---
narrator: Florian Dombois
subject: Kite flying
facilitator: Johannes Bennke
date: 2026-03-16
approved: 2026-03-18
summary: "An artist uses wind as a medium for choreographing more-than-human relations through kite flying and sailing."
location: "Zurich, Switzerland"
headshot: "florian_dombois.png"
topics: [art, ecology, music, science]
links:
  - text: "World Wide Winde"
    url: "https://worldwidewind.org/"
  - text: "Laboratorio Laguna"
    url: "https://laboratoriolaguna.net/"
---

*How would you like to introduce yourself?*

My name is Florian Dombois. I was born in West Berlin in 1966. I work as an artist and am a professor of transdisciplinarity in the arts and sciences at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). I have developed an artistic practice that often operates at the intersection of art and science.


*Could you outline your life and career---where you started and where you are today?*

I've only been exhibiting as an artist since 1999 or 2000. I studied geophysics and philosophy, but I grew up in the arts---I think that's evident in my understanding of art. For me, the 1970s and early 1980s were formative, perhaps even the late 1960s, if you want to call that a subcutaneous perception. I grew up in a strong artistic context: Documenta, the Berlin Academy of Arts. There was a lot of Fluxus, a lot of happenings. As a child, I witnessed many happenings and often found them relatively boring. Months or years later, I'd have moments of realization where I'd think: "That was just like a happening." There was something of a delay, and that really occupied my mind.

I'm primarily interested in art that alters our perception of reality. In my work, I'm not really interested in creating a situation where an artifact stands in the center and everyone says, "That's art." I'm much more interested in the moment of a collective art experience, because the viewer contributes at least as much to it. I'm a proponent of the "eye of the beholder"---just as much emerges from this process in the viewer's eye.

For the record, it's perhaps important to note that the happenings had scores and were often score-based. That had a profound influence on me. When you're so deeply immersed in art, as an artist you often want to distance yourself from where you come from. I then studied geophysics in 1986 because I couldn't really identify with the contemporary art scene at the time---there was a sort of neoconservative movement back then, where the "young wild ones" wanted to return to painting and the classical media. But I had already strongly experienced that anything can be art and that art is more of an experience than an artifact. I probably felt out of sync with my generation back then.

In geophysics, I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't my world either. I was very interested in tectonics and reading the landscape as a sculpture shaped by geological forces. Math didn't hold me back---but the way scientific research is then articulated, through publications and so on, I found that totally problematic. And then there was something else important: Chernobyl happened in the third week of my studies. We immediately measured the radioactivity of the moss on the edge of the roof in the physics building at TU Berlin. It was relatively low at first because the fallout hadn't quite arrived yet, but after a week or two, the first rain fell---then the Geiger counter went crazy.

This mix---on the one hand, the natural sciences, which are shaped by extractivism and colonialism and have many problems in their understanding of nature, and on the other hand, the experience of ecological problems---created this cocktail that I tried to make sense of for myself. In the 1990s, I earned my doctorate in cultural studies because that was the only place where one could address this. My geophysics professor found the thesis---it was titled "What Is an Earthquake?"---not uninteresting, but he couldn't supervise it. I then went to Hartmut Böhme and was able to reflect on this within cultural studies from 1994 to 1998.

After that, I fell into a pretty problematic rut because there were no jobs for a cultural studies scholar who had studied geophysics and wanted to become an artist. I then worked in a virtual reality group at the Society for Mathematics and Data Processing (GMD) in Bonn. From there, I went to the art academy in Bern in 2003 and established the transdisciplinary field---I called it by the letter Y, which separates and brings together---under the name "Y-Art as Research."

Even though the journey was long, I kept coming back to the question: How can research be interesting as a concept for the arts? Protocols play a role here---even though I've only really been using the term for two years. There are so many roots coming together there.


