Design: Hiroko Tanahashi
Process Seeds explores how artistic and scientific research evolves through materials, tools, gestures, experiments, failures, and unexpected encounters.
Bringing together artists, scientists, and researchers working with material experimentation, the evening offers insights into the often invisible processes through which ideas take shape: how questions emerge, how materials resist or redirect them, and how knowledge is generated through making.
Alongside talks and interventions, a pop-up exhibition presents Object Seeds, functional and dysfunctional prototypes, failed experiments, and process artefacts developed through a transdisciplinary exchange between fellows of Akademie Schloss Solitude and researchers from the Robotic Composites and Compositions Group (RoCoCo) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
By bringing artistic practices into dialogue with research on responsive, adaptive, and programmable materials, Process Seeds highlights material exploration as a mode of inquiry – one in which experimentation generates new questions, new forms of knowledge, and new ways of working across disciplines.
The detailed program will be announced soon.
A project by SCOPE – Solitude’s Collaborative Platform for Art, Science & Digital Cultures – fostering transdisciplinary exchange, experimentation, and collaboration among Solitude Fellows and partner institutions.
In cooperation with the Robotic Composites and Compositions Group (RoCoCo) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS).
Program
Talks, interventions, and pop-up exhibition
6.00 pm | Welcome & Introduction
6.30 pm | Keynote by Rebekka Ladewig (Professor of the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at Bauhaus University Weimar)
Capsule atmospheres. How the Californian Light and Space movement simulated outer space
Launched in 1967 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) the Art and Technology Program brought together artists, scientists, and engineers to explore the frontier-zone between artistic practice and scientific research. This keynote focuses on one of the experiments that came out of this program – the First National Symposium on Habitability (1970). At the height of the Space Race, as science fiction visions were being transformed into technoscientific realities, the symposium discussed the design of environments capable of sustaining human life in extreme conditions involving long-term confinement and isolation in space. The lecture looks into how artists of the Californian Light and Space movement collaborated with NASA scientists to simulate such environments, creating what I call »capsule atmospheres,« and how these simulated atmospheres impacted on the NASA space program.
7.30 pm | Interventions & Tour through the Pop-Up Exhibition
When: October 23, 2026, 6–8 pm
Where: Projektraum Römerstraße of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Römerstraße 2A, 70178 Stuttgart