Prof. Timothée Ingen-Housz
Vita
Timothée Ingen-Housz was appointed professor at the University of the arts in October 2015.
Trained as a multimedia artist, author and visual language designer, Timothée Ingen-Housz´s practice as artist, educator and researcher is concerned with the exploration, communication and narrative awareness of complexity. His journey started at Paris´s Ensad, where he graduated with the experimental logographic writing system “Elephant’s Memory”, a linguistic toy allowing words and norms to be playfully negotiated across existing languages and cultures. He then founded a creative studio for “screen, stage and page”, authoring audiovisual formats for science communication, game design, art exhibitions, film and theater projects while pursuing his own research in visual communication and screenwriting. Starting to teach while still a student, he held lectures and workshops at Ensad (Paris) , Harvard film faculty, Goldsmiths University of London, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Cologne international school of design, Bauhaus University, and finally the UdK Berlin, where he now teaches “media conception and dramaturgy” in the curriculum „communication in social and economic contexts“ while developing a variety of research projects in collaboration with Technical University Berlin and Potsdam Institute for Climate change, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Oxford University and many others. Currently prototyping participatory interfaces and transformation maps towards sustainability, he´s researching co-creative processes facilitating the communication of complexity for multiple societal stakeholders and from multiple points of view. Working at the crossroads between science, design and the humanities, Ingen-Housz ´s own work been shown internationally, most recently in the traveling exhibition "the society of signs" (2021). Next to teaching, he’s currently co-developing the UdK´s research horizon in the upcoming Einstein climate change research center for public policy and human settlements.
Audiovision
This department is originally called “conception and dramaturgy with audiovisual media”.
Our interest is here the study of images and sounds, and their combination in narrative sequences. We are interested in their techniques and aesthetics, their rules and their tricks, their capacity to represent, to deceive and to involve, – with or without interfaces, menus or buttons. We are investigating comics, movies, news, serials, games, performances, graphics, spacial and virtual environments, – anything potentially narrative in any form and format, in any context and for any purpose.
In the interdisciplinary environment of GWK, we´re out to explore audiovisuals through the kaleidoscope of their reception modalities and strategic potential. We do not only “design stories”, – we work with storytelling to figure out what to tell to whom, why, when and how. Can we use narrative processes to investigate and transform situations?
What we wish to find can not be found in a book. We need a playground rather than a library or a search engine – a place where perceptual and representational processes can be practiced and questioned all at the same time. In other words: a (dis)comfort zone where we can feel safe to fail productively, and design methods allowing both the formulation and the elegant resolution of communication problems.
Making images is a social enterprise. Our seminars are real-life blogs buzzing with comments, likes and disses. If we want our images to reflect and participate in contemporary debates, we must take advantage of the challenges and dilemmas coming with their multiple roles in a many-to-many world.This starts by looking at each other´s work, and use our own eyes, ears and wits to kickstart the conversation our stories are meant to generate in the world.