For the 2023 exhibition ‘POWER’ held at the Belgian Architecture and Cultural Center CIVA in Brussels, Meta Office was commissioned by Tu Delft / The New Open to investigate the role of open data in our current energy crisis.
‘Comfort Zone’ is a spatial installation designed to challenge our perceptions of warmth and comfort in the context of our changing climate. It presents an alternative approach to space heating, which responds to local demands and global energy supply. Rather than mindlessly heating entire rooms, it selectively warms the areas where warmth is genuinely required and, crucially, only to the extent that our environment can sustain. Red heat clouds, which evolve around moving bodies, challenge our conventional understanding of space and prompt us to reconsider it as a tangible yet immaterial comfort zone—a zone defined by necessity and bound by possibility.
Year: 2023 / Location: CIVA, Brussels / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit, Felix Reiterer, Tim Hoijman, Pieter H. , Dennis Pohl, Georg Vrachliotis
‘Sensing domesticity’ started as an academic research report produced for TU Delft under the supervision of Georg Vrachliotis and Heidi Sohn. Intended as a theoretical precursor to the speculative design project ‘From Mine to Mine’, the publication sets up a methodological framework that bridges architectural discourse with contemporary urgencies relating to material extraction, sensing technologies and labor.
The project expores the spatial implications of data by gaining a technical and material understanding of the systems bound to sensing technologies. It approaches the problem of representing and designing the house as a singular entity and defines it as part of a continuously expanding mediascape inhabited by sensing objects. By instrumentalising these objects as mapping tools, the project unpacks the languages and frequencies on which they communicate, the material and geological traces they follow as well as the scale and distances they cover.
It becomes clear that the primordial environment of the house has been replaced by a planetary system in which the house itself becomes an infrastructural and multipliable node. This renders definitions such as ‚inside‘ and ‚outside‘ or ‚natural‘ and ‚artificial‘ obsolete and makes an understanding of the world as an anthropogenic construct all the more significant: a global interior emerges, a shared domesticity within a World Interior.
Year: 2022 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit
Meta Office has been initiated as a collaborative agency within the Datapolis research and design studio at the Architecture Faculty of TU Delft, where the eponymous project explored the relentless work of humans behind artificial intelligence. As a videographic documentary, Meta Office merges the physical imprint of 500,000 Amazon Mechanical Turks within one virtual yet real office space. The work is featured in the book Datapolis (2023) edited by Paul Cournett and Negar Sanaan Bensi and published by nai010 publishers.
The project shows that what we think of as artificial intelligence is often manufactured by the routine clicks of countless workers. Hidden behind their screens they operate the digital production line of a rising labelling industry focused on data description services – services that seem to be automated but are in fact deeply human. Amazon employs workers from all over the planet who are paid cents per task to label, categorise and validate vast arrays of raw data, providing the important meta-data. The so-called Amazon Mechanical Turks are the unseen workforce behind digital automation.
By using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform to enter into a dialogue with its workers, Meta Office exposes their decentralized ‘office’ spaces, merging them within one database. It is the workers’ subjective description of their working environment that generates an image of what becomes the meta office: the vast constellation of bedrooms, desks and lamps, geographical locations, square meters and working hours form what we might call the office of the 21st
century.Year: 2021 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Paul Cournet, Hans Larsson, Setareh Noorani
‘From Mine to Mine’ is a speculative academic design project and short film, produced under the supervision of Georg Vrachliotis and Heidi Sohn for the ‘ExploreLab’ Graduation Programme at TU Delft. The project has since been featured in numerous online platforms and publications.
From Mine to Mine confronts our understanding of architecture with its emerging context of data transmission and resource extraction. In a time of copper depletion, the project looks toward three separate sites that have been widely affected by the extraction of copper (and its implementation as enabler of any kind of digital connection), and attempts to convert them into new ‘mines’, made productive instead of destructive. The miner of the future accesses these mines remotely through screens from home, a place whose architecture becomes both consumer and constructor of a territory in transition – from dependence on copper to alternate resources: By creating the conditions for new ecologies to thrive, the new mines form alternative industries, yielding new materials to resolve the economic reliance on copper.
The project thus traverses different scales to unite the economic, the ecological and the material within one architectural design. Global contexts of copper trading, the exploitation of the landscape and the connection of the individual to their immediate material environment are linked in an overarching design narrative that is used as both a design tool and a means of representation.
The final videographic documentation functions as a dynamic design product that narrates the trans-scalar, trans-temporal and trans-disciplinary approach introduced.
