This talk will take the form of guided tour through the recent exhibition Metamorphosis or Confrontation, the first solo museum exhibition of Tobias Klein. The exhibition traces Klein’s modi operandi – an operational synthesis between digital and physical materials and tools as poetic (poïesis) and technical (technê) expressions as a new hybrid practice model.

The exhibition is structured in 4 distinct spaces that articulate a new practice model that strictly opposes a traditional dualistic separation of digital workflows and traditional making and material understanding. Instead, the talk will highlight three operational methods to define a practice model able to overcome the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century schism of intellectual from manual labour, as well as the nineteenth-century gulf between automatic mechanisation and poetic creation.

The first articulates the transfer of physical traces into digital environments and reversely fitting digital objects into the narratives and values of cultural artefacts. This model will be extensively discussed in the first space of the exhibition – BONES.

Antithetical to the first method, transformation formulates an emancipation of transferred data through materialising transformations in constructed cultural contexts and is articulated in the second and third space MASKS and MUTATIONS.

The exhibition – an materialised echo of Klein’s writings on Digital Craftsmanship is able to synthesise the previous dialectics, articulating the notion of Digital Craftsmanship in the form of a collaborative practice in which methods of transfer and transformation collapse into a dialogue between practitioners from craft, science and engineering, enabling the emergence of new hybrid objects, materials, tools and associated values and narratives – all shown in the final space of the exhibition – FORCES.