Michael Heidt

Michael Heidt is an affiliated researcher at GeDIS. He graduated in computer-science from Philipps University of Marburg with a thesis on self-organising cloud systems. Michael's current research focus is interactive systems: He has built interactice artefacts for deployment in cultural environments such as museums, at public events, in gallery spaces, and other sites of cultural communication. Michael is especially interested in how to embed practices of computing and code-making into interdisciplinary networks of cooperation within the field of culture.

To this end, he developed a methodology for integrating elements of practice-based research into processes of interdisciplinary artefact construction.

An ongoing focus of Michael's research is complexity, which he has applied as intellectual lens informing research engagements with biological systems, interaction systems, and distributed systems. As part of this pursuit, Michael constructed the peer-to-peer self-organising middleware system Omnivore, the machine learning system TREPP for appraisal of restriction enzymes at Max-Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, and the rapid-prototyping HCI-middleware /LOOPHOLE/.

Michael was a visiting Scholar at Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts and Technology, is an alumnus of German Academic Scholarship Foundation and of DFG's research training group crossWorlds.

As part of an ongoing research cooperation with GeDIS, Michael develops an account of the epistemological function of interdisciplinary practices of artefact construction. Construing differences as assets, he describes interdisciplinary networks of cooperation as material precondition for the formation of situated knowledges.

Michael has a soft spot for ultra-concise object-functional code, philosophies of difference, and extra-spicy thai food. You can usually find him writing code, buried within a pile of makeshift devices, scruffy books, and edamame pods.