Research Focus

The research focus on Transdisciplinarity (fsp-t), led by Prof. Dr. Florian Dombois, provides space for artistic and scientific production and reflection. It is a place where different approaches, practices, and methods from the arts and sciences encounter each other on equal footing. The focus is explicitly not on the problem itself, but rather on the empty space in which the participating artists and scientists expose themselves and are thus able to observe each other at work. In practical terms, the fsp-t operates a wind tunnel laboratory, whose center and medium remain invisible—unless someone visualizes the wind and, in doing so, reveals themselves.

A recurring theme is the model — for example, as a test object in the measurement section, raising the question: How do verbal and non-verbal thinking encounter each other?
A recurring theme is scaling — for example, as the scale effect of an experiment, raising the question: How do things and questions change when we re-dimension them in terms of space, time, energy, or quantity?
A recurring theme is the wind — for example, as the flow around a body, raising the question: How do we want to deal with the temporality of knowledge? For where is the wind when it is not blowing?

The fsp-t is designed to accommodate a maximum of two to three research projects at the same time. This stems from the conviction that the desired artistic quality can only be achieved within a small-scale framework. Nevertheless, there is a clear ambition that the concepts, approaches, and results emerging from the activities of the fsp-t can be fruitfully applied in other institutes and projects — in other words, that the work functions as a prototype. In this spirit, the head of the fsp-t, Dombois, has also been active for several years in the field of the artistic PhD. The goal is to develop and enable a curriculum in which the arts are not overwhelmed by scientific expectations, but instead find a form appropriate to their own disciplines. Above all, this is to ensure that the encounter between art and science takes place on equal terms.

Dombois and his team create situations in which researchers from the arts and sciences develop stories together — stepping from the systematic into the episodic. A central goal in this process is to discover, open, and expand the rupture in reality: a rupture framed on one side by granted freedom, and on the other by claimed freedom. Wherever an opening emerges between previously separated spaces, a pressure equalization occurs. Meteorologists call this phenomenon wind.

To the Research Reports:

Research Report 2024
Research Report 2023
Research Report ZHdK 2022

Research Report ZHdK before 2022

Interview with Florian Dombois

by Helene Romakin
April 2025

In this interview, Florian Dombois and I reflect on his pioneering role in the field of artistic research and the path that led him there. «I had doubts about geophysics and the approach of the natural sciences from the very first semester, but I couldn't bring myself to drop out,» he says, looking back on the beginning of his studies. I have been working with Florian as his research assistant and co-curator of the annual Wind Tunnel Festival at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since 2022. Together with our colleague Berit Seidel from the artists collective U5, we explore strategies, methods, and formats of being-in-the-world within our academic and artistic practices. Florian has been an artist and professor in the Research Focus on Transdisciplinarity at ZHdK since 2012, where he leads artistic research projects and founded an artistic PhD program. His artistic practice dates back to the 1990s, the founding years of artistic research. For us, it seemed a fitting moment to reflect on Florian’s work and take a step back to consider the early introduction of what is now a highly discussed field — artistic research.

Helene Romakin: You can look back on a very transdisciplinary education and career, which you have built since the 1990s both within various institutions and as a freelance artist. Let’s start from the beginning: You first studied geophysics at the Technical University of Berlin, while also exploring philosophy and the history and theory of science, until you eventually completed a doctoral thesis in cultural studies titled What is an Earthquake? An Attempt to Expand Seismological Modes of Representation. After that, you moved into art. Could you elaborate on what interests motivated you in these different disciplines?

Florian Dombois: I can't answer that in two sentences. It was a search, a development that needed detours: In 1986, I enrolled in geophysics and philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin. At the time, painting by the Neue Wilden was on the agenda at the HdK, now the Berlin University of the Arts. Their return to the figurative panel painting didn’t interest me for various reasons. I was looking for the energy in volcanoes and earthquakes. I wanted to understand our environment and our Earth. In the third week of my studies, Chernobyl happened. In the «project lab,» a self-directed physics practicum, we had access to Geiger counters and immediately started measuring: the moss on the roof of the physics building. When the first rain came, bringing the fallout over West Berlin with it, it was almost unbearable how much the device crackled. You couldn’t see anything special — it was only the news and this measuring device that revealed the danger to our lives.

