“Wallpapers are frequently an expression of personal taste and a way of helping to define personal identity”
‑ Zoë Hendon from “Wallpaper”

From historic relevance to modern‑day aesthetics, back to seeming irrelevance, wallpapers have been a part of our lives for centuries. But what is the history of wallpapers? How have they evolved over time? What role do they play in our lives today? What are artistic qualities of their design and application and how do they influence our perception of space? Who even is able to design their personal space according to their own taste and identity?

After a very nice welcome and tour of the “Sensemble” theater by Anne and Sebastian, these were some of the open ended questions that we started to explore in our first week of our journey through the world of wallpapers. Off we went finding sources, reading articles and books and we found a lot! From the history of wallpaper in Britain in a BBC documentary the 1892 feminist short story “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to exhibitions of contemporary art in the Rhode Island School of Design of the medium and coming to a close in our modern world with wallpaper pattern generation by neural networks. Even political protest connected to wallpaper, as in Pak Sheung Chuen’s “Nightmare Wallpaper” drawings, created during the trial of activists pursued by the government after Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists. He then scans these random traces, blowing them up on the computer, multiplying each fragment, giving way to decorative abstract motifs reminiscent of wallpaper.

This seemingless unimportant and yet omnipresent observer of our daily lives, the wallpaper, showed to be a unexpected connection point between art, history, design, politics and technology.

In between research sessions, we also setup our “studio” space in our temporary home of the attic of the Kulturfabrik.

Having collected multitude of sources, on the second day we also wanted to explore performative aspects from the get go and decided to each research in a different direction and then share our findings in an open form performance. This resulted in very different approaches to the topic:

• a humorous sketch of a professor giving a TED talk until being informed, that the paper the talk is based on does not make their data(sets) available and the talk is now cancelled.

Figure 1: Joern’s TED talk sketch

• a very yellow presentation of the short story “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Figure 2: Alicia’s Yellow wallpaper presentation

• an interactive “mind palace” journey through a British middle class home in the 17th century to imagine the life of the inhabitants and the usage of the wallpaper
• an overlayed video of a short documentary with a following quiz show about the history of wallpaper

The performances were a fun way to share our findings and also to get a first glimpse of the different approaches we have towards the topic of wallpapers.
To finish off the day, we followed the presentation of “Yellow wallpaper” with a movie version, which sadly turned out to be horrendous, but still a nice way to end the day.

Two additional ideas that had come up already during our preparation for the residency, were doing interviews with people about their personal connections to wallpapers and the idea of creating moving wallpaper in the form of a robotic moving wall rig. While the interview idea was straightforward and we started collecting questions and ideas how and who we could interview, the moving wall rig was a bit more complex. As it turned out the initial idea of a moving wall rig, which just moves a wall back and forth, was not very exciting and we started to think about other possibilities, landing on two ideas:

• a fully drivable wall with 3‑4 wheels, that can be moved remotely and could be used as a stage
  element, a prop or part of an installation
• a construction of a “sensitive wallpaper” on a frame, that can be moved forward to create the illusion of something moving behind the wallpaper, potentially triggered by a person walking by or a sound

Figure 3: Do robot walls dream of electric flowers?

As of yet we’re not sure if the first idea is feasible, du to the costs of high torque brushed DC motors, but the materials for a prototype of the second idea are on their way to us. Aside from electronics we also require wallpaper and were luckily able to get a large amount of roles for cheap on kleinanzeigen from a nice lady in Augsburg. Tools and different base surfaces were purchased from the local hardware store.

To get back into the creative after a lot of research and planning we decided to regularly give ourselves prompts to inspire creation of music, visuals and/or writing and started off with a writing exercise
on:
A wall (with wallpaper) from somewhere you’ve lived or been has been a witness to a conversation ‑ Narrate its experience as an observer Again this lead to very different approaches from a short play, to a wallpaper monologue to a horror story.

Finally, to end the week off we recorded interviews with each other to start an “Archive of Memories”.

von Joern Griepenburg