Starting in the Spring of 2019, exactly 100 years after the foundation of Bauhaus, the Rotterdam museum Het Nieuwe Instituut transforms into Neuhaus, a temporary transdisciplinary academy for more-than-human knowledge.

Neuhaus.world is a participatory, interactive music video for Lake of Pavement, a new track by the emerging Rotterdam based artist Jo Goes Hunting. The video is made in conjunction with Neuhaus, a temporary academy for more-than-human knowledge at Het Nieuwe Instituut.

It incorporates user-generated photographic material to construct an ever-changing, ever-evolving music video, completely reliant on external contributions for content.

The contributed photo stays in the video as long as nobody else takes a new photo for that specific shape. At that moment the photo will be overwritten by the new one. This way the Neuhaus World is in constant flux.

Users can either add their work to the permanently mutating public version of Neuhaus or – if you are with a closed group – start a private version of the video.

A temporary academy

Het Nieuwe Instituut proposes Neuhaus as a means to host, generate and share other knowledge, to escape the destructive status quo. Neuhaus aims to explore, investigate and promote knowledge based in marginalized and unrecognized cultures, knowledge that strays far from any traditional reductionist analysis or mathematical modelling, knowledge that lives in plants, animals and machines, and knowledge that relates to the entire physical body and all of its senses, beyond the rational mind.

The present is marked by multiple challenges and there is a renewed need for other knowledge. The current crises could all be traced back to an economic system that focuses purely on productivity. It is built on – and in turn continuously acknowledges and reinforces – a system of knowledge production rooted in (mathematical) analysis, quantifiable data and control, in order to facilitate productivity. This system is so omnipresent that, even though we feel the need to think, design and act differently, it has become almost impossible to even imagine anything outside of its constraining logic.