An Exploration of the Digital Space
by sharing bauhaus
Teaser for the sharing bauhaus project "The Sanctity of Experience: Attention" by filmmaker and virtual reality theorist Jessica Brillhart
We try an experiment: What if the Bauhaus hadn't been founded in 1919 but in 2019? Wouldn't it have set up a workshop for exploring the digital space? What are the right tools, the right exercises, to get to know and research this digital material experimentally in order to use it to shape people's lives in such a way that it would do justice to the socio-political questions of the Bauhaus? And how would these questions have changed, evolved or even become absurd facing the digital revolution?
sharing bauhaus explores the Bauhaus’ principle of collective research into the digital realm. Our goal is to raise awareness of the experiment as a space for learning experience. Designed as a digital workshop, we do not use a physical location equipped with computers, we do not use a lab where people come together in an analog way to research the digital. The sharing bauhaus workshop is a virtual space, itself part of the object that he examines and designs. The name of the Bauhaus Agents’ new website, “making bauhaus”, not only serves as the guiding principle of our endeavor to initiate concrete experiences, but at the same time to see it as an assignment to question and expand what we understand by Bauhaus.
Screenshot from the creative coding tutorial "Bauhaus 101" by designer Tim Rodenbröker
The Bauhauslers of Today
With regard to new media in particular, the proportion of those who (mostly at a young age) train themselves playfully and experimentally is greater than in any other field. At the same time, the acquisition of skills in dealing with digital technologies also requires knowledge transfer that brings experience and skills in contact with one another and makes learning a reciprocal undertaking. Where, how and from whom do digital space designers acquire their expertise? And what role does expertise play in an era that increasingly claims that we ourselves are shaping our lives?
sharing bauhaus takes into account the fact that 100 years after the Bauhaus was founded, the boundary between masters and students has become blurred. In the context of our digital workshop, these historical labels are broken down into situational roles that can be changed depending on the context, subject or medium - without installing a fixed attribution or even a hierarchy that continues beyond the act of the current experiment would.
As a participatory digital project, sharing bauhaus uses the interactivity of social media to stimulate, share and comment on collective learning processes.
Digital Realities
To this end, we have invited an international group of programmers, designers, researchers and artists to get started and share their individual learning experiences in the form of experimental tutorials with a global audience. The aim is to create new imagination spaces that question and critically expand our understanding of digital realitie(s).
Are you curious? Then visit us in our social media channels: In accordance with our title, all activities of sharing bauhaus take place on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – we look forward to your visit and your lively participation using the hashtag #sharingbauhaus!