*You started working with wind about thirteen years ago and built a wind tunnel at ZHdK. How did this project come about?*

There are two reasons. In Bern, I was so successful in research and teaching that I gradually slipped into a management position---but then I wanted to return to my own artistic practice and research. I didn't want to bring my artistic practice---which at the time still revolved around earthquakes and the sonification of seismic data---to the new university in Zurich; I wanted to separate it from that. As a child, I sailed and find wind incredibly interesting---the move to ZHdK was a reason to start something new.

Shortly before I came to Zurich, I was an artist-in-residence at MIT. There I found the Wright Brothers' wind tunnel and went inside. There are a thousand anecdotes---about Alexander Calder's studio model and all sorts of strange connections. I found this machine fascinating and thought, "I could use this."

At the same time, I knew that ZHdK was moving into the Toni Areal---a building that wasn't supposed to have any lab spaces for research; we were all supposed to work at desks. But I really wanted to have my own space, because I believe that spaces also say something, and it's not just us in the spaces. The wind tunnel takes up a lot of space; it's so big that you can't put it away, and at the same time, it's empty inside. So I created something like a room within a room---a claim to space. With that, I began to engage with the university and to explore and reveal its dynamics. With that one project, which was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), they couldn't drive me out. To this day, this wind tunnel has no official permit to remain.

I then developed the tunnel into a transdisciplinary meeting place---perhaps it even has protocol dimensions; we could talk more about that. At the same time, I increasingly realized that wind is a great medium for thought. My fascination with the ephemeral, with situations and happenings, connects well with the wind---as an invisible, imaginary, and yet very real medium.


*You're now leading the research project "Worldwide Wind." What's it about?*

The wind tunnel is, of course, the controlled form of wind. "Worldwide Wind" is about so-called triple instruments. I've developed kites that fly on piano strings. In Asia, there's a long tradition of mounting instruments openness kites---either buzzers or whistles. When I learned this, I thought: "How can I bring the sound from the sky down to earth?" I initially wanted to solve this with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, until it dawned on me: The string itself can serve as a medium. If you replace it with a piano string, the whole thing becomes a giant instrument---like a giant electric guitar with a thirty-meter string.

The project is about exploring these instruments musically and artistically on the one hand: What are their sonic possibilities? What do the materials do---which kites, which pipes, which wires? On the other hand, you can't give concerts anymore. We're back to happenings---you can't say, "We're playing from 3 to 5 p.m." The wind almost always plays tricks on you; you have to listen. I haven't given up on the wind tunnel, but I now have two ways of dealing with the wind: the natural one, where I have to fully engage with it and enter into a dialogue, and the controlled one.

When you can no longer give concerts, you need more time---you always have to plan for three to five hours. People come, and the relationship with the audience changes. We collaborate with people from the fields of new music, pop music, and sound art. This is the first project funded by the SNSF in which purely artistic research interests are being realized. We only have artists on the payroll. I wanted to prove once and for all that this is possible.


*How did you come to the topic of protocols, and what terms did you use previously for your research practice?*

I can pinpoint pretty precisely when the term became so significant for me. I'm part of the ELIA Working Group for Artistic Research. Two years ago, Glenn Loughran---brought texts by Walter Benjamin and Tyson Lewis on anti-fascist pedagogy to the group in response to the 2024 U.S. elections. These texts dealt with the concepts of constellation and protocol. We worked through these texts and then created an online series for the community: How can collective negotiation take place without having to reach a consensus? How can we still interact with one another despite our differences? In the process, I began to engage with the protocols and increasingly realized that this harmonizes perfectly with my other work.

As is so often the case: you don't start with the concepts, but only realize later which ones help you. Much of my artistic work is score-based. I've done happenings and written scores. My friend Isabel Mundry always said, "What you're doing there are actually scores---you're like a composer." And what does a composer do? He creates a kind of protocol.

