The seminar series The Floor is Lava investigates how ecological, political, social and technological crises destabilize the infrastructures of everyday life. Across the series we ask how imaginaries of collapse and renewal shape collective responses to uncertainty, and who has the power to define what counts as crisis, catastrophe or transformation.
The Floor is Lava III focuses on landscapes and communities where these instabilities become tangible. Moving between critical geography, performative scores, queer media theory and experimental technologies, the seminar explores how landscapes function as layered archives of infrastructures, histories and alternative lifeworlds. Ruins, abandoned military sites, subcultures, healing springs or experimental communities can be read as spaces where past and present systems overlap, revealing the material traces of political and technological transformations.
A central concept is the glitch: moments in which systems reveal their underlying structures through disturbance—when maps fail, infrastructures become visible or technological systems break down. Such disruptions can produce productive states of disorientation, understood here as moments when normative orientations no longer hold and bodies need to find other ways of navigating the world. Rather than treating these interruptions as errors, the seminar approaches them as openings for alternative ways of sensing, orienting and understanding environments.
Through discussions, fieldtrips and experimental practices, participants will explore how walking, sensing and DIY off-grid technologies can generate new relations between bodies, landscapes and technological systems in moments when established frameworks become unstable. A presentation and exhibition will take place at the end of the semester.
The seminar is in collaboration with Prof. Rosa Wernecke and the workshops No cloud, yes DIY tech & Interactive touch sensors for organics by Helin Ulas, furthermore it includes a joint field trip with Prof. Julian Warner and students from HMDK Stuttgart.
The Floor is Lava III focuses on landscapes and communities where these instabilities become tangible. Moving between critical geography, performative scores, queer media theory and experimental technologies, the seminar explores how landscapes function as layered archives of infrastructures, histories and alternative lifeworlds. Ruins, abandoned military sites, subcultures, healing springs or experimental communities can be read as spaces where past and present systems overlap, revealing the material traces of political and technological transformations.
A central concept is the glitch: moments in which systems reveal their underlying structures through disturbance—when maps fail, infrastructures become visible or technological systems break down. Such disruptions can produce productive states of disorientation, understood here as moments when normative orientations no longer hold and bodies need to find other ways of navigating the world. Rather than treating these interruptions as errors, the seminar approaches them as openings for alternative ways of sensing, orienting and understanding environments.
Through discussions, fieldtrips and experimental practices, participants will explore how walking, sensing and DIY off-grid technologies can generate new relations between bodies, landscapes and technological systems in moments when established frameworks become unstable. A presentation and exhibition will take place at the end of the semester.
The seminar is in collaboration with Prof. Rosa Wernecke and the workshops No cloud, yes DIY tech & Interactive touch sensors for organics by Helin Ulas, furthermore it includes a joint field trip with Prof. Julian Warner and students from HMDK Stuttgart.