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BERND HOPFENGAERTNER

ExtraRoom

BERND HOPFENGAERTNER

source: berndhopfengaertnernet

EXTRA ROOM
Extra Room is a design project combining scale models and narrative elements to reflect on how advances in neuroscience and technology might affect our self perception. The Extra Room exists in an imaginary world where mind-reading technologies are used to ‘read’ the human mind. As the mind becomes transparent in this world a new necessity of protective self discipline emerges.
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source: berndhopfengaertnernet
I observe scientific concepts and ideas, current technical developments and cultural phenomena. My interest lies in the interdependencies of these fields and the spaces of possibility spanning between them. My work is about designing these spaces by creating tangible and more or less concrete artifacts: stories, videos and objects. By imagining the possible, the speculative, the non-existent (to quote an old industrial band: what is, is, what is not, is possible), Art and Design can contribute to a broader discourse in a way that is not accessible by purely analytical means. I’m interested in Design as an interdisciplinary intermediary, placed in-between natural science, engineering, cultural and media theory and everyday-life. My work has been exhibited, among others, at the Wellcome Trust in London, the MoMA in New York and the National Museum of China in Beijing. Parallel to my own artistic and design practise, I have worked as a lecturer at the Bauhaus-University Weimar, and I am currently teaching at F-A-S-T, an interdisciplinary Art, Science and Technology Program, a cooperation of the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden with the Technical University Dresden and the Dresden University of Technology and Economics. I live in Berlin.