Dark Matter University (DMU) is a counter-institutional network of educators, researchers, and practitioners dedicated to anti-racist design education and outcomes, based in Turtle Island (United States and Canada) with a growing international membership. DMUxLisbon is both a living document and a real-time modeling of counter-institutionality within the Triennial through a collective “constellation” of content co-generated by the network’s many members. This constellation is both a showcasing of DMU’s work and methods, and a manifestation of our multiple, situated identities and narratives. Taken as a whole, we propose this real-time constellation is itself a new canon.

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DMUxLisbon uses a site-specific installation of print and digital elements, which form constellations of collective knowledge, both embedded within and layered across the Canons gallery and beyond the museum walls themselves. In leveraging the spatial attributes and cultural relations of the Constellation over the Canon, DMUxLisbon models DMU's ethos of both decentering and infiltrating western institutional spaces and (re)orienting to immense legacies of knowledge systems across our diasporas, toward new forms of collective knowledge production, practice, and community. The elements within these constellations—representing a wide range of practitioners, student work, co-written pedagogy, co-authored texts, and so forth—constitute a live snapshot of the ever-evolving collective knowledge of DMU’s network. Within the time and space of the exhibition, DMU will facilitate both virtual and in-person workshops with communities in Lisbon to further co-create these constellations of architectural knowledge, and to see what futures they might take us to, together.

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ArchiTAG and Augmented Architecture produced an AR mobile device application: ‘DMU Constellation’ that can be used in conjunction with the physical installation or independently. This immersive App provides more information about the DMU network, how projects are connected and includes more in-depth information about select projects. In addition to the AR exhibition, the iOs & Android App was also used as a device to assist in the installation setup process, providing a digital map showing each pixel’s placement.

View project summary on Vimeo here