Marion Traenkle

Born in Berlin and living in Amsterdam, Marion Tränkle is an artist and designer with a practice that crosses the fields of media art, performance, and architecture. Receiving her Engineer Diploma from the TU Berlin, she also holds degrees in Contemporary Dance from the Amsterdam University of the Arts and from the Media Technology program at Leiden University.

Her artistic practice concerns interactive, scenographic, and performative installation, and focuses on live processes of transformation, which are physically performed and staged. In developing her work she often engages in conceptual strategies that involve international cooperation within other artists, designers, and engineers. This includes a recent collaborative work On Track which was developed by the artist collective, In Serial in the context of the European Mobile Lab for Interactive Artists, a project initiated by the Universities of Athens, Lapland and Applied Arts in Vienna.

The ARTI research group of the Amsterdam University of the Arts has supported Tränkle's practice-based research trajectory she conducted at the School of Art/Brunel University London where she obtained her PhD in 2011 with a thesis on Material Agency and Performative Dynamics in the Practices of Media Art.
Throughout her association with ARTI she co-taught the interdisciplinary course “Art as Research” and co-directed the workshop “Dance and Architecture: The Site Specific Body” at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.

Responsive Environments

Tränkle’s research explores the design and materialization processes of responsive environments, specifically conceptualized and developed for performance contexts. The research relates to her own artistic practice of developing performance-installations and aims to support such practice through a cross-disciplinary perspective on and investigation of current design strategies.

In terms of investigating responsive systems - systems that can “act” and “adapt” to establish constantly evolving relationships - her research combines two strands of strategies in order to performatively expose processes of transformation: The artistic investigation of the dynamic, responsive capacities of actual materials and the use of technology that can create forms of interactive experience and expression. Outcomes include the creation of environments and scenarios that “perform” to negotiate tension between the constructed and the evolved, between risk and responsibility, and between performing autonomously or in tandem with human intervention.

Selected works
•    The Pulse of the Wait: Interactive Installation. World Minimal Music festival, Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ, Amsterdam 2011.
•    On Track: Performative Installation. Artist collective In Serial: Linda Dement, Petra Gemeinböck, PRINZGAU/podgorschek, Marion Tränkle. Exhibitions: 2010, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria. 2009, Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts, Katowice, Poland. 2009, Thessaloniki Biennale, State Museum of Contemporary Art.
•    Ani_mate: Performative Installation, Gasthuis Theater Amsterdam 2007.


selected publications

  • Beesley, Philip, Sachiko Hirosue, Jim Ruxton, Marion Tränkle, and Camile Turner (eds.). Responsive Architectures: Subtle Technologies. Waterloo: Riverside Architectural Press, 2006
  • Pieter T'Jonck about the performance Ani_mate. In: T’Jonck, Pieter. “Obsceniteit, Obsessie, Obstructie.” Volume: Tijdschrift over Gasthuis en nieuwe Theatermakers, volume 7 (2007), pp.22-23; pp. 26-33.
  • On Track: A Slippery Mechanic-Robotic Performance. In: Gemeinboeck, Petra, Traenkle, Marion, Dement, Linda, PRINZGAU/podgorschek, and Saunders, Rob. “ON TRACK: A Slippery Mechanic-Robotic Performance,” Leonardo, volume 43, number 5 (2010), pp. 488-89.

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