Year: 2023 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Heidi Sohn, Georg Vrachliotis, Ferry Adema
https://koozarch.com/interviews/from-mine-to-mine-a-territory-in-transition
https://vimeo.com/745123310
As part of the exhibition series and online publication ‘Image Capital’ by Armin Linke and Estelle Blaschke, Meta Office created a photographic installation exploring the relentless work of humans behind artificial intelligence – by exposing the spaces of Amazon Mechanical Turks. The installation was on display at Folkwang Museum (Essen), Fondazione Mast (Bologna) and Centre Pompidou (Paris).
The project shows that what we think of as artificial intelligence is often manufactured by the routine clicks of countless workers. Hidden behind their screens they operate the digital production line of a rising labelling industry focused on data description services – services that seem to be automated but are in fact deeply human. Amazon employs workers from all over the planet who are paid cents per task to label, categorise and validate vast arrays of raw data, providing the important meta-data. The so-called Amazon Mechanical Turks are the unseen workforce behind digital automation.
By using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform to enter into a dialogue with its workers, Meta Office – Behind the Screens of Amazon Mechanical Turk exposes their decentralized ‘office’ spaces, merging them within one database. It is the workers’ subjective description of their working environment that generates an image of what becomes the meta office: the vast constellation of bedrooms, desks and lamps, geographical locations, square meters and working hours form what we might call the office of the 21st century.
Year: 2022 – 2023 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit
Meta Office has been initiated as a collaborative agency within the Datapolis research and design studio at the Architecture Faculty of TU Delft, where the eponymous project explored the relentless work of humans behind artificial intelligence. As a videographic documentary, Meta Office merges the physical imprint of 500,000 Amazon Mechanical Turks within one virtual yet real office space. The work is featured in the book Datapolis (2023) edited by Paul Cournett and Negar Sanaan Bensi and published by nai010 publishers.
The project shows that what we think of as artificial intelligence is often manufactured by the routine clicks of countless workers. Hidden behind their screens they operate the digital production line of a rising labelling industry focused on data description services – services that seem to be automated but are in fact deeply human. Amazon employs workers from all over the planet who are paid cents per task to label, categorise and validate vast arrays of raw data, providing the important meta-data. The so-called Amazon Mechanical Turks are the unseen workforce behind digital automation.
By using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform to enter into a dialogue with its workers, Meta Office exposes their decentralized ‘office’ spaces, merging them within one database. It is the workers’ subjective description of their working environment that generates an image of what becomes the meta office: the vast constellation of bedrooms, desks and lamps, geographical locations, square meters and working hours form what we might call the office of the 21st century.
Year: 2021 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Paul Cournet, Hans Larsson, Setareh Noorani
Meta Office collaborated with De-Studio to create a heating chandelier. Both, the object itself and its performance is designed to be as resource efficient as possible. It is easy to assemble and disassemble, maintain, separable by type, and fireproof. To reduce energy consumption and in harmony with the tradition of chandeliers that excel in reflecting light, the main panel is constructed from mirror-polished steel to effectively reflect and brighten its surroundings.
The HC1 hosts an infrared heater to provide warmth, an LED for illumination, a passive infrared sensor (PIR) to detect the presence of moving entities, and an Arduino (computer) with internet access to receive real-time data from the energy grid and potentially interact with other HC1 units.
The HC1 is modular and can be extended to create an alternative heating and lighting system, which is called ‘Comfort Zone’.
Year: 2023 / Location: CIVA, Brussels / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit, Tim Hoijman
Meta Office has been initiated as a collaborative agency within the Datapolis research and design studio at the Architecture Faculty of TU Delft, where the eponymous project explored the relentless work of humans behind artificial intelligence. As a videographic documentary, Meta Office merges the physical imprint of 500,000 Amazon Mechanical Turks within one virtual yet real office space. The work is featured in the book Datapolis (2023) edited by Paul Cournett and Negar Sanaan Bensi and published by nai010 publishers.
The project shows that what we think of as artificial intelligence is often manufactured by the routine clicks of countless workers. Hidden behind their screens they operate the digital production line of a rising labelling industry focused on data description services – services that seem to be automated but are in fact deeply human. Amazon employs workers from all over the planet who are paid cents per task to label, categorise and validate vast arrays of raw data, providing the important meta-data. The so-called Amazon Mechanical Turks are the unseen workforce behind digital automation.