HR: That must have been a deeply formative experience...

FD: Yes, and I experienced the act of measurement as a peculiar mix of empowerment and helplessness. Philosophy helped me endure the reductionism of geophysics, where everyone articulated themselves so differently than in the art world I had grown up in. From the very first semester, I doubted geophysics and the approach of the natural sciences, but I couldn’t bring myself to drop out. On the one hand, I was too fascinated by tectonic theories; I was — and still am — grateful for the ability to read the formative dynamics in the landscape. On the other hand, nothing that truly moved or concerned me at heart had any space in the seminars, theses, or textbooks. What mattered to me — the fearful, the stirring — remained unspoken, repressed, even actively excluded. I had to create spaces myself.

HR: The first projects in which you worked across disciplines and created new spaces of possibility still took place within a scientific center for geophysics.

FD: Yes, I tried to bring the two realities together. During my internship at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, I laid out a cable in a square with 1 km sides for our measurements. I walked the straight line across the terrain, over sticks and stones, and thought of Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967). Or at the University of Kiel, when I was a tutor for potential theory, I had the group draw and calculate the electric field lines of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977). My fellow students were indifferent, but for me, that was my source of energy.

In 1992, I wrote my diploma thesis on the free oscillations of white dwarfs and neutron stars. Afterwards, I hiked through Germany, Switzerland, and into France, in search of like-minded people and role models who worked between science and art. I realized that I still wanted to study a few more semesters of the history, theory, and ethics of science. I found the truth claims made by natural scientists too ideological, and despite their supposed commitment to pure rationality, too emotionally defended. The constant assertion that science is neutral and bears no moral responsibility for environmental catastrophes or societal structures did not convince me. I began to engage with the representational forms of the sciences and their epistemic implications and limits. From that, my dissertation emerged — with the question: «What is an earthquake?»

HR: What were the beginnings like? Did you find support for your approach in academia and the art world?

FD: At first, I encountered boundaries. The professor who supervised my geophysics diploma, Jochen Zschau, a well-known seismologist, didn’t want to take on the supervision of my doctoral work because he didn’t feel competent. That was very honestly meant. Zschau is a great scientist and person. I went to Hartmut Böhme, who fortunately accepted me — despite my lack of a degree in the humanities — at the newly founded Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt University. With the dissertation, I was able to differentiate my doubts about science using the example of earthquakes and turn my critique back into action. I began to sonify seismic signals and to develop listening to scientific data as an alternative understanding of nature and the world. After the defense in 1998, I gave lectures on this. Even the infrastructure was almost nowhere to be found: my hosts often had to bring their home stereo systems into the lecture hall.

Parallel to these lectures in the natural sciences, I now knew what I wanted to do artistically: to build sound installations and bathe in the seismic-sonic material. I wanted to hear what is happening inside the Earth. I discovered the different tonal colors of the various stations, their daily and seasonal variations (Surf, 2006). The seismic detail became increasingly interesting — the many versions of noise and crackling. I built myself a 5.1-channel installation through which I could experience the «Ring of Fire» from Hawaii (Circum Pacific, 2003). And then, in 2010, I gained access to data from the second-largest earthquake ever recorded — the 2004 Sumatra event, known for the catastrophic tsunami it triggered, whose reverberations could be measured across the entire planet for more than three months. That bell strike, that immense natural oscillation of our planet, marked, for the time being, the conclusion of my seismic sound works (Free Oscillation, 2010). I felt like being silent.

HR: Looking back, what would you say are the methods, ways of thinking, or perhaps even the kind of thinking you carried over from geophysics into your artistic practice? And conversely, which artistic approaches had already shaped you during your studies in geophysics and cultural studies? I’m thinking here, for example, of the work Using Audification in Planetary Seismology (2001), in which you questioned the formal limitations of scientific practice that strongly influence creativity and critical thinking.

