Berlin | Housing the Human Festival

Housing the Human is an interdisciplinary collaboration of five European institutions and organizations aiming to develop methods for a practical futurology—a paradox that the project seeks to address by producing prototypes that can be experienced and tested. It takes place at radialsystem in Berlin 18-19 October 2019.

Housing the Human unveils the results of five projects that tackle questions on how will we live in the near future. The collaboration brings together art, science, and technological innovation to explore speculative concepts for the future of living and coexistence.

Certain Measures present a domestic setting that adapts to its human inhabitants’ requests. But what does it mean for AI to have such intimate knowledge of our every need? Lucia Tahan’s Cloud Housing imagines an app catering to a nomadic creative class and offers on-demand rentals and upgrades on their décor—but shedding the burden of ownership comes at a price. Simone C Niquille’s HOMESCHOOL analyzes the standard datasets now used to train domestic robots, and asks what human biases are passed on to the machines we let into our homes. Meanwhile, Mae-ling Lokko’s Agrocologiessuggests sharing our kitchens with mycelium cultures, and feeding them with our food waste. The resulting bio-material can be used to create new objects. And as we’d share our homes with robots, biomes, and other species, Dasha Tsapenko’s Lovaratory wonders whether we’d also enter into new types of relationships of codependency, trust, or even romance with our nonhuman cohabitants.

Visitors will be offered walk-throughs with experts such as architects Tatiana Bilbao and Rahul Mehrotra, architectural theorists Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, art historian Margit Rosen, and designer Daniel Perlin; a talk hosted by ARCH+ features between writer and editor Anh-Linh Ngo and architecture curator James Taylor-Foster on practical futurology and transdisciplinary research; a lecture and Bed-In performance with Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley on the role of the bed in the age of social media; and the game After Money, asking how new networks of care and sociability can emerge in a world without money.

On Saturday, October 19, as part of the Housing the Human Festival, the public is invited to join an open seminar with renowned experts and professionals centered around three defining themes: Methodological Frictions, on the practical hurdles of working across disciplines; Usefulness, on the tension between artistic freedom and practical implementation; and Prophecies, on the promises and missteps of working with innovation and future-oriented topics.