The second track: I've written research proposals---at first I didn't like doing that, but eventually I realized what it enables. The kite project was a huge breakthrough for me. To explain to a scientific community why it needs to fund research in the arts, I needed two arguments. First: Within the sciences, there are so many different understandings of research that they can't even agree among themselves---but the peer community is always cited as the common denominator. Transportation scientists have their peers in transportation science, philosophers in philosophy---and we in the arts have our peers too. You have to take them seriously.

Second: The interesting thing about art is that it doesn't know what the outcome will be. We don't solve problems---on the contrary, we tend to create them. How can I promise a funding agency, which is itself under public pressure, what the outcome will be, without simultaneously compromising my artistic freedom? If I define the goal, I lose the point of art. So I said: Instead of defining the goal, I'll approach it through the starting point, the direction, and a rehearsal schedule. I create a very strict rehearsal schedule. There are models for this---from the school of Bertolt Brecht, then Heiner Müller and Christoph Schlingensief---who no longer staged plays but understood the rehearsal period as a time for collective development. At some point the curtain goes up; there is a result.

I structured the proposal exactly the same way and discovered in the process that the concept of the "protocol" is incredibly helpful. I haven't named it like that in the proposal, but I'm going to make extensive use of it in the final publication. The protocol allows me to collaborate with other artists and orchestrate a temporary collective. I choreograph gatherings. The art market functions largely through the product, not through the process of making it---which is why I'm so interested in research. Without knowing what the outcome will be, I can bring people together, guide them into constellations, and release energy.

Research is, to quote Thomas Kuhn, "a process driven from behind." There is a certain rigor, a certain seriousness to it. So instead of formulating a thesis, I said: We're publishing, we have outstanding people, and we have a rehearsal schedule that is so precise that no one questions whether we're worth the money. The corresponding staff positions are synchronized with the rehearsal schedule.


*Now that you're working with the concept of "protocol"---what associations does that trigger in retrospect?*

As I just said: I'm an artist who doesn't so much sit in the studio and produce something just to show it to the public. Of course, there are interesting positions like Bruce Nauman's, who says: Everything produced in the studio becomes art---and then goes to the museum. I don't operate according to that logic. I'm also spending less and less time in museums with exhibitions. Over the years, I've always opened windows in museums---that connection to the outside world was important to me because I found that exhibition space increasingly problematic. I've increasingly moved toward generating the energy that art means to me: What must one do for art to emerge as an experience? I'm not an actor or singer who stages this as a play---I create situations in which I hope things will turn out well.

Kite flying is a central practice: Every first Wednesday of the month, we drive to the Engadin, where the wind is particularly good, and fly. Then you see what the wind brings. People come by---it's public, that's the great thing. The kites force me into public space. Here my "studio" has no walls, because otherwise there would be no wind. The wind is the friend of this openness, of the ephemeral, of moments of serendipity.

Then there's repetition. It's artistically interesting because modernism neglected it---due to its constant innovation and avant-gardism, there's no repetition there. Incidentally, that's also a reason why the wind tunnel interested me: in the early avant-garde, there was great enthusiasm for wind, storms, and wind tunnels. The Futurists were interested in machines, bullets, and fast cars---visual imagery from the wind tunnel played a major role. Since I have a problem with these early avant-garde movements because they are so machismo-driven, I built the wind tunnel to be extra slow. The idea: You don't overcome modernity by forgetting it, but by repeating it, incorporating a circular moment, and slowing it down in the process---there's something to that; at best, it's therapeutic, but at the very least, cathartic.


*So that means introducing a kind of difference into the repetition?*

Among other things. To create a detour, away from this macho "higher, faster, further" logic.


*What's the story behind the "Laboratorio Laguna" project in Venice, where you're also working with wind and sailboats?*

In 2017, I was invited to present at the Research Pavilion in Venice. Since everyone always brings everything to Venice and sets up art there, I staged the opposite. Since it was a research pavilion, I didn't have to open with the finished work---I could close with the finished work. I relocated the process to Venice, sailed out into the lagoon every day in a sailboat, and collected materials from the many abandoned islands. I brought that back to the exhibition space and built a wind tunnel there---a wind sculpture made from these materials. In the process, I discovered that the lagoon is an incredibly interesting space, especially in contrast to the incredibly crowded Venice.

