Rundgang Design 2022
Design by Marcus Bücken
The Rundgang – Open Days of the Berlin University of the Arts is a firmly established event in Berlin's cultural summer. At the end of the academic year Germany's largest art university with its four colleges, the Berlin Career College and the Inter-University Centre for Dance opens its workshops, studios and rehearsal rooms for the public thus creating an opportunity to get in contact with our artists and their works.
Every year in February we start the design competition in one of the four design classes and give students the chance to show there vision of the University.
We are pleased to present to you the designs that were created in 2022.
The visual consists of four circles corresponding to the four faculties. It symbolizes the special moment of the Rundgang, in which many things mix: students mingle with fellow students from other faculties and visitors.
The different works of the students at different locations lead to a communal experience during the tour. This tension is reflected here.
The module heights of the grid on which the design is based refer to the actual proportions of the students at the various faculties of the UdK Berlin. In the animation, the modules move in different directions at different speeds, just like the visitors of the Rundgang.
The poster design abstracts the tour and its visitors into two heterogeneous, overlapping grids that generate an optical effect through their moving encounter, which lends the design a further level of meaning: the Rundgang thus appears as a place of productive encounter, a place of exchange, and a place of artistic exploration. The analog and digital interplay within the design process functions as a visual quotation and refers to the different possibilities of attending the Rundgang: In addition to the on-site visit, the new Rundgang-platform also offers the possibility of digital participation.
The design for the appearance of the Rundgang is colorful, diverse, almost crowded, moving - derived from the visuality of Berlin's urban space.
The starting point for the design was that new things are discovered during the Rundgang of the UdK Berlin. The information on the poster also needs to be discovered: Black circles on a white background create an interesting play of shapes. When viewed from a distance, the circles become writing, revealing information about the Rundgang.
Poster and animation are composed of animated writing and alienated videos. The latter were recorded at the UdK Berlin and abstractly depict the creative work within the university. This visual chaos is supported by the sound level, which invites to decode the videos.
The Rundgang exhibits semester and final projects that were worked on with great energy throughout the semester. The animation visualizes my interpretation of the creative process: Idea collection, topic identification, research and inspiration, drafting and discarding, frustration and random thoughts, until the final result.
"The head is round so that thinking can change direction." With these words, the French artist Francis Picabia describes the ability to deal with novelty - that ability to which both the exhibiting artists and the visitors of the Rundgang aspire, as it were. The ones in the creation and testing of new forms of expression, the others in the experience and internalization of the same. The detached view enables a constant back and forth, encourages one to turn one's own head and thereby possibly discover something new.
At the beginning of every Rundgang there is abundance: masses of visitors meet masses of exhibits, installations, performances. This abundance sets the pace for the walk through the UdK Berlin on the Open Days - crisscrossing, rarely targeted, but always impressive. To visualize this quality, paths are generated whose colorfulness and speed are based on a random principle. The tracks that are drawn in this way show, on the one hand, how visitors contribute to the abundance. On the other hand, they use the formal language of sketching: A design emerges on a white sheet. Motif and animation thus show the relationship between impression and expression, interweaving artistic practice and impression.