Sensory Threshold LAB 2022, HOLY GRID!

“Two stories about experiences with LSD came to my ears. They can be confirmed easily by many other acid-admirers by browsing the web. It is the story of experiencing a visual phenomenon that manifests itself as a homogeneous grid, either made of points or lines, covering everything in the field of vision of the drug user. […] Look around you, look at your kitchen floor, your bathroom tiles, the windows on the other side of the street, the pavement of the sidewalk you are walking on, the bricks of the building’s wall next to you. One might start to wonder if the whole world is on acid.“
Alexander Johannes Heil, Substanzraum – A New Approach To Global Space 2020

Holy Grid! What’s going on? Is our brain really wired to organise our environment and thoughts into homogenous grids? This is what we want to explore and challenge during this years ST LAB. The participants are invited to initiate collaborative approaches, workshops and lectures to create a vast range of positions towards the theme of the grid. Seriality, industrial production, and eventually the grid moved more and more in the foreground of architectural design. You can see this reflected in the building where Billytown is located. New technologies, like the parametric design, producing variants from complex shapes in series is still based on the mesh – a complex grid.

We departed from an empty space, enclosed by grids of industrially produced serial objects. Tiles, windows, window frames, concrete slabs with rectangular cassettes; a monument of advanced “gridization.” Yet, grids do not solely dominate our physical environment. They facilitate and rule cyberspace, our communication technologies, and make each point on the map as good as any other. They emerge as models as we dive deeper and understand more clearly how our brain constructs our reality.”

As in the previous LABs the space was organically transformed into an unforeseen universe, which emerged from the collaboration of the participants.