The Wind Tunnel Model

Where is the wind when it is not blowing? In the new book The Wind Tunnel Model, artist-scientist Florian Dombois and his fellow researchers propose new forms of interaction between various artistic disciplines as well as between arts and sciences. Rather than defining a problem or a topic, around which people from the involved disciplines group, Dombois has established a wind tunnel laboratory with an empty test platform at Zurich University of the Arts. It is an architecture that turns its back on us and forms something invisible, a disturbingly concrete secondary model. The book features essays by Dombois and his collaborators at the laboratory. They reflect not only on this idea for a new trans-disciplinary collaboration. They also pledge for an exchange between verbal and non-verbal thinking modelled on the man engine, a mechanism of reciprocating ladders and stationary platforms installed in mines to assist the miners’ journeys to and from the working levels. For Dombois, the device is the key metaphor for his team and their work at the artistic wind tunnel.