FD: In the natural sciences, I learned the format of research projects, in which those involved synchronize themselves as a collective for a limited time; where you design and carry out a shared choreography lasting several years; and where it’s about receiving something from others and passing something on to others. Geophysics taught me to think in large temporal and spatial dimensions — and how those can still be found in the small and concrete; in other words, to constantly scale my thinking and find comparisons. My interest in instruments comes from geophysics, especially when they indicate phenomena that elude our senses. A seismometer can detect imperceptibly small vibrations, or the previously mentioned Geiger counter opens up a layer of reality beyond perception. And it taught me something else: how a good story can change perception. When you talk to geologists about a simple rock, they place that specimen in the context of enormous forces and time spans — of ancient oceans and supercontinents and dinosaurs and meteor impacts — and suddenly the stone is charged, suddenly it overflows with stories.

And conversely, from the side of art, I was influenced by Fluxus; by individual exhibitions I saw during my childhood, like documenta 5 (1972), SoHo – Downtown Manhattan (1976), and Für Augen und Ohren (1981) at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. I saw many happenings. The reference to the ephemeral, the rehearsal, the processual — that’s certainly something that can still be seen in my practice today. For our conversation, the reference to the 1970s is probably helpful. In his book Limits of Art: Allan Kaprow and the Happening, Robert Smithson and Land Art (2013), Philip Ursprung writes that much was set in motion in the art of the 1970s that was then not pursued — «a route not taken.» I believe I’m on that road, even if in a different terrain and in a different vehicle.

HR: Could you elaborate on that? Which path, the one not taken, do you mean?

FD: What interests me about the 1970s is the departure—the idea of thinking about art beyond the artifact and beyond the museum space. When I go to an art exhibition, I can see in every displayed work how large the entrance doors of the rooms are. Of course, it’s good for the art market if there are objects that fit into an apartment. And I can sympathize with collectors who want to live with the artworks. But for me, art is more than that. It concerns my entire existence in this world. Through it, I relate to the questions of our time, and through it, I try to open up realities in which I want to live. Art challenges me to repeatedly detect and illuminate my own blind spots, to think the world differently, to open my perception and sensitivity, to educate myself. It is a renunciation of stability and security—a fragile free space that I receive and at the same time have to create myself. Artifacts or products play a role in this, but for me, they are not the sole goal.

HR: With your career path, you were right in the spirit of the times: You are a pioneer of artistic research between art and science, a movement that took shape in the 1990s. How did you experience the beginnings of this paradigm shift in art? How do you assess the discourse around artistic research today? Have the questions, methods, and forms of representation changed?

FD: You’re right, the 1990s were a beginning for Artistic Research. Tom Holert pointed out in the issue «Artistic Research» of Texte zur Kunst (2011) that artistic research is also a consequence of institutional changes in art universities, because in the 1990s, art universities in Scandinavia were granted the right to award doctorates and began to confer PhDs to artists. That is certainly one of the forces still at work today.
But in the 1990s, there was also a mutual rapprochement between art and science in the art world. It seems to me that at the time many were interested in discovering the natural sciences and the technical as an aesthetic space. For me, that was good on the one hand, because I could bring my topics back into the artistic context. On the other hand, this encounter of art and science has not gone deep enough for me, where it only copies the surface. For me, it is much more than a stylistic question or even exoticism.

I have tried and keep trying to ask fundamental questions, even if it makes my work harder to read, because it often only gains contour on the second glance: How can we learn from the experiences of the sciences with the format of research without becoming accomplices to their claim of sole explanation? How can we trust art again, take it seriously as a social force? With artistic research, I seek other, more sustainable forms of thinking and being-in-the-world. In this search, I jump from one leg to the other, sometimes artist, sometimes scientist, and artistic research allows me to critically examine both fields.

HR: In your artist’s book Palaver (2008), which you conceived and wrote together with Eran Schaerf, you ask about the place where artistic research can present and debate its results. Have you found such a place?

