Interview: The bauhaus.media.stage laboratory in Schwanseestraße

Could you give us an idea of what the bauhaus.media.stage lab (b.m.b. lab) is?  

Jenny Brockmann:
Moritz [Wehrmann] and I started the bauhaus.media.stage lab in spring 2022. Since then, we have been working together to develop concepts in the field covering the intersection of science, art and philosophy. In the lab and on the stage, the practice of the arts intertwines with the practice of theo-ry, which we both see as malleable practices.

The emergence of theory from processes, objects and practices is of great importance, especially for the Weimar Media Studies programme, which is where the lab is anchored; this is because thought always articulates itself out of bodies and out of everyday and non-everyday worlds.

The bauhaus.media.stage lab is thus first and foremost a structure. It currently occupies Room 1.16 at the Faculty of Media at the premises in Schwanseestrasse 143, Weimar.

Moritz Wehrmann:
The bauhaus.media.stage lab is:

a place that gives space to chance.
a place for experiments in digital and analog space, as well as their fields of intersection.
a place that invites investigation into new forms of science.
a place of change that can be adapted when others don't fit.

The name of the lab alludes to the historic stage concept of the classical Bauhaus. How is that to be understood? 

Moritz Wehrmann:
The bauhaus.media.stage lab is a laboratory which is firmly in the tradition of the historical Bau-haus, but which, instead of simply venerating this tradition, focuses on current topics. The historic Bauhaus stage is the inspiration for the lab’s experimental spirit, which aims to bring very different disciplines into contact with each other and allow them to react to each other. 

Both the historic Bauhaus stage and the bauhaus.media.stage lab are places where the focus is on experimentation and not on stage performance. Of course what happens can and should be shown, but not as the main priority; the activities at the lab should in no way be understood as a form of theatre in the sense of: here stage - there audience.

The bauhaus.media.stage lab should thus be seen more in terms of creating a space, a stage on which things, processes, experiments and ideas can enter the world. It is at the same time both a protected space and a space of risk.  

Jenny Brockmann:
The bauhaus.media.stage lab aims to create space for exploring interdisciplinarity and multiper-spectivity, and to investigate what opportunities and challenges arise when different perspectives meet. 

The importance of research and experimentation in space was already recognized by the historic Bauhaus, which created the Bauhaus stage as a place where a wide variety of disciplines and arts could be performed and visualized. 

We also want to think of the stage as a pre-public-presentation laboratory, as a place of perfor-mance with varying degrees of public exposure.

Indeed, we believe that engagement with specific physical and social spaces for students and re-searchers, not to mention the social, discursive and multisensory practice of shared space, is a necessary precondition for any practice, not least its extension into virtual and digital space.

The stage is conceived here in an extended sense as a place or medium of different formats and degrees of extension in which different public spheres are addressed.

After one year of bauhaus.media.stage lab: Which project did you particularly enjoy? 

Jenny Brockmann:
I would prefer to speak of events that have particularly touched me, rather than projects. The first thing that comes to mind as an event was our first exchange of ideas for the bauhaus.media.stage lab - in the words of Hermann Hesse, 'There is magic in every beginning'. 

It was a special event for me, for example when in April 2022, on our first day of employment as members of the artistic staff of the Faculty of Media, Moritz and I stood with Prof. Dr. Henning Schmidgen and Dr. Simon Frisch in room 1.16 of Schwanseestrasse 143 and talked about what a reimagined Bauhaus stage could mean for both the Faculty of Media and the university as a whole. Following this, it was possible to use the space and pursue the idea through coincidence and thanks to the great goodwill of the Faculty authorities. 

Another event that has remained in my mind was balancing on the seating sculpture Seat#12 with the new head of the Faculty of Media Prof. Dr. Lorenz Engell and Susanne Rößler in the autumn of 2022. This was when our ideas were confirmed and we were subsequently enabled to give further visibility to the bauhaus.media.stage lab by means of internet presence.

I would also like to mention here the highly impressive lecture by technology activist Caroline Sinders at the bauhaus.media.stage lab in the summer of 2022, the beautiful media art projects by students both at the bauhaus.media.stage lab and in the entire S143 building during the Winter-werkschau 2022, and our first FRAGMENT, RAUM analog/digital, at the Bauhaus Museum one month ago.

And of course the many encounters with students, researchers and other people interested in the lab.

Moritz Wehrmann:
The most beautiful thing for me was to see how the laboratory changed from a former industrial cleaning facility into a space that can be used extremely flexibly and creatively. The transformation of the space itself is thus already a great project that is never intended to be completely finished. 

Working with the students in the space, as well as meeting colleagues in this atmosphere, which is unusual for a Faculty of Media, creates new ideas. With regard to projects of the bau-haus.media.stage lab beyond Room 1.16, the RAUM digital/analog project of my colleague Jenny Brockmann at the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar was an enjoyable event which is worthy of men-tion. 

The bauhaus.media.stage lab also offers further projects and opportunities for participation in the near future with the recently initiated FRAGMENT series. This started with the workshop at the Bauhaus Museum and will this year take in various collaborations - a lecture in the Schiller Museum on 'Media of the Forest', the 'Witches' Dance' in the Heckentheater (‘hedge theatre’) in the grounds of Belvedere Palace, and a workshop with theater director Robert Wilson in the Oberlichtsaal of the Bauhaus University.

The bauhaus.media.stage lab is a place not only for practical artistic projects, but also for artistic research. What aspects are you interested in here? 

Moritz Wehrmann:
On a certain level, artistic research always leads a niche existence, although I can say from per-sonal experience that it is not only the artists who benefit from it, but also the research partners and the public.

