In September, students from the Design Art Technology program spent two project weeks conducting research in and around the Diogenes bunker — one of the largest WWII bunkers in the Netherlands. During their fieldwork, they explored and reimagined the space, its history, its sensory experiences, and its possible futures.
The resulting works from these weeks became part of the immersive exhibition Emerging Exits, on view from October 3 to November 2. The final works range from texture-reading machines that disclose the bunker’s history, speculative conversations hacking into the bunker’s original phone lines and a reinterpretation of the aesthetics of modern warfare, to an installation that presents the bunker as a haunted object where projections decode information that still lingers long after the Enigma machine was shut down.
View the works by our students below.
A single ring of light, paired with low-frequency sound, acts as a lens on the Diogenes bunker wall in Arnhem. The choreographed movement of light brings the surface into motion, highlighting a dynamic interplay of moments of construction and deconstruction. Erratic patterns of cracks and repairs emerge like afterimages, raising questions about their origin. They make us speculate on the impact of bombs, or the attempts to (re)build and conceal. The work treats the wall as both witness and archive of these moments. In its simplicity, the circle becomes its own entity, an echo of signals once used in war, and a reminder of what the walls continue to remember. Students: Kee Palenque Lobato, Lukas Dommershausen en Lina Ptushkina.
Unarchived.log is a collection of audio recordings created during the two weeks spent in and around the Diogenes bunker. Each log documents fragments of our experiences, discoveries, and imagined future possibilities that surfaced while working in this unusual space. An unidentifiable voice narrates these logs, capturing everyday observations that are not bound to a single moment in time. They borrow from the bunker’s past lives, reflect on its present, and speculate about its future. Together, they form a new kind of archive. Students: Ying Drubbel, Kimia Mohammadi en Art Dekkers.
This work takes on the feeling of grief surrounding the bunker’s uncertain future. Once a site of wartime transmissions, the bunker is anticipated to soon return to the ownership of the Ministry of Defence. Its new function remains undisclosed but has invited an imagination around its possible military applications that are still wrapped behind secrecy and control. The dead fly recalls the many flies we found lifeless in corners of the bunker, frail bodies that seemed out of place. Set against the sound of drones, the work invites a space for mourning on what it means for the past to repeat itself. Students: Pola Wdowiak, Minji Kim en Uijae Jung.
The project draws on the transmissions once intercepted in the bunker during the Second World War and analyses the relationship between the space, the flow of information, and the surrounding landscape. At the center of the room stands the R4D4R, adapting the design of the original map operated by young women, also known as Blitzmädchen, who lived and worked in the bunker, sharing intelligence and tracking aircraft. This becomes a point of departure for imagining how airplanes might have moved and their hypothetical trajectories. Modified ventilators escalate this setting, simulating the lights and sounds of an approaching aircraft. These elements reimagine an environment that links back to the bunker’s history and the sensation of being surrounded, or almost trapped, within an excess of information. Students: Alessandra Schipa, Jurre Bakker en Sep s Van Der Spiegel.
Phasing in and out in the land and history, the mask of the Diogenes Bunker vanishes and reveals itself as material witness of past tales and future stories. The meaning and function of the bunker is constantly reconstructed and deciphered in a loop, receiving, transferring and archiving information, but how does the bunker embody this morphological shift? What lies within its imprinted cold concrete? What has remained stuck, hidden, embedded and what shimmers still decoded? The two-channel audio-visual installation Along Dotted Lines invites the audience to explore and imagine the bunkers narration by listing to its speculative soundscape and emerging themselves into the haunted layers of the bunker of the present. Students: Sjoerd Willemsen, Inessa Perk en Vi Reichel.
This project explores the movement of four sound data streams, each with different characteristics, within a bunker-shaped map. Each sound follows its own speed and path, circulating through four zones that function as interpretation, storage, decision, and encryption. As the sounds pass through these zones, their properties are constantly changing, reshaping the overall rhythm and harmony of the system. Each sound eventually exits the map at a different moment, revealing an organic pattern shaped by temporal differences and interactions within the system. Through this process, the work seeks to visualise and sonify the data flow that once existed inside the bunker — sometimes calm, yet at other times chaotic and turbulent. Students: Linus Berkers, Minoo Chang en Greace Yu.
This project reflects on the constant sense of danger and anticipation that once shaped life and work inside the Diogenes bunker in Arnhem. The installation reconstructs an ordinary office once used by Blitzmädel — the women who worked inside the concrete structure, listening for signs of threat in the air. When someone enters the room, an alarm goes off. Once the chair is taken, the sound falls silent. Impending is a sensorial installation that uses motion tracking, DMX lighting, sound, and vibration to evoke this feeling. The soundscape merges field recordings from the bunker with fragments from Blitzmädels an die Front (1958), while subtle vibrations in the desk extend tension into the body, turning anxiety into a physical experience. The work captures the feeling that fear is near, that something is about to happen, yet it cannot be named. It revives the charged atmosphere that once filled this place, when the Blitzmädel listened and waited. Students: Yoran Span, Nazanin Ghalandari en Meike Pols.
Our work is an archive of traces and stories of the bunker's history that may soon disappear as the site is speculated to take on its military role once again. The installation combines projections of the bunker's textures and fragments with a time capsule that invites visitors to trace and preserve their own moment of visiting the monumental site before it once again is indefinitely closed to the public. While imagery of textures flows across one of the walls, the other re-processes your own movement and presence in the bunker. Students: Stanislav Titanov, Marijn Schraal, Hyebin Park, Lucía Siles Valiente and Burçak Kaptan.