GUESTS
As a place of interdisciplinary curiosity, we regularly have guests from a variety of fields. Here you can browse the list of guests to the chair over the years.
MIRIAM SIMUN
Miriam Simun will visit the Chair of Art in Architecture for the summer semester 2025, sharing her workshop Training Trans Humanism: How to Become an Octopus (and sometimes a squid) with the students in the course Artistic Methods: OTHER BODIES.
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Recurring questions revolve around interspecies relations and non-human intelligence; the relationship of technological innovation to mythology and desire; the construction of knowledge and the violence of categories; and radical reimaginings of life under ecological crisis.
Trained as a sociologist, Simun takes on the role of ‘artist-as-fieldworker,’ conducting first-person research with diverse places and communities: from scientific laboratories to rewilded forests, from freedivers to human pollinators. This in-depth and corporeal research dictates the form of the final artworks.
HELENE NYMANN
Helene Nymann will visit the Chair of Art in Architecture for the summer semester 2025, sharing her workshop on Future Ancestry and Ancient Memory Techniques with the students in the course Experimental Creation: From Matter to Meaning.
Helene Nymann is a Danish visual artist and artistic researcher exploring embodied knowledge, memory systems, and future ancestry. Through mnemonic structures and systems, Nymann creates participatory environments where individual recollection transforms into collective co-creation. Using moving images, sound and sculpture, Nymann examines how we process information, store knowledge, and shape memories — cultivating more sustainable ways of imagining and remembering for futures.
Nymann completed her practice based PhD in 2024 with the project "Memories of Sustainable Futures: Mnemonic Practices in the Spaces between Artworks and Worlds". Nymann's works have been presented at museums and art internationally and nationally; the New Museum, Pioneer Works and the Fridman Gallery in New York, USA; Copenhagen Contemporary, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, ARoS, Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark; MACRO, Museo D’arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy: and Tate Modern in London, England.
JOE DUMIT
Joe Dumit will visit the Chair of Art in Architecture for the summer semester 2025, sharing his workshop Slow Prompting with the students in the course Artistic Methods: OTHER BODIES.
Joe is an anthropologist of passions, brains, games, bodies, drugs and facts. He loves engaging with just how strange we all are in doing what we love and how much we love and live by what we think of as knowledge. His research and teaching constantly ask how exactly we came to think, do and speak the way we do about ourselves and our world. What are the actual material ways in which we come to encounter facts and things and take them to be relevant to our lives and our futures?
Joe is Chair of Performance Studies, Professor and former director of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Davis. He is also on the faculty of the Cultural Studies PhD program and in the process of launching an undergraduate program in Data Studies, helping undergrads learn to think critically and computationally about data.
Joe's research is deeply interdisciplinary, spanning group improvisation, gaming studies, immersive visualization, computing history, and bodymind anatomies. His work in group improvisation focuses on Contact Improvisation, fascia studies, and haptic creativity, collaborating with institutions like the Interacting Minds Centre and Studio Olafur Eliasson on projects exploring embodied cognition. In gaming studies, he co-founded the ModLab at UC Davis, integrating game design into research and pedagogy. His immersive visualization research at KeckCAVES brings together scientists, dancers, and media artists to explore 3D environments. Additionally, he investigates the early history of computing, particularly its paradoxical role in modeling human irrationality, and examines diverse anatomical knowledge systems across medicine, movement, and alternative practices.