By using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform to enter into a dialogue with its workers, Meta Office exposes their decentralized ‘office’ spaces, merging them within one database. It is the workers’ subjective description of their working environment that generates an image of what becomes the meta office: the vast constellation of bedrooms, desks and lamps, geographical locations, square meters and working hours form what we might call the office of the 21st century.
Year: 2021 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Paul Cournet, Hans Larsson, Setareh Noorani
‘From Mine to Mine’ is a speculative academic design project and short film, produced under the supervision of Georg Vrachliotis and Heidi Sohn for the ‘ExploreLab’ Graduation Programme at TU Delft. The project has since been featured in numerous online platforms and publications.
From Mine to Mine confronts our understanding of architecture with its emerging context of data transmission and resource extraction. In a time of copper depletion, the project looks toward three separate sites that have been widely affected by the extraction of copper (and its implementation as enabler of any kind of digital connection), and attempts to convert them into new ‘mines’, made productive instead of destructive. The miner of the future accesses these mines remotely through screens from home, a place whose architecture becomes both consumer and constructor of a territory in transition – from dependence on copper to alternate resources: By creating the conditions for new ecologies to thrive, the new mines form alternative industries, yielding new materials to resolve the economic reliance on copper.
The project thus traverses different scales to unite the economic, the ecological and the material within one architectural design. Global contexts of copper trading, the exploitation of the landscape and the connection of the individual to their immediate material environment are linked in an overarching design narrative that is used as both a design tool and a means of representation.
The final videographic documentation functions as a dynamic design product that narrates the trans-scalar, trans-temporal and trans-disciplinary approach introduced.
Year: 2023 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Heidi Sohn, Georg Vrachliotis, Ferry Adema
https://koozarch.com/interviews/from-mine-to-mine-a-territory-in-transition
Meta Office is a research-based design practice working at the intersection of architecture, multimedia, and digital culture. Founded in 2022 by Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, and Edward Zammit, it has since evolved into a growing network of collaborators dedicated to bridging the digital and physical in unexpected and unconventional ways. Their work has already been exhibited in various museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Fondazione MAST in Bologna, and C.I.V.A in Brussels.
For inquiries, questions, or just to say hello, please feel free to contact us at hello@meta-office.eu.
For the 2023 exhibition ‘POWER’ held at the Belgian Architecture and Cultural Center CIVA in Brussels, Meta Office was commissioned by Tu Delft / The New Open to investigate the role of open data in our current energy crisis.
‘Comfort Zone’ is a spatial installation designed to challenge our perceptions of warmth and comfort in the context of our changing climate. It presents an alternative approach to space heating, which responds to local demands and global energy supply. Rather than mindlessly heating entire rooms, it selectively warms the areas where warmth is genuinely required and, crucially, only to the extent that our environment can sustain. Red heat clouds, which evolve around moving bodies, challenge our conventional understanding of space and prompt us to reconsider it as a tangible yet immaterial comfort zone—a zone defined by necessity and bound by possibility.
Year: 2023 / Location: CIVA, Brussels / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit, Felix Reiterer, Tim Hoijman, Pieter H. , Dennis Pohl, Georg Vrachliotis
Meta Office has been initiated as a collaborative agency within the Datapolis research and design studio at the Architecture Faculty of TU Delft, where the eponymous project explored the relentless work of humans behind artificial intelligence. As a videographic documentary, Meta Office merges the physical imprint of 500,000 Amazon Mechanical Turks within one virtual yet real office space. The work is featured in the book Datapolis (2023) edited by Paul Cournett and Negar Sanaan Bensi and published by nai010 publishers.
The project shows that what we think of as artificial intelligence is often manufactured by the routine clicks of countless workers. Hidden behind their screens they operate the digital production line of a rising labelling industry focused on data description services – services that seem to be automated but are in fact deeply human. Amazon employs workers from all over the planet who are paid cents per task to label, categorise and validate vast arrays of raw data, providing the important meta-data. The so-called Amazon Mechanical Turks are the unseen workforce behind digital automation.
By using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform to enter into a dialogue with its workers, Meta Office exposes their decentralized ‘office’ spaces, merging them within one database. It is the workers’ subjective description of their working environment that generates an image of what becomes the meta office: the vast constellation of bedrooms, desks and lamps, geographical locations, square meters and working hours form what we might call the office of the 21st century.
Year: 2021 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Paul Cournet, Hans Larsson, Setareh Noorani
‘Sensing domesticity’ started as an academic research report produced for TU Delft under the supervision of Georg Vrachliotis and Heidi Sohn. Intended as a theoretical precursor to the speculative design project ‘From Mine to Mine’, the publication sets up a methodological framework that bridges architectural discourse with contemporary urgencies relating to material extraction, sensing technologies and labor.