In 2018, I became involved in artistic PhD programs and realized that this could be a good fit. Through our friendship with Andrea Cortoni and Giulia Mazzorin from Biennale Urbana, who know the lagoon very well, and with Berit Seidel from the U5 collective---who have been making art collectively for ten years and have a great deal of experience with it, and for whom collective work does not proceed consensually---the four of us then said: "We're going to build a PhD academy." We quickly realized that it wasn't worth founding a new institution, so instead we entered into an agreement with the University of the Arts Berlin, Uni Arts Helsinki, the University of Art and Design Linz, and the ZHdK Zurich. Each university sends three doctoral students to Venice for three weeks.

We've set up a program there. In the "Bohemian Pavilion"---a warehouse with very raw walls and rooms where you sleep in pairs or trios---there's minimal infrastructure. The building has a water door leading to a canal; the boats are stored inside. We sail into the lagoon in small dinghies---two or three people per boat. The lagoon is very shallow everywhere. It's about the relationship between inside and outside, between land and water---all these amphibious ambivalences.

The wind plays a major role because, alongside the tide, it is the central force. The tide is regular: in, out, in, out. The wind is irregular. The sailboat is an ingenious concept because it uses two competing forces to get anywhere---thanks to the centerboard and the sail. And it's very much about acting collectively. I try to make it clear to the doctoral students that the sailboat is in itself a living metaphor. On such a small boat, you sail in pairs or trios, and that introduces you to an art that unfolds in dialogue with others: When I move, you have to move too. When traveling with several boats, constellations of distance, proximity, and radio contact form---as well as everything that happens in the chats. Digitalization plays a central role. We work with these various simultaneities, and we say: Venice is not our subject, but our method. It is not the subject that brings us together, but a method.


*So one could speak of a kind of Venice protocol?*

Yes, indeed, one could. We published a Wind Tunnel Bulletin on Laboratorio Laguna, in which I tried to represent our concepts in "clocks." There's a clock---actually a pie chart---showing how many days we spend on what. Or there's a 24-hour clock where we say: Typical PhD working hours might be nine to one and three to eight. But since we cook together, eat together, and sleep together in the same room, we do 24-hour PhDs. For artists, sleeping, dreaming, and doing the dishes are also productive times.


*There's also a dream log in this bulletin.*

Exactly---a log in the sense of a written record. Berit always asked us to share our dreams. She would come to everyone in the morning and ask, "What did you dream about last night?" and write it down. We wove that into the notebook. These clocks and calendars are a kind of visual log---forms of group synchronization, just like a church clock works.


*Quasi-snapshots of ebb and flow, of the rhythm of the day and the lunar rhythm?*

Exactly. Logs can be independent of time and place, but they can also be dependent on time or place. With the kite project, I started to take a different interest in repetition and realized what it can do. I'm not really the type of person who always does the same thing---but now I was forced to do so and realized how valuable it is. In Venice, the tides structure everyday life---it's a striking rhythm. Tourists don't notice it at all, but the whole city lives by this pulse. Our clocks and calendars are forms of synchronization.

I use protocols as a means of synchronizing people---whether they're artists, audiences, or scientists. The disciplinary differences don't interest me that much in this context.

Another brief digression that's important: The wind tunnel has an open test section. In the 1990s, I was involved in what was then emerging as Art & Science. The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn produced a major series on various topics, and I noticed how artists and scientists told each other about all the amazing things they were doing---but they didn't really engage with one another; there was no real exchange at all. I realized: I don't have to have them tell me something head-on, but rather let them look at something invisible so that they bring their imagination into play. When you look at the wind, everyone knows it's there---but everyone describes something different that they see, because there's nothing visible there. That means: It's an orchestration of imagination, a choreography of the imaginary.

