Hybrid Heritage

How to re-signify heritage and monuments with the help of creative visions and hybrid (combined physical and digital) tools?

Engaging with this challenge, the lecture presents projects by Hybrid Space Lab that research and design the further development of heritage from a multicultural perspective. By integrating digital technology and networks in the re-development of heritage, the projects address cultural hybridity in today’s globalized world. Based on artistic research and with a thoroughly transdisciplinary approach, the Hybrid Heritage project cluster aims at proposing future possible affective landscapes for re-signifying heritage, crafting an agile, transferable, and context-sensitive approach.

The lecture also addresses the multifaceted notion of hybridity. With the contemporary cultural shift and paradigm change with the focus readjusting away from divisions and boundaries to interconnections and networks, we are experiencing today a proliferation of hybridizations in all dimensions of contemporary life and expression.

Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Prof. Frans Vogelaar are co-founders of Hybrid Space Lab, a Think Tank and Design Lab for Architecture, Urbanism, Design and Digital Culture, focussing on cultural innovation and contributing to positive societal and environmental change. Hybrid Space Lab develops spatial interventions that open up and reinterpret places. “Hybrid” stands for interdisciplinarity, “Space” for spatial expertise and “Lab” for the innovative working method that favors a transdisciplinary design approach where city, nature and the digital are thought and developed together: http://hybridspacelab.net.

Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi has lectured since 1997 on design in the urban landscape at the University of Duisburg- Essen and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Ostwestfalen-Lippe.

Prof. Frans Vogelaar is since 1998 Professor for Hybrid Space at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in Germany, where he founded the first Department of Hybrid Space worldwide, focusing on the combinations and interrelations of physical and digital space.

Verena Kittel is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, and research associate in the collaborative exhibition project Tacit Knowledge. Post Studio/Feminism – CalArts (1970–77) with a special interest in practice-based research in art educational contexts. In her thesis, she aims at establishing a queer take on the dominant historiographies of the Bauhaus and its influence.