The Creative Technologies Meetup was launched as a series of informal events in 2015 by me and Alexandra Waligorski together with Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli, Hamburg. We were primarily interested in finding like-minded people and a potential community in Hamburg and bringing them into contact with each other: Artists, designers, programmers and other people who are interested in the artistic and critical application of technology. In a regular meetup, at least two people present their work, food and drinks provide the basis for staying and exchanging.

The idea is to create a context for interdisciplinary exchange on this upcoming topic which is still often considered a nerdy niche topic although being interwoven with our everyday lives – and then there is beer, food and friendly people.

In 2022, the event series continues to run in collaboration with theHOST.is project by Kampnagel and the Deichtorhallen and offers the chance for interested people and colleagues to exchange ideas with theHOST.is resident artists and other Hamburg artists, to gain insight into the process and to develop ideas together.

If you want to be kept updated, join our very old fashioned facebook group or write me a message and I will put you onto my mailing list!

Here you find some documentation!

Upcoming

28.10.2023, 14:00 • Creative Technologies Lunch „Art, Code and Community Kitchen“ – during the Diversify the Code closing event!

The „Art, Code and Community Kitchen“ invites you to have a soup with us and get to know artists and makers that work between art and technology in Hamburg.

Beginning a series of project introductions, Fernanda Ortiz will present the work she is currently developing at Kampnagel: BODIES UNDER INFLUENCE. It is a live VR dance performance that choreographically explores: Where does the body begin, where does nature end and where can the two no longer be separated?
Anngret Schultze and Kattalin Newiger Mitxelena are introducing „Faces. A Shopping Paradise“ which is interweaving dance, artistic audio description, 3D animation, and technoid soundscapes into a performance on the theme of identity and consumability.
Dong Zhou will share her project “Meandering Bowing” showing the trajectories of a violinist in the 2nd violin part of an orchestra playing Smetana’s The Moldau. The musician’s traces virtually left in space allow for a new perspective on the musician’s authorship and question the hierarchy in musical composition through notation.
MICHAELBRAILEY reads selected passages from their new text-based work ‘Sad Light’ alongside an introduction to the associated research. ‘Sad Light’ is a black .pdf document imprinted with white characters – text and ASCII art – that theoretically, poetically, emotionally and conspiratorially explores the computer screen as an interface into vast, concealed systems of extraction.
Lena Biresch will be presenting their VR project “Me, Myself & My Avatars (or remapping the homunculus)”. The project demonstrates how easily humans can mentally adapt their body images and plays with avatars that propose additional limbs or control the entire environment.
Finally, the generative music duo Fragment (Arjun Jamil & Joana Naomi Welteke) will close the lunch. Their performances seamlessly blend organic and synthetic sounds to create sonic landscapes that evolve in real-time.

Come along – whether out of curiosity, to network, with your own questions on the topic or simply for a relaxed lunch break (food at a cost of 5 euros) as part of the DIVERSIFY THE CODE closing event.

In cooperation with THEHOST.IS, a project of Kampnagel and Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

Past Dates

14.08.2023, 19:00 • Meetup #8-2023 / Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli (Oberhafenquartier) with Brig Huezo and Janne Kummer
27.06.2023, 19:00 • Meetup #7-2023 / Auditorium, Halle für aktuelle Kunst Deichtorhallen Hamburg – İdil Galip, Neema Githere, Vanessa A. Opoku, Petja Ivanovas and Moisés Horta Valenzuela.
05.04.2023, 19:00 • Meetup #6-2023 / Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli – Iyo Bisseck & Sarah Diedro Jordão presenting »Dreaming Beyond AI«, Sandra Trostel, Thies Mynther & Jon Frickey presenting »Spaceship Zoopticon«
12.12.2022 – 19:00 • Meetup #5 / Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli – postponed
04.11.2022 – 19:00 • Meetup #4 / Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli with Jazmin Morris, Liva Dudareva, Pablo Somonte Ruano and Claudius Schulze
23.09.2022 – 19:00 • Meetup #3 / Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli with the Hyphen Labs + Gloria Schulz & Sarah Lasaki of „Dance Machines“ project
27.05.2022 – 15:00–18:00 • On-Site Workshop with Dasha Ilina / Kampnagel
19.05.2022 – 19:00 • Meetup #2 / Studio Hammerdeich with Olsen + Jascha Viehstädt + MICHAELBRAILEY
11.05.2022 – 11:00–13:00 • Online-Workshop with Dasha Ilina / Online
04.05.2022 – 19:00 • Meetup #1 / Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli with Darsha Hewitt, Dasha Ilina, Nadja Buttendorf, and Fernanda Ortiz.

2015-2017

Our first totally independent meetups happened regularly at Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli and Künstlerhaus FAKTOR with artists like Andi Otto, Anton Koch, Jessica Broscheidt and many more.

Meetup#8 2023

How are marginalized bodies represented in digital space? And what freedoms do digital spaces give us for self-determined design of our virtual bodies and identities? 

At our next Meetup, Brig Huezo will present VR projects that address these questions. As a dancer, performer and choreographer, Brig is interested in deconstructing our perception of the body and its future in an increasingly technological and virtual world. The following day, 14.08.23, Brig will hold a workshop at Kampnagel together with performance artist Sahra.Zaniah, bringing together MoCap, contemporary dance and vogueing under the title „Post Digital Bodies“, aimed at BIPoC* performers and choreographers. 

