ECHORAUM (Echo Room) is the result of a series of two-year cooperations between the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany and a number of international Media Colleges. Students and graduates of these institutions are given the opportunity to present their current projects in the lower ground floor galleries which become a temporary experimental laboratory.

-1/MinusEins, the experimental media lab of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, grew out of the academy's holography lab under the aegis of professor Mischa Kuball. Conceived as an interdisciplinary workshop, a place of communication and teaching as well as the centre of a network within the academy, the lab is intended to help students realise their projects. And it is with this in mind that it enters into cooperations and exchanges with a wide range of non-university partners in Cologne and further afield. The fifth exhibition in the Room of Echoes focuses on the phenomenon of transformation. History is a process of constant change and transformation. What has been different about this process since the end the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries is its speed, its dynamic and its multilateral consequences. Human beings today as the agents, but also as the objects, of change and constant development, have to preserve their identity by being cleverer and more mobile in this accelerating process if they do not want to be marginalised. The democratisation of information, which has made it possible to participate in this transformation process, suffers from a highly dialectic ambivalence: the possibility to learn more about the structures of the world that surrounds us by having access to more information always carries with it the danger of drowning in a wealth of information due to sensory overload, which limits rather than stimulates one's capacity to act or to experience original sentiments.
In this multitude of unchallengeable universes, the current exhibition invites you to pause, to decelerate and to reflect for a moment.

Works from: Céline Berger, Jongwon Choi, Björn Drenkwitz, Akiro Hellgardt, Daphné Keramidas, Alfons Knogl, Steffi Lindner, Pia Schauenburg, Katharina Urbaniak, Adrián Villa