisions in a European cultural-heritage project, not just to try something new. As a thank-you for your time, every participant gets a Dussmann bookshop voucher.

💚 Sounds like sth for you? Secure your spot!
💚 Know someone it's perfect for? Pass it on!

[copy/paste link to the form in the comments]

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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.

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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

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Happy to finally share snippets of our master thesis.
With my fav. work buddy @frtz.zrn.

Supervised by:
Prof. Albert Lang
Prof. Dr. Marc Pfaff
Dr. Peter Polack

Investigative Models:

On 17 October 2023, an explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza-Palestine killed hundreds of people. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, the incident became the subject of more than ten separate investigations by states, media organisations, human rights groups, and independent OSINT researchers. These inquiries drew on largely overlapping open-source material, yet arrived at very different and, in some cases, mutually incompatible conclusions about the cause of the blast and damage.
What makes this divergence remarkable is not the disagreement itself but the conditions under which it occurs. Many organisations involved in the investigation shared similar intentions, professional backgrounds,
and normative commitments to human rights and evidentiary rigour. Yet despite this shared horizon, their analyses of the al-Ahli Hospital explosion produced not convergence but divergence: a proliferation of competing
“truths,” each internally coherent, evidence-based, and often methodologically sophisticated.
This thesis begins with the assumption that contemporary visual investigations cannot be evaluated solely by classical notions of objectivity, neutrality, or factual correctness. The problem is not simply whether an investigation is right or wrong, but whether it constructs the epistemic conditions under which truth claims can become reliable, comparable, and contestable.

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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 ⭐

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Quick walkthrough of „Reclaiming Data – Art and Memory in the Age of Digital Archives Exhibition“ 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻✨ 12.–14. & 18.–21. June 2026 at @flutgrabenberlin @new__practice curated by curated by @jonnybixbongers

„Alongside the symposium, the exhibition at UNIversum extends these questions into space. Bringing together artistic positions by Nora Al-Badri @albadri.nora , Juan Covelli @juan_covelli , Egor Kraft @krft.id , Yagmur Uckunkaya @yagmuruckunkaya / Artur Cipriani @arturcipriani and a live performance by Jiawen Wang @j.iawenw.ang the exhibition explores archives not as neutral repositories, but as contested and constantly shifting terrains of memory.“ ✨✨✨

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Loops — 18.06. | 19:00

Verbal Matter at Flutgraben e.V.
with Daniel Falb + Yağmur Uçkunkaya (@rayne.yes) and Artur Cipriani (@arturcipriani)

For this session, we bring together Daniel Falb, Yağmur Uçkunkaya, and Artur Cipriani for a conversation on language, AI, animism, and the material operations of computation. Moderated by Jonny-Bix Bongers.
Daniel will present his recent poetic research around Animism and AI. He investigates the resonances between current animisms around AI and animisms in early cultural history. As we live in a form of prehistory ourselves, the earliest beginnings of AI, the question of preserving that which rapidly antiquates becomes critical. At the same time, preservation today is often entangled with surveillance and privatization, while communizing collections remains an open task.
Yağmur Uçkunkaya and Artur Cipriani will discuss how language is reorganized in large language models through encoding and statistical proximity, where words, sounds, and images become exchangeable within a shared numerical space. They will explore language as a system that reproduces itself through its own archive, where meaning emerges from comparison, retrieval, and recombination rather than fixed reference. The figure of the encoder will be one entry point, among others, to think through how these processes reshape how language is produced, circulated, and experienced.
Together, the session asks how AI reshapes language as memory, infrastructure, and relation, and how the intensity of words changes when they become operative within systems that continuously encode and reproduce the world.

Poster Design by @michelleduong__ & @fernandabraunsantos

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Program Update #7: Non-linear Archive — Roundtable with @vinzenzaubry  
Now to another program highlight of our symposium: we are very happy to close the symposium with @vinzenzaubry and a workshop of a slightly different kind — an experiment in collective archival practice.

From the beginning of Reclaiming Data, we will introduce @field.tool as a shared documentation tool: a non-hierarchical archiving environment through which speakers, students, researchers, artists, institutions, and visitors can co-author an archive of these two days.
Photos, notes, quotes, links, references, artworks, books, and spontaneous associations can be added throughout the symposium — tagged inline and flowing into one common knowledge base. Instead of being curated from above, the documentation grows organically into an interactive graph of relations, traces, and shared observations.

On the second day, we come together for a roundtable with Vincenz Aubry to reflect on what unfolded and to discuss what non-linear, co-authored archiving could mean for future forms of documentation, research, and collective memory.  No registration needed.

🗓 13 June 2026
16:30 - 18:00  📍 Flutgraben e.V. @flutgrabenberlin  Am Flutgraben 3 12435 Berlin

Exhibition 🗓 12–21 June 2026 Opening: Friday, 12 June, 17:00

For the full programme, check the link in bio.

Reclaiming Data is a collaboration by @dock_digital_berlin , @new__practice , @designandcomputation and @ecommemoration / Körber-Stiftung. Supported by @technologiestiftung and @centerforliterature .

Curated and organized by @jonnybixbongers . Graphic design by @yunkuo__

#ReclaimingData #DigitalArchives #CulturalMemory #CollectiveArchives ArchivalPractice

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