FD: The project was triggered by prize money from Kunsthalle Bern for mediation work. I persuaded Philippe Pirotte, the director, to think of the negotiation of an artwork among artists as a mediation format. I was able to win over Eran Schaerf, a trained architect and a great thinker and artist, and we discussed for a year and a half — actually a palaver itself. The proposal that emerged is simple: the moment of presenting a work should be spatially separated from the moment of negotiating it, for example by a folding screen. This separation helps, among other things, to visibly distinguish the presenting artist’s double role as author and as viewer of their own work. Here, they can defend the work; there, criticize it.

The first implementation took place at Kunsthalle Bern. Afterwards, we conducted the Palaver several more times at the Bern and Zurich Universities of the Arts. I still find the layout of Palaver very suitable, and we also mention it in the new PhD issue «Formats of Claiming,» which will be published soon.

HR: Have you been able to try out this approach of peer discourse among artists anywhere else?

FD: Around the same time as Palaver, in 2008 I conceived a conference stream in Berlin for the European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts as an exhibition. I called the stream «Art as Research.» There was a call, and then Bergit Arends, Sabine Flach, and I peer-reviewed the submitted works. The process was new for everyone. For the exhibition, I rented Villa Elisabeth, and with Ellen Blumenstein we curated nine artistic works, including Christoph Keller’s Visiting a Contemporary Art Museum under Hypnosis and my own work Surf (both 2006). There was simultaneously a film screening by Eran and Eva Meyer and a sonification concert where, among others, Wolfgang Müller publicly performed his Séance Vocibus Avium for the first time. The response from audience and press was great; the TAZ headlined «Erderschütterung» («ground shaking»).

Michael Schwab was also at the exhibition, and without knowing each other before, we had an extremely lively conversation. It turned out that he was also thinking about a publication forum for artistic research, so together we conceived the Journal for Artistic Research. In 2009, we went to Bergen together for Sensuous Knowledge – An International Working Conference on Fundamental Problems of Artistic Research, organized by the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, and began together with Henk Borgdorff to address the players of artistic research, including ELIA and AEC. Then, the following year, I invited everyone to Bern, where we discussed the journal, the research catalogue, and the Society for Artistic Research, which we then founded there with 80 attendees. I financed Michael, the conference, and the whole start. The endeavor was a collective act for all of us. By now, the Research Catalogue has nearly 30,000 users.

HR: Let’s dive deeper into your artistic practice. Your early artworks, such as Circum Pacific 5.1 (2003) as well as your doctoral dissertation (1998), dealt with the modes of representation of collected data in seismological research. Your focus was always on the auditory measurement, perception, and representation of environments and ecosystems. Could you speak about the beginnings and origins of your interest in the auditory?

FD: I remember two beginnings. The later one was in the summer of 1993, when I was attending a lecture on the topic «Hearing and Seeing.» Suddenly, out of the blue, I noticed the similarity between a seismic curve and a sonogram. I ran home excitedly. Since I couldn’t program well enough and had no money, there followed a small odyssey of persuasion until I heard my first seismogram in the apartment of a friend of a friend. The computer speakers were way too small, yet the sonified earthquake sounded immensely powerful. It had a presence incomparable to the drawn seismogram. Thanks to the sonified data, I was able to understand the Earth as a sounding body. In my dissertation, I collected many phenomenological and philosophical arguments for listening, especially as an alternative epistemology.

For me, this was the breakthrough in my search for how to represent and investigate the environment in a way that is neither dominating nor extractivist. In my dissertation, I quote a reflection by Georg Picht, which remains central to me to this day: «Humanity is today in danger, through its science of nature, of destroying the realm of nature in which it lives and which is subject to its control. A knowledge that proves itself by destroying what is to be known cannot be true. Therefore, we are today forced to question the truth of our knowledge of nature.» (original in German, Picht, Georg: Der Begriff der Natur und seine Geschichte. 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1990, p. 80)

What I call «Auditory Seismology» is about making the seismic experience perceptible, where fear and terror, as well as humans and their emotions, have a place. It is about imagining an Earth before which we can feel small and subordinate. When listening to seismic signals, there is no sweet spot, no Archimedean point; every location on the globe has a specific sound — and yet you hear everything everywhere, all together and superimposed. An infinite melody, a sonic activity without beginning or end.

