SR-Tuning

Semantic Reloading

"Objects are semantically worn out long before the materials they are made of." U.Eco

SR-Tuning is a strategy for enhancing the use of a structure. For us, every structure is "tuneable". Our method of Tuning always concerns endowing semantically exhausted places, un-useable objects or worn-out structures with new content and possibilities of use. The aim is to make the use more multi-faceted by strengthening existing potential or implanting new inventions.

SR- Furniture Tuning

The beginnings of tuning go back to the methods of performance. Our first tuning was in 1998, the SR-Furniture-Tuning in the gallery "Urban Issue" in Berlin, a kind of live performance. With the help of flyers, we recruited people to bring along old furniture with semantic deficits to the gallery, where they were then to be tuned live. The room layout corresponded to the process of tuning. At the beginning, there were the service corners with customer consulting, followed by the workshop, where tuning was carried out. After this came the showroom, where the tuned furniture could be tried out and stood ready for collection by the owners.

City Tuning

Urban Planning always deals with the change of existing structures. This process we call City-Tuning. We see these urban interventions as a temporary situation in the growing or shrinking organism of a city. Many of our projects deal with the re-use of former, un-public urban sites. These places are worn out and need semantic reloading (sr). Sometimes it is this process City-Tuning makes it possible to use these urban sites again. One example is our project "Yaam-Club", which transformed an abandoned site of the former eastern-harbour in Berlin into a public club.

Our first City-Tuning was a game in the "Urban Issue" gallery in Berlin (1998), with Birgit Schlieps, Peter Arlt and Elke Marhöfer. Invented concepts such as the "hobby cellar colony" were to be implemented by the public according to certain rules in a large model of the city.

Another City-Tuning project is the SR-Balcony-Tuning, that we carried out during the »Hotel-Neustadt« festival in Halle-Neustadt, Germany. More Information