EXC 1027: Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory

Driven by the vision that “Gestaltung” is a fundamental mode of knowledge production, the Cluster
of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” developed a novel
form of interdisciplinary research. Initiated by humanities scholars, the Cluster brought together
researchers from the natural and materials sciences, medicine, architecture, design, and
humanities who jointly explored and established new architectures for knowledge generation.
Within these collaborative research processes, the humanities’ synthetic approach of analysing
images and knowledge structures across all scientific disciplines merged with the natural
sciences’ analytic and experimental procedures and — for the first time — with the design
disciplines. The Cluster’s central insight that “Knowledge is Gestaltung” and “Gestaltung
produces knowledge” yielded the following fundamental achievements:
i. Images, architectural spaces, and processes of Gestaltung were developed as essential
agents in the creation of knowledge and shaping of practices, for instance in neurosurgery,
zoological morphology, physics, and media theory. This “turn to Gestaltung” was
implemented by transforming design into a key actor in interdisciplinary basic research.
ii. The humanities achieved a new leading interdisciplinary role in research by introducing
transversal epistemological thinking and historical genealogies into scientific laboratories and
design workshops. Materials science, physics, and biology reshaped their experimental
approach by integrating epistemological, historical, and design dimensions. This enabled new
categories of research perspectives in the field of material code and structural science.
iii. The Cluster developed an experimental and adaptive Interdisciplinary Laboratory by
transforming the design of interdisciplinarity into a research challenge in its own right.
Simultaneously, current interdisciplinary research processes and their history in the form of
scientific collections were opened up to the public: With its innovative exhibition formats, the
Cluster conceived curating as an original form of research and knowledge production.
Taken as a whole, the Cluster “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” created a model of an adaptive,
collaborative architecture of knowledge that may well revolutionize the current German academic
system. Both the new Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity and the Hermann von Helmholtz
Center for Cultural Techniques perpetuate the achieved integrated research structure of more
than 40 disciplines at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In this way, Humboldt’s model of research,
teaching, and public exchange has been reshaped by the Cluster, combining the legacies of the
200-year history of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the 100-year history of the Bauhaus.