HR: And the earlier beginning?

FD: The earlier beginning was in 1980, with the exhibition Für Augen und Ohren. Von der Spieluhr zum akustischen Environment (For Eyes and Ears. From the Music Box to the Acoustic Environment), where I first encountered sound art. David Tudor’s Rainforest (1968) was incredible, Laurie Anderson’s Handphone Table (1978), Christina Kubisch’s Moving Music (1978), Harry Bertoia’s Tonal Pieces (from 1971 onward), which at the time you were still allowed to pluck. It was my first encounter with Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori (1913) — which I later responded to, among other things, with my very first kite instruments in the Triple Instruments (2019). I could rave endlessly about this exhibition, but I’ll just highlight three events from the accompanying program: there was an evening concert of Harry Partch’s music on his original instruments, which has haunted me ever since. I heard Conlon Nancarrow and his music for player piano for the first time. And Tudor and Schnebel staged Rozart Mix (1965) by John Cage for twelve tape machines. Actually, seismic movements were for a long time recorded on magnetic tape. «Another route not taken.»

HR: In 2022, we initiated the Wind Tunnel Festival together with Berit Seidel and you. What was initially conceived as a one-off event will now take place for the fourth time in May 2025. How would you describe the festival? What defines it for you?

FD: You saw that the wind tunnel has potential as a festival format. The spark was that one evening in December when we played music for each other in the wind tunnel—music that made us cry. «No one asked us, when we had no face yet, / Whether we wanted to live or would rather not [...] If I were allowed to wish for something / I’d be embarrassed / About what I should wish for— / A hard or a happy time / If I were allowed to wish for something / I’d wish to be a little happy / For if I were too happy / I’d be homesick for the sadness.» (Original in German, Friedrich Hollaender, 1931) That evening, we cried a lot. It was beautiful—being emotional together, feeling held, having trust, and showing one’s own vulnerability. That is our foundation for the festival, the carpet we stand on.

You ask what defines the festival for me? Certainly the guests, the audience, our team—with whom we meet in a threshold situation: between indoors and outdoors, between a rooftop garden and a concrete terrace, between garage doors and theater curtains, between sky and earth. And we sit on and next to the wind tunnel, through which the wind softly drifts, always circulating. The boundaries between art and science become blurred. What matters to me is that after every input, we go back outside to the tunnel and open the doors and curtains. We have to connect academic spaces with the world.

The festival is fluid—we start a day before, and after the two public days, we go to the mountains together to fly kites. We invite individual guests from previous years—you call that «long-term relation.» We have guests who carry the format further, into other contexts and other countries. That’s perhaps the greatest compliment for us—their enthusiasm. Or what do you think?

HR: Yes, I feel very much the same. What touches me most is that we create this moment in which intellectual exchange happens equally and simultaneously with emotional intimacy. Against the backdrop of political events in recent years, it is all the more valuable that we find spaces and moments of togetherness, of critical dialogue, and of consolation.

Your other major artistic research project is the Triple Instruments. Through truth wind blows, funded by the SNSF. Could you explain what’s behind it?

FD: If you ask a scientist, «What is the wind?,» they will probably explain it to you. If you ask an artist, «What is the wind?,» they might sing it to you. In this SNSF project, we make the wind sing. Technically, it works like this: we fly kites on long piano wires, which are looped into a string instrument anchored on the ground. I call it Triple Instruments because its sound brings three agents into dialogue: (i) the wind in the kite and its hummer, (ii) the human at the ground instrument, and (iii) the string between them—the soul of the instrument.
Every first Wednesday of the month, we travel to the same place in the Swiss mountains. I call it a «public rehearsal,» because you can’t give concerts with the wind. It blows—or it doesn’t—when and how it wants. For me, these rehearsals are «truer» than any concert. Our stage is the meadow, the valley. There are no walls, anyone can join. We are mobile and yet site-specific. Flying the sound kites is a spiritual experience, both alone and in a group. The beginning and end are fluid—I always lose track of time. It feels healing. Sometimes I wonder whether this is truly my response to the global environmental crises. And I believe, yes, it is. The subtitle Through truth wind blows is a quote from the Upanishads.

