The offerings in the field of Experimental Design by Professor Christian Schreckenberger are available to all students of the three bachelor and master programs Communication Design, Industrial Design and Photography. Following the basic idea of interdisciplinarity pursued by the Folkwang University of the Arts as a whole, the students work in experimental design with a wide variety of topics, media, materials and artistic strategies. In an open artistic process, the students themselves decide which path they take and -depending on the course of their experiments and their interest- they decide whether they develop products, application-oriented speculations, poetic objects or sculptures, objects, images and installations in the sense of autonomous artistic works.
Aida Farvard, 1990 Born in Tehran, Iran
“You reinvent yourself in every moment of your life. You write the book of your life with your own thoughts. Experiences from the past, whether good or bad, determine how to react in each moment. You are always creating new worlds with your thoughts. You are neither your body nor your thoughts. How much you change through years and the things that shape who you are and influences on you. The society that you are living, the wrong and right and the border between them. To decide to be yourself or be what they want you to be and after a while you look back and realize if you knew yourself before.”
Dan Geffert, 1989 Born in Bochum, Germany
For his final project for Bachelor of Fine Art Dan Geffert created a mechanic he called „Ernst-Haeckel-Machine.” Ernst Haeckel – a 19th century scientist recognized world wide by his times -did drawings of micro-minimal cell structures in nature. Dan Geffert’s construction is able to film the fluent mixture of paints controlled by his Ernst-Haeckel-machine. His video „Sudden Art“ shows this process leaving the spectator to think about geological processes, cell structures, veins or even the universe. Its cosmos gives no definition about any, lacking a chance of a clear dimension.
Ekaterina Haak, 1982 Born in Kazakhstan
“My work is based on my interest in ‘useless’ objects which I notice everywhere. In almost every home, in numerous office and car spaces there are souvenirs, keepsakes and dust collectors to be found. Without illustrating this phenomenon directly, I created these ceramic objects which, at times, quote formal attributes of the memorabilia, but also possess an aesthetic of their own. The plant, animal and humanlike sculptures oscillate between archetypal and amateurish qualities, sometimes even evoking the thought that they may have been created by a child. The placement of the ceramics invite the observer to discover correlations among the single pieces in the installation or to project one´s own stories in the composition of the figures.”
Rosa Hausmann, 1992 Born in Solingen
Rosa Hausmann drew on the theme of shadows in her bachelor thesis. After numerous preliminary experiments with various media, she developed her own graphic technique in which she places individual dots next to each other with different densities. In the course of the work, the topic of shadows took a back seat. The free play with density, course, contrast and overlapping in a more general sense became more important and eventually became completely independent in large-format drawings directly on the wall.