As a second position, artist and boxer Janne Kummer introduces their practice. Janne’s work investigates the effects of digitalization on the evaluation and perception of our bodies – always in connection with movements such as cyberfeminism, design justice, soma design and new materialism. Janne sees their own work as a tool to expose existing power structures and to develop alternative queer-feminist visions of the future.

Meetup #7 2023

The current THEHOST.IS resident artists of DREAMING BEYOND AI are researching new narratives and visions around AI technologies in a group of fifteen artists in Hamburg these days.

Five of them – İdil Galip, Neema Githere, Vanessa A. Opoku, Petja Ivanovas and Moisés Horta Valenzuela – will each briefly share their research questions and discuss the possibilities of a feminist digital culture with us over dinner and drinks.

Meetup #6 2023

The first Meetup of this year was also the kick-off of the new THEHOST.IS season, hostet by DREAMING BEYOND AI. Iyo Bisseck and Sarah Diedro Jordão presented their interdisciplinary project that brings together artists, researchers, activists, and policymakers to develop new narratives and visions around AI technologies and discusses the injustices and biases, that shape algorithmic decision-making processes. 

Hamburg-based filmmaker Sandra Trostel, composer Thies Mynther and animation artist Jon Frickey present the „shortest musical in the world,“ their animated film ZOOPTICON In a post-apocalyptic future, we have left the fate of our cultural heritage in the hands of the intelligent and friendly spaceship „Zoopticon“. Along for the ride, however, are five science fiction creatures who, despite help from the spaceship, fight out the same conflicts and make the same bad decisions as the humans who created them.

Meetup #5 2023

The composer-performer Leo Hofmann works between media art, sound art and performance and gives us an insight into his current research on „sonic actors“, musical actors who are neither human nor instrument. In his luggage he has his Sonic Jewelry, which we – tadaa – may also try out ourselves. Well, let’s see whether our talent is sufficient for some home-style Christmas music making.
And just as fitting for the season, filmmaker Sandra Trostel and animation artist Jon Frickey introduce us to their new and cutest science fiction creatures. Five very different little animals take us on their journey in the spaceship Zoopticon, a journey in which they first know nothing about each other’s existence and  that they have one thing in common: they all originate from a mysterious planet, called … Earth!

Meetup #4 2023

Like last time, for this meetup, we were sticking with the program of theHOST.is and the topic of Anything to Declare? Thinking outside the Border. The resident artists of the program and an artist from Hamburg gave insights into their current work on different aspects of borders and boundaries:

Jazmin Morris‚ project „Don’t touch my hardware“ explores boundaries between software, hardware and the body, speculating on how hardware can enhance our relationship with modern technology. 
In response to proliferating monopolistically owned convenience stores in Mexico City,  Pablo Somonte Ruano  develops a speculative alternative model: POCAS (POCAS Organización Cooperativa de Auto-Servicio). The fictional company overcomes the capitalist-neoliberal structure of convenience stores, applying principles such as commons, agorism, platform cooperativism, and cybernetics.
Liva Dudareva’s project explores the interconnections between the emergence of ecosystem ecology, the systemic consideration of the relationship between living and non-living beings, and the nuclear weapons tests conducted in the United States between 1945 and 1992. 
Joining us from Hamburg: artist, curator, photographer, and DIY boat builder Claudius Schulze. In his work, he too explores anthropocentric phenomena, using a variety of advanced technical means to meticulously investigate transformations of living beings and their habitats. Recently, he has implemented ClimateArtFe.st in Hamburg.

Meetup #3 2022

The third Creative Technologies Meetup Hamburg 2022 took a closer look at the boundaries and shifting borders of our post-digital world – inspired by the second theHOST.is season of the artist collective Hyphen Labs. In the fall of 2022, under the headline “Anything to Declare? Thinking outside the Border”, Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge questioned forms and practices of creating borders between bodies, landscapes and nations. From Hamburg, the team around the XR project „Dance Machines,“ initiated by the choreographer Regina Rossi, presented that evening, focusing primarily on experiences of the boundaries of and for the human dancing body. Digital artist Gloria Schulz and the choreographer and performer Sarah Lasaki gave an insight into their work on multimedia dance experiences and their experiences with intergenerational audiences.

Meetup #2 2022

The second Creative Technologies Meetup Hamburg this year was hosted at the artist-run Studio Hammer Deich. This time, THEHOST.IS artists as well as artists from Hamburg looked into code as an artistic means: Choreographer Jascha Viehstädt introduced Studio Hammer Deich and his artistic experience in applying AI in the field of dance. THEHOST.IS artist Olsen provided insights into his current project on the poetics of zeros and ones, our physical relationship to algorithms and is longing for support on questions of game design. Electronic music composer and VR enthusiast MICHAELBRAILEY presented his most recent work touching on the spiritual quality of code. 

Meetup #1 2022

At Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli – the Hamburg center for DIY culture – we focussed on DIY teleportation, motion capturing, and digital representations of bodies; with Darsha Hewitt, Dasha Ilina, Nadja Buttendorf, and Fernanda Ortiz.