PopUpLab pops up!

by STATE Festival's Futurium Project Lead, Katharina Meyer

Hurray, it’s starting! Tomorrow is already the beginning of the STATE Festival partner program collaboration with the Futurium at the PopUpLab!

(Almost) one week long, from Tuesday to Saturday, the Futurium and STATE's PopUpLab will be open at Bülowstraße 90, 10783 Berlin-Schöneberg, then much of what is created in the mobile lab will move to our festival main venue, Kühlhaus Berlin, Luckenwalder Str. 3, 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Our broad and immersive program will specifically focus on the emotional relationship between human beings and things: the culinary acquisition of knowledge, the link between the sketches that we have in mind and their real-world implementation, and the disassembly and the reassembly of habits, setting us on our course into the future.

As curator, it was great fun to work with the Futurium team, sketching out together the influences we find most current and relevant, and presenting this topical research to ensure that creative people from all fields will find connecting factors for themselves, and always with this year’s festival theme in mind.

Before I finish the installation (we are expecting the lab modules which have just been constructed!), I’ll give you an overview of all the activities:

Please note that all four free-entry (!) workshops have some places left, and you can register quickly by sending an e-mail to km [AT] statefestival.org. However, the talks in the evening will offer enough spaces for everybody who wants to come. And last but not least, on Saturday we’ll have a Finissage/ closing party. Expect a great performance and an exhibition of at all the objects that have been created during the week.

Day 1
Tuesday 25, 09:00-16:00 - WORKSHOP: Data Gastronification Kitchen - We eat Data!
Facebook event // STATE Website

Conceptual artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathon Keats, takes research on the body's enteric system as a starting point for considering alternate modes of comprehension that don't directly engage our gray matter. His method, which he calls "gastronification", provides a counterpoint to the visualisations used by scientists to represent complex models and data. Flow diagrams here are reformulated as recipes, which can be cooked up and consumed. Which we´ll totally do!

At the end of the day, there will be a big data feast of icecream. And this exciting panel:

Day 1
Tuesday 25, 18:00-19:30 - PANEL:  Emotional Cognition + other representations of Science
With:  Jonathon Keats, Nina Samuel, David Marx and Desiree Förster (Host)
Facebook event // STATE Website

While the recipes from the workshop participants cool down to serving temperature, we'll turn to observation: if future challenges in research can not be sufficiently addressed with the usual cognitive resources, how do we otherwise derive knowledge? Might Data Gastronification be the solution? How do we emotionally contemplate the things we cannot scale with reason?

Our panelists work at the interface of art, science and Neuropsychology, and highlight challenges to (re)interpretation of the world, reason and intuition.

Gastro Epistemes are being discussed alongside the relationship between sketch and outcome, and questions that arose in connection with the workshop: Can knowledge be represented at all? Is food not only technology but also a vessel of knowledge?

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Day 2:
Wednesday 26.10., 10:00 - 16:00 - Workshop: Foresight: We start the DeLorean towards Future
With: David Weigend, Michaela Führer, Frederik Eichelbaum
Facebook event // STATE website

The Foresight Workshop headed by Futurium provides a hands-on introduction to the methodology of future research for scientists and other creators who are interested in tomorrow. Guided by foresight experts, hypotheses, morphological methods and future storytelling can be learned and tried out here.

Environmental Scanning and STEEP Factor Analysis, Weak Signal and Megatrend will no longer be unknowns. In small teams, the subject of artificial intelligence will be dissected from various perspectives and reunited in one strand of findings at the end of the day.

Day 3+4: 
Thursday 27. & Friday 28.10., 10:00-17:00 - Workshop: Design Fiction+De-computation: Of Men and Machine
With: John Fass, Raphael de Courville, Andreas Rau, Javier Soto
Facebook event // STATE website

Professor Kevin Walker developed the De-computation method at the Royal College of Arts in London, and coined the term in contrast to the well-known design thinking process. Here, "making" equals thinking. In four steps, any arbitrary object or process is disassembled and rebuilt according to an anticipated research question:

Instead of starting from scratch, the De-computation-Workshop takes on a design challenge: the intersection of humans, machines and emotions. What are the encodings here? Objects to start from will be: Bicycle, Radio, Text, Suit, Folding Chair and House plant, representing the mechanical, electrical, biological, theoretical, and embodied. Absolutely forbidden: Sharpies and Postits! Strictly hands-on!

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Day 3
Thursday 27., 18:00-20:00 - Panel: Design Fiction and Human-Machine-Interaction
With: Christian Zöllner, Raphael de Courville, Felix Sattler, John Fass and Katharina Meyer (Host)
Facebook event // STATE website

In the evening, the PopUpLab will be open for a 90-minute panel discussion between two of the workshop participants and additional guests from the design fiction field. How to imagine future? And is it of any help to make progress tangible and sensible? What progress can be observed in the area of motions and artificial intelligence? And where else does one find "sentimental machines"?

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Day 5
Sat, 29.10. 12:00 - 18:00 - Open Lab + Snap your Future Workshop (16:00 sharp)
Workshop with Leon Krenz
Facebook event // STATE website

During the Open Lab Day, the #PopUpLab is open to the public where we'll introduce co-creations, creatives and, last but not least, Futurium's Reallabor itself. Prototypes will be displayed and we offer the opportunity to tackle design challenges collaboratively.

And during the day, we have a fantastic workshop, facilitated by Leon Krenz, called SNAP YOUR FUTURE! How will life look like in a few years/decades time? In an open workshop, participants will use Snapchat to explore possible answers to this question. They´ll build their own ideas about the future as well as approaches for upcoming problems, and iterate them as snapstory. Bring your phone!!!
Facebook Event

We´ll use the latest forecasts from institutional and private sources of trend- and future-research as fuel. Results will be reviewed and discussed collaboratively

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Day 5
Saturday 29th, 20:00-midnight: Finissage Party and Performance
Facebook Event // STATE Website

Music and drinks make a pop-cultural finale for PopUpLab-week! There will be the opportunity to mingle with our various communities, and a wonderful performance by Valery Vermeulen who makes music with algorithms and astro noise, plus robotic lounge music with DJ Delay on the decks, and a very special bar. Doors open from 8!