When you're flying a kite, you look up at the sky---there's a ton going on---and the kite shows you that there's a whole lot there---but you don't see any of it. You have to construct everything in your head. The protocols help me synchronize people, bring them together, and give them time with one another. I call this "splicing"---a weaving together in time. Then it falls apart again. In these phases, when you're so interwoven, something is needed---and for me, it's almost completely irrelevant what you're talking about. I think much more about: "Does it have a good rhythm?" Is the coffee break right? Is there the right food to eat? I find that people already bring so much of what's needed to spend a good time together. It's about unleashing that, bringing it into play---not harmonizing, but guiding it into constellations. Dissent is, of course, much harder to choreograph than consensus. But protocols allow for both.


*We now have a---let's call it provisional---definition: protocols as the synchronization of people. The Protocol Oral History Project uses the definition "patterns of interaction." Now I'd be interested to know if your definition can be extended to include the non-human. In sailing, after all, there's essentially a synchronization not only among people but also with those forces they cannot control: the forces of the wind, geothermal forces, the forces of light and darkness, planetary or cosmic forces---and then social forces. How would you broaden this definition?*

You can explain protocols to people, and that's why they can adhere to them. The forces you're talking about don't adhere to them. In that sense, protocols are directed at human actors---but as you correctly sensed, I am of course very interested in non-human actors, forces, and agents. That's why I've stepped out of the wind tunnel---I want to synchronize with the environment. The White Cube decouples itself from reality, and I think that's wrong.

At Laboratorio Laguna, the tide serves as a recurring pattern. For a while, we even used to say, "Let's meet in ten centimeters" instead of ten minutes---that is, when the tide has come back in. Our monthly meetings always take place during the waxing crescent moon. I'm currently working on a record where I use the summer solstice, winter solstice, and the two equinoxes as reference points. These are forces that naturally influence the weather as well---not in a causal relationship, but they are not without effect. I believe that protocols can connect us with non-human actors.


*What kinds of resistance come to mind that prevent the protocols from the outside or the inside---that sabotage their implementation?*

When working with artists---and I'm no exception---if someone tells me what to do, I naturally won't do it. What I find interesting is that a score tells me what to do. For me, the protocol is, in some ways, a more abstract dimension because it governs the conditions under which I enter into a negotiation. I actually find that more interesting.

I experience this with kite flying, too. When we arrive, we unpack and set up, and I actually never give an introduction about what's going to happen. A colleague once said, "Why don't you explain what's going to happen and when it starts?" And I replied, "Because I don't want to say: You have to do this." The kites are like a constructed protocol---they establish certain relationships. You look up, you have something in your hand that pulls. You have a direction that you might not otherwise sense if you didn't have the kites in your hand. You're building, so to speak, a social choreography around an artifact---and not around a rule. The kites and the entire setup are implicit, non-verbal protocols.


*That means there's a structure---a dispositif, an arrangement that's set up. You have things under control, like unpacking the kites. But as soon as they're released, the uncontrollable comes into play.*

Exactly. Then they settle in---just as the kites all align themselves with the wind, something social happens as well. I don't need a central director. I can prepare it and then let it run its course.


*Earlier, you referred to the German theater tradition of Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, and Christoph Schlingensief. You used terms like "scores" and "partiture"---both concepts from art history or art itself. Now comes the term "protocol," which originates from administration. In which tradition do you see your work, and from which are you turning away?*

What interests me in artistic creation is what I cannot control. For me, the most beautiful thing is when something emerges that I didn't know or didn't intend---the surprise. I increasingly have a sense of time like foam: time is constantly emerging; it is not simply an arrow I must follow, but spreads out before me like foam. And I can move within this beautiful space of foam and arrange possibilities---this is how I tend to work, rather than setting something up to which everyone reacts.