The project expores the spatial implications of data by gaining a technical and material understanding of the systems bound to sensing technologies. It approaches the problem of representing and designing the house as a singular entity and defines it as part of a continuously expanding mediascape inhabited by sensing objects. By instrumentalising these objects as mapping tools, the project unpacks the languages and frequencies on which they communicate, the material and geological traces they follow as well as the scale and distances they cover.
It becomes clear that the primordial environment of the house has been replaced by a planetary system in which the house itself becomes an infrastructural and multipliable node. This renders definitions such as ‚inside‘ and ‚outside‘ or ‚natural‘ and ‚artificial‘ obsolete and makes an understanding of the world as an anthropogenic construct all the more significant: a global interior emerges, a shared domesticity within a World Interior.
Year: 2022 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit
‘From Mine to Mine’ is a speculative academic design project and short film, produced under the supervision of Georg Vrachliotis and Heidi Sohn for the ‘ExploreLab’ Graduation Programme at TU Delft. The project has since been featured in numerous online platforms and publications.
From Mine to Mine confronts our understanding of architecture with its emerging context of data transmission and resource extraction. In a time of copper depletion, the project looks toward three separate sites that have been widely affected by the extraction of copper (and its implementation as enabler of any kind of digital connection), and attempts to convert them into new ‘mines’, made productive instead of destructive. The miner of the future accesses these mines remotely through screens from home, a place whose architecture becomes both consumer and constructor of a territory in transition – from dependence on copper to alternate resources: By creating the conditions for new ecologies to thrive, the new mines form alternative industries, yielding new materials to resolve the economic reliance on copper.
The project thus traverses different scales to unite the economic, the ecological and the material within one architectural design. Global contexts of copper trading, the exploitation of the landscape and the connection of the individual to their immediate material environment are linked in an overarching design narrative that is used as both a design tool and a means of representation.
The final videographic documentation functions as a dynamic design product that narrates the trans-scalar, trans-temporal and trans-disciplinary approach introduced.
Year: 2023 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit / Guidance: Heidi Sohn, Georg Vrachliotis, Ferry Adema
https://koozarch.com/interviews/from-mine-to-mine-a-territory-in-transition
https://vimeo.com/745123310
As part of the exhibition series and online publication ‘Image Capital’ by Armin Linke and Estelle Blaschke, Meta Office created a photographic installation exploring the relentless work of humans behind artificial intelligence – by exposing the spaces of Amazon Mechanical Turks. The installation was on display at Folkwang Museum (Essen), Fondazione Mast (Bologna) and Centre Pompidou (Paris).
The project shows that what we think of as artificial intelligence is often manufactured by the routine clicks of countless workers. Hidden behind their screens they operate the digital production line of a rising labelling industry focused on data description services – services that seem to be automated but are in fact deeply human. Amazon employs workers from all over the planet who are paid cents per task to label, categorise and validate vast arrays of raw data, providing the important meta-data. The so-called Amazon Mechanical Turks are the unseen workforce behind digital automation.
By using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform to enter into a dialogue with its workers, Meta Office – Behind the Screens of Amazon Mechanical Turk exposes their decentralized ‘office’ spaces, merging them within one database. It is the workers’ subjective description of their working environment that generates an image of what becomes the meta office: the vast constellation of bedrooms, desks and lamps, geographical locations, square meters and working hours form what we might call the office of the 21st century.
Year: 2022 – 2023 / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit
Meta Office collaborated with De-Studio to create a heating chandelier. Both, the object itself and its performance is designed to be as resource efficient as possible. It is easy to assemble and disassemble, maintain, separable by type, and fireproof. To reduce energy consumption and in harmony with the tradition of chandeliers that excel in reflecting light, the main panel is constructed from mirror-polished steel to effectively reflect and brighten its surroundings.
The HC1 hosts an infrared heater to provide warmth, an LED for illumination, a passive infrared sensor (PIR) to detect the presence of moving entities, and an Arduino (computer) with internet access to receive real-time data from the energy grid and potentially interact with other HC1 units.
The HC1 is modular and can be extended to create an alternative heating and lighting system, which is called ‘Comfort Zone’.
Year: 2023 / Location: CIVA, Brussels / Team: Lauritz Bohne, Lea Scherer, Edward Zammit, Tim Hoijman