Interdisciplinary IAD Module Fall 2018, in cooperation with DDK, DKV and DKM

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From "life hacks", necessity-based "bricolage", such as Jugaad in India (see other terms in different countries*) to art-based and political-based targeted disruptions, "hacking" could be considered as a form of activism, akin to notions of resistance, disobedience, and subversion, especially as we refer here to "values". 
As such, finding affordable or personal solutions, going around established systems, repairing or subverting an object's use could be ways of gaining or regaining autonomy, gaining or regaining meaning, etc. The hacks themselves often have a playful quality to them that underlines that those forms of resistance are mostly physically non-confrontational and non-violent. 
Forms of hacking can also include statements of living and thriving within subcultures, forms of art and performance (ie. drag culture), taking counter hetero-normative and counter patriarchical actions (such as not being referred to with a gender-based pronoun).  
Finally, adopting and embracing failure, cracks, oddness and uncanniness could constitute again other forms of hacking, and be notably expressed with art, design and craft (see Kintsugi art for instance). 

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Materials as Mediators
Materials surround us all the time, even if we tend to ignore it through our everyday habits, like on our digital journeys around the globe, we are still constantly immersed in it. What about their certain properties, conditions and transformations constituting the space around us? Like the air and atmosphere as a phenomena, we inspire (from latin breathing in) and respirate, we speak through, we form our intimate atmospheres, we can observe this medium on various scales, might it be observing pollutants in the sky down to our microbial clouds surrounding us all the time. By manipulating and co-creating with these material conditions, we learn to play with underlying systems.
link: https://zkm.de/en/event/2011/06/experiencing-atmospheres-dimensions-of-a-diffuse-phenomenon

Social Experiments:
Like in Herbert Garfinkel´s «Krisenexperimente» in the 70s, we would like to emphasise on our everyday routines within social interactions, might it be a daily shopping in the supermarket, where we take out goods from other´s people baskets without asking, not cueing at the check out, being very polite to our best friends, sitting next to the only person in the train and so on. We would like to emphasize in implicit rules, which are inscribed in our social behaviour, making up a certain cultural context we live in. Through this method we might become foreigners in our own culture for a certain action.
link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaching_experiment

Assignments

Exercice 03 - Strollogy - Methods for the photographic excursion

Street as a museum

• Photograph the urban space and the people as if they were exhibits of an exhibition.

The smallest possible intervention

• Change the perception of space with little interventions
  (see also Lucius Burckhardt, «Der kleinstmögliche Eingriff», Schmitz, Martin Verlag, 2013)

Photograph with a specific perspective

• A picture which does not represent to the place
• The classic postcard
• An irritating place
• A photograph that provokes false assumptions
• A picture that shows a problem
• A situation: coincidence or intention?
• A photo taken at the wrong moment
• A place for a street art intervention
• The photo I wouldn't actually take
• Manipulated / not manipulated

Expectations and Gradings

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