I am therefore not entirely in the Brechtian tradition, because I do not work with a stage in the strict sense. There is no defining line in my work. The wind negates all walls---and then there is no longer a clear transition. This is a continuation of various traditions of the twentieth century. I try, as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira so beautifully puts it, to practice "Hospicing Modernity"---to help modernity pass away, because it truly has many problematic moments. Keyword: colonialism. How do we get out of this? The ephemeral, the processual, the collective---these are interesting movements that have roots, for example, in Brecht, who created his theater in the 1920s and 1930s with a group. The tradition lies in Fluxus and in the parts of the visual arts that are unsuitable for the art market---performance art.

Through my studies in geophysics, I lost my fear of bureaucracy and science and discovered them as a space for me to explore. One might perhaps speak of a "Gaia Bureaucratia," similar to a "Gaia Scientia." In play, there are also rules so that room for maneuver becomes possible---and playing can also mean overcoming or breaking the rules. Protocols don't have to be taken too seriously either. Bureaucracy is a disaster when it confronts you like "The Captain of Köpenick." But it has also made a lot possible: transparency and protection against arbitrariness. I believe that despite all criticism of bureaucracy, formalization doesn't necessarily have to be an obstacle. I try to use protocols as a means of enabling reality---as a loss of control.

In fact, the phrase "loss of control" deserves a longer discussion: What do control and loss of control mean in relation to the word "protocol"? I'm interested in the aspect of loss of control. But it's like with a sailboat: you need the sail. With the sail, you don't control the wind, but use it. With the centerboard, you don't control the current, but use it---and you even use the competition between the two, because they can't agree, and then you can go wherever you want.

Maneuvers have to be announced somehow. David Graeber has discussed such things in his books on bureaucracy and piracy. It's about, for example, the case of mutiny: afterward, the pirates have to agree on who commands the ship---someone has to say, "Turn now." In his interpretation, this is how the Enlightenment was invented. A humorous book.


*This raises the question with which I'd also like to conclude: How are protocols adopted? How do you get others to adopt protocols? You mentioned earlier the possibility of conceiving the protocol from the artifact, because it entails certain affordances that one must act upon, and this engages with a milieu that is subject to a loss of control.*

There is an important element of fascination: The kites are both site-specific and nomadic at the same time. They can go anywhere, and when they're there, they're completely specific to that location. Then there's a second thing we haven't addressed yet: We have a website with a calendar listing the times and locations where we fly. And we manage a small chat group---about sixty to seventy people whom we notify when we're live-streaming our sounds. That's also a form of synchronization.

Because we do this every month, it creates an openness: I don't have to make exact plans for a specific time. It works more like this: someone says, "I'm coming"---and then, "Actually, I can't make it"---and that's not a problem at all. Then they just say, "I'll come next month." I see this all the time with people who say they'll come three times before they actually show up. The repetition helps. Sometimes there are just the two of us---that's the basic setup, so to speak. But since many walkers pass by, we're rarely truly alone. In very bad weather, we're sometimes alone, but otherwise there can be twenty to thirty people at once. It has an open structure---and that's made possible by the protocols.

Now we might turn to another aspect we haven't yet addressed: the final publication. All experiences are formulated in the form of a protocol. Artistic research, as I understand it, is a contribution to the arts. How can I pass on my experiences to you as an artist---and do so in a way that doesn't close everything off by saying, "Now make the same kite," leaving you with practically no artistic freedom! But rather in a way that allows you to do it yourself and find your own form.

The recipe is, of course, an obvious choice---it's not entirely unrelated to the protocol---but I don't want the recipe either, because the point is not to reduce imagination, which is what the recipe tends to do. A step more abstract: We describe the materials, how to come together, what kinds of kites there are, and create a mix of photos and descriptions---fact sheets about the things we've made, purely documentary. Then we open up the space through semi-poetic protocols: "Invite all your friends at the same time"---that sort of thing. Protocols that show they can tolerate deviations and still be exemplary. Exemplary is, after all, nothing other than site-specific.