I see artistic research not only as a catalyst for research, but also as a nucleus itself. Ideally, this is a mutual way of inspiring, mirroring and sharing that can bring interesting new perspectives, re-search questions and ideas into the world. 

There is also the research project 'Time/Forest/Media', which I am due to start with students in the summer of 2023. This project centres on the forest, where diverse complexities intertwine to create ecosystems; these in turn form intricate structures which are difficult to penetrate. The project is based on the increasingly widespread recognition in forestry research in recent years that the forest is a network of information and communication that adapts and is in a state of constant flux, form-ing a system that can be called natural intelligence. Furthermore, I am researching and teaching on issues related to (so-called) Artificial Intelligence and its explosive influence on art, economics and society. In this very dynamic field, artistic research is particularly predestined to find new perspec-tives, questions and answers.

Jenny Brockmann:
I would say that we see artistic research as an integral part of the everyday life of the bau-haus.media.stage lab.

At the bauhaus.media.stage lab, our aim is to investigate the role that sensory perception, so-called 'embodied knowledge', and the political, social, gender-specific and ethnic coding of a space play in the experience of space. We also ask what this means for the design of both analog and digital space and its algorithmic structure.

On the other hand, thematic research projects such as 'Animism/Maschinism', which was initiated in 2023 by Prof. Dr. Henning Schmidgen, Dr. Mathias Schönher and myself, are also connected to the lab. This transdisciplinary research project combines methods from the history of science and technology with philosophical-critical approaches and artistic-experimental aspects and is therefore predestined to take place in and with the lab.

We are particularly excited about our first steps towards creating a 'digital twin' of the bau-haus.media.stage lab, a virtual copy of room 1.16 in which students and researchers can observe and participate in the lab’s processes. The focus here is on the idea that in the future we will find ourselves in a mixed-reality environment in which all senses are addressed via both analog and digital processes. We would like to co-create this environment in order to shape it in a gender-sensitive, socially just and inclusive way. This is carried out in collaboration with Professor Fröh-lich’s Chair of Virtual Reality and Visualization.

We have also just started a collaboration with the newly-installed lernraum.bauhaus. Not only will we be an 'analog twin' for the space in Amalienstrasse, we will also have a digital connection to the lernraum.bauhaus; a screen will allow a full-size image of the participants on both sides. High-quality technology has already been installed for transmitting sound and video, and this summer we will be starting to connect objects on both sides via the Internet of Things network. Objects at both locations are equipped with sensors and machine functions and connected via the Internet so that they can interact with both the immediate environment and the object at the other location.

Another research project we are starting with students this summer semester involves research into the historic stage at the Weimar Bauhaus. The historic stage had neither a fixed workshop site nor a determined performance space. We would like to trace the various formats performed at the time and reconstruct how and where the Bauhaus stage took place.

In addition to its use for teaching and projects, the space is also designed as a meeting place. How does that work, and what can interested people do there? 

Jenny Brockmann:
The bauhaus.media.stage lab is meant to explore the relationship between art and society and to research how (media) art can incorporate social interaction as a sustainable, gender-sensitive, so-cially just and inclusive environment. 

The encounter between students and researchers using the space already happens differently here from the way it does in other spaces. There is a table-tennis table and the interactive seating sculp-ture Seat#12, which encourages a different way of communicating with each other.

Both the table-tennis table and Seat#12 are available to people at the Bauhaus University at any time. Room1.16 of the bauhaus.media.stage lab is also open to all teachers of the Bauhaus Univer-sity to experiment with new forms of teaching.

About once a semester, we organize a ‘media pot luck dinner‘, where people can get together over snacks and drinks and exchange ideas. 

Moritz Wehrmann:
Exactly, it’s really important that the space can be - and has been - used by a wide variety of peo-ple: for exhibitions, workshops, colloquia and, of course, for joint exchange, as with the ‘media pot luck dinner‘ format. 

If you look at where new projects and innovations are created in an institution, these are spaces where people can try things out, as well as spaces where people with different fields of knowledge and from different backgrounds meet and exchange ideas. That's why multifacetedness and en-counters are particularly important to us. If this interview has triggered any questions or interest in encounters, we would be happy to hear from you.

The bauhaus.media.stage (bauhaus.medien.bühnen) laboratory is located in room 1.16 on the tem-porary campus of the Faculty of Media, Schwanseestraße 143. 

WEBSITE: https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/medien/institute/bauhausmedienbuehnen-labor/ 

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/bmblab/ 

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/people/Bmb-Lab/pfbid02qxA2cooMagEzS93vqqdc7LAz6xDaGUeUd14xS9jj1nkYfQNT5p5tEicUnMno8qzCl/ 

BIOs 

Jenny Brockmann is an artist and sculptor. Her work, which combines technology, science and art, has been exhibited internationally at venues including BOZAR in Brussels, documenta fifteen in Kassel, the Zachęta – National Gallery in Warsaw, and the Hudson Valley MOCA in New York. She studied Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she was a student of Rebecca Horn, and was awarded a degree in Architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. Brockmann creates works that are characterized by a discursive aesthetic. www.jennybrockmann.de 

Moritz Wehrmann is a media artist and staff member at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His artistic output includes conceptual as well as perception-reflective works which are executed in various media and material forms. He explores and questions aspects of subjectivity, perception and issues of the relationship between physical and media self-location. He has exhibited at Cen-tre Phi(Montreal), Ars Electronica (Linz und Tokyo), the Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Bauhaus Foun-dation in Dessau and the Deutsche Hygiene Museum in Dresden. www.moritzwehrmann.com