HR: At ZHdK, you have built an artistic PhD program. In 2022, the collaborative project Laboratorio Laguna. PhD on Sail was added, which you co-founded with Biennale Urbana (Giulia Mazzorin, Andrea Curtoni) and U5 (Berit Seidel). What does it mean to you to establish and advance artistic research within academia?

FD: I hesitated for a long time to get involved in the artistic PhD, because after a Bachelor and Master in art, I find another phase of individual work not meaningful. Artistic research, to me, lives from collaboration and exchange among artists, and that requires research projects with many participants. Besides, institutions love titles; and once they exist, they become arguments. There are already countries in which autodidacts or university dropouts can no longer become professors of art—a catastrophe. That’s why I resisted the idea of doctoral degrees in Switzerland for years, to prevent our art schools from making the same mistake.

And as so often with resistance, at some point it can no longer be maintained, because reality takes over. So in 2017, I switched sides. From then on, I started under the premise that our program brings emerging artists together and guides them into an exchange in the spirit of disciplinary «sharing & challenging.» I have deliberately excluded the idea of «knowledge production.» An artistic PhD should advance the field of art—that is my mantra. And for that, we are developing our own formats of sharing, formats of challenging, and formats of handing over. The dissertation is defined through engagement with the artistic peer community. In other words: I try to continue my practice of collective work together with the PhD candidates.

For several decades, I have been creating collective settings through research projects. I write the grant applications like scores for a multi-year happening or an environment with many agents. My ideal is that everyone can follow their inclinations, and yet something new and unexpected emerges from the project. The purpose of my research projects is not to describe or understand art, but to produce it. If you look at PhD education with this expanded view, then it becomes possible to guide academic regulations into an artistic free space.

In Laboratorio Laguna, we come together with a dozen PhD candidates from several European art universities. Venice is our method, not our topic. We sail with dinghies into the lagoon, where we practice balancing. The constant tidal currents accompany us, as does the turning wind. In the many wave patterns, we learn to recognize the shifting ground. We are embedded in historical depth—we encounter pre-Renaissance geo-engineering and a republic that, in the late Middle Ages, was capable of democratically deciding on and carrying out a transgenerational project to save the lagoon: the diversion of rivers and their sediments.

We live in the «Bohemian Pavilion» without single rooms and without air conditioning; we cook together and work side by side. It’s about a utopia of living together in which art is always possible. An alternative way of life in the face of climate catastrophes like global warming or sea level rise. There’s no use resisting—we must embrace the catastrophe.

HR: How do you see the future of artistic research? What is your vision? In 2006, you wrote a manifesto titled «Art as Research», which outlined ten theses. Are they still relevant? Would you expand them?

FD: Two months ago, I read Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021). I wish I had had this book when I was writing my dissertation. She analyzes with incredible precision the many problems of the «House of Modernity» and how deeply our thinking is permeated by it. And because this thinking accompanies and conditions us «precognitively,» it is «faster than thought.» All our ideas for solutions are steeped in the methods and concepts of Modernity. Even the belief that there is a solution is modern. Olivera says it will take our collective effort to care for the dying modernity until its final end in the coming years.

Your question about my vision for artistic research reminds me of former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt: «If you have visions, see a doctor!» And of course I do have visions—that’s the problem. I believe, for example, that we need to overcome individualism in art, and that science, for instance, needs to free itself from the tertium non datur. But then again, even that is still a too modern way of thinking. Olivera says we need the «4Hs: humility, honesty, humor, and hyper–self-reflexivity.» I believe the future probably lies somewhere in there: humility, honesty, hyper–self-reflection, and humor.