A week-long design workshop Into the Vertigo: Exercises in Posthuman Space-making focuses on the spatial sensation of spinning, rotating, and twisting. Participants will tackle the complex subject of dizzy visions through an interdisciplinary approach informed by feminist design methodologies and critical posthumanism. The core method will be thinking through making. Participants will utilize techniques such as 3D printing and laser cutting to develop The Surprise – a prototype of a space or object that can spin, evoke vertigo, or communicate these concepts otherwise.

Rediscovering movement, emotion, and inclusivity, through the means of communication design can prove as a vital mode for creating “sensitive spaces”. During the first half of the week, various short exercises will allow for the exploration of the perception of balance –or its disruption– at multiple sensory, spatial, and social levels. The workshop will also provide a theoretical framework that incorporates the concept of posthumanism, which addresses the contemporary question of what it means to be human under the conditions of globalization, technoscience, late capitalism, and climate collapse.

Tereza Ruller is an Amsterdam-based independent designer and co-founder of The Rodina, a communication design studio. She experiments with intermedia art strategies in the field of graphic design and investigates theoretical frameworks around bodies, labor, surface, and action. In 2015, she coined the term Performative Design. The experimental practice of The Rodina is drenched in strategies of performance art, play, and subversion. Studio invents ways in which experience, knowledge, and relations are produced and preserved. The Rodina explores the spatial and interactive possibilities of virtual environments as a space for action, new thoughts and aesthetics that come forward from between culture and technology.