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Welcome to the Bauhaus 2023 exhibition. This year, around 73 Master students took part in what has become one of the most anticipated events of the academic year. Across 14 projects, students explored a wide range of communication theories, from Shannon and Lasswell to the Palo Alto school, applying them to subjects as varied as the Apollo 11 mission, the Israel-Palestine media war, the COVID-19 infodemic, and the sinking of the Titanic. The results, as you will see, are as creative as they are analytically rigorous. A selection of projects is presented below, with the remaining exhibits available in the slideshow at the bottom of the page.
Enjoy Echoes in the Waves:
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This carefully researched exhibition consisted of handcrafted cardboard ship models built and painted by the students, placed on a simulated Atlantic Ocean scene complete with paper icebergs, and displayed alongside a recreated period newspaper front page and a Morse code reference chart made available to visitors. The entire exhibition, from the ship models to the press section, was conceived and constructed by the students specifically for this Bauhaus exhibition. The question raised by this exhibition is: could the sinking of the Titanic have been avoided if communication between the ships had functioned correctly? Using as backdrop the night of 14 to 15 April 1912, and leveraging Shannon's communication model and in particular his conception of noise and entropy, the students showed how a chain of failed, distorted and undelivered messages between the Titanic and the surrounding ships progressively sealed the fate of over 1,500 passengers.
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Project Palestine: Media Propaganda
and the War of Information
The media war is at the heart of the Israel-Palestine issue.
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A group of students chose to examine this conflict through the lens of two communication theories, propaganda and the double-bind theory of the Palo Alto School, drawing a comparative study between Nazi propaganda of the interwar period and the media strategies at play in the current conflict. Through an interactive exhibition combining caricatures, a quiz and a painting activity, the students invited their audience to question the information they had been exposed to and the position taken by Western media and politicians.
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London Under Attack
How to survive the Blitz - thanks to the cybernetic theory of communication.
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The Blitz remains one of the most intense and defining moments of the Second World War, when London endured relentless aerial attacks night after night. But beyond the destruction and resilience, this period also highlights something less obvious: the power of communication. This student explores how Cybernetics, particularly the principle of feedback, can help us understand how information, decisions, and reactions shaped survival during the Blitz. By combining historical context with interactive student work, they uncover how communication systems, both human and technological, played a crucial role in anticipating threats, coordinating responses, and ultimately protecting lives.
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Apollo 11
From the Moon to the Living Room
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On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the Moon, and approximately 650 million viewers around the world watched it happen live on television. But how exactly did those images travel from the lunar surface to living rooms across the globe? It is this question that a group of students chose to explore through Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, tracing the journey of the Apollo 11 images step by step from their encoding on the Moon, through the challenges of noise and limited bandwidth, to their reception and broadcast on Earth.
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InfoCalypse
When Information Becomes a Virus
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The COVID-19 pandemic generated an overwhelming flow of information, including false information, that the World Health Organisation identified as an "infodemic." Among the many conspiracy theories that circulated during this period, one claimed that 5G technology was directly responsible for the spread of the virus, despite having no scientific basis. It is within this context that a group of students chose to explore the phenomenon of disinformation through two communication theories: propaganda and the hypodermic needle theory of Harold Lasswell. By comparing the spread of false information to the propagation of a virus in the human body, their project InfoCalypse maps the cycle of disinformation from its creation to its impact and points towards a remedy.
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Slideshow of the other exhibits
