Robert Patz
Dissertation Project
“Body-Knowledge” and Blurring in the Service of Intuition: Multimodal Interaction and Creative Knowledge-Genesis in Technological Applications of Virtual-Reality-Aided Architectural Designs (working title)
The corporeal knowledge that develops in the interaction between motor skills and cognition is proving increasingly important for research. This “body-knowledge” assumes a special role in the process of designing architecture, since architecture is always experienced corporeally. Its design is thus ideally based on a “corporeal process of thought.” Moreover, the architectural process of design inherently aims to create a three-dimensional, spatial product. The digital input and output media of virtual reality (VR) technology enable a design and its process of creation to be represented in three dimensions without the detour of abstract, two-dimensional forms of representation. The designer is corporeally present in the VR. Through corporeal expression (for example, by hand gestures), designers shape their environment without any physical obstacles, in contrast to the real world. The technology promises to enable the improved realization of subjective, temporal-spatial experience—i.e., body-knowledge—as projective thinking, and to improve the realization of this thinking in concrete designs in comparison to existing computer-aided methods of design and planning. The project aims to draw from transdisciplinary insight and empirical methods—in part on the basis of experimental technological applications that it develops—to continue this debate and come closer to answering the question of the ways in which the body can be integrated into computer-aided design applications.
Biography
Studies in architecture at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus–Senftenberg (BTU), and the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV); contract work in architecture offices in Berlin and Potsdam. Freelance artist and curator. Since 2011, membership in the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler, Berlin. From 2007–2013, member of the Artistic Advisory Board of the Ministry of Culture of the State of Saxony-Anhalt.
Publications
Virtual-Reality-Aided Architectural Design – eine Annäherung an natur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Parameter, Online-Publikation, Universität der Künste Berlin 2015.
„VRAAD“ (2015), in: PROTOCOL #7, Architektur im Kontext, Universität der Künste Berlin, Juli 2015.
too small to fail – Kunst am Bau für AEMtec Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin 2014.
Projektdokumentation „COMIC vs. HITEC“ (Autor: Dr. Martin Seidel), in: Kunst am Bau, Projekte des Bundes 2006 – 2013, Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz, Bau und Reaktorsicherheit u. Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung (Hrsg.), Jovis 2014.