The Topological Media Lab studies distributed agency, materiality, and gesture from phenomenological, social and computational perspectives. We study the phenomenology of gesture and performance, how media can be tangible, how people inhabit spaces made of responsive matter. Based on such studies, our goal is to create modes of performance and responsive environments with ethico-aesthetic impact.

The TML invents gesturally nuanced, time-based media and expressive instruments that support novel responsive architectures, based on a topological approach to media: physical and computational matter, image or sound that evolve continuously under continuous gestural input.

The projects are inspired by collaborative work with artists, performers and researchers in Europe, Canada, Japan, and the U.S.A. The studio-lab's physical-computing artifacts, installation experiments, and scholarly presentations provide opportunities for students to integrate critical, artistic, and scientific practices.

This section documents past and current research areas. Artists and researchers with backgrounds or interests ranging from fine arts, electronic music, theater and architecture to materials and textile sciences, computational physics, signal processing, computer vision and pattern recognition etc. have all been welcome to the TML.