Computer-driven media are changing our environment, delivering images, sound and kinetic objects with ever greater density. Given that increasingly complex information technology verges on the limits of intelligibility and manageability, we face the challenge of building and inhabiting our spaces in ways that can make sense to us individually and collectively. How can we build rich responsive environments for shelter, sociality or play? How do people experience computer-mediated environments that now include not only virtual reality games and experimental theater, but also classrooms, airports and public spaces? In short, how can we build a world that is not complicated but rich?
In order to answer these practical challenges, the Topological Media Lab was established in 2001 as an atelier-lab to experimentally explore how we sense and shape our environment or each other via corporeal gesture and movement. Posing a positive response to our critical questions with a process-oriented approach to the world, we study and invent topological media – physical and computational matter, image or sound evolving as continuous substances under continuous action.
The members of the atelier-lab come from many practices and scholarly disciplines: movement arts, electroacoustics, realtime video, graphic and fibre arts, computer science, architecture, philosophy, science and technology studies, anthropology, literary theory, film studies, cultural studies, electrical engineering and so forth.
Over the past decade, our practical questions have also refined into challenging conceptual questions: How can we make compelling events without convention? What makes some events dead and others live? What is a gesture when we do not assume bodies a priori? How do conventions and bodies come into being or dissolve in the continuously flowing world? Since 2007, the TML’s two major axes of research are movement-based installation-events, and poetic architectural installations.
