HausCode 2026

The Inaugural Cycle

HausCode inaugural cycle is centered on the exhibition “For Children. Art Stories since 1968”, which presents artworks conceived for children and approaches childhood as a space to reconsider forms of learning, institutional transformation and the making of art history.

Informed and inspired by the exhibition reinterpreting childhood and exploring how curiosity and experimentation expands and accompanies us beyond these early life years, the three contributions each reflect different perspectives as they engage with systems of learning and play through interactive sound, text-based, and gaming environments. Following the open call and selection process, the projects developed over three months in close exchange with the Haus der Kunst team. Through this process, sharing and connection gradually became central to the first edition.

How do personal memories merge into a space of shared emotion? What happens when a machine is taught to interact in intimate and imperfect ways? And how does physical experience enter digital realm through personal interpretation? Working through emotion, voice, and play as universally understood forms of expression, the three digital projects form the first chapter of a growing entity that will continue to expand over the coming years.

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Contributions 2026

Adaeze Okaro, Instructions We Follow Without Being Asked, 2026

Instructions We Follow Without Being Asked is an interactive digital project that sits at the intersection of memory, identity, and collective experience. It explores instructions, phrases, and lessons absorbed in childhood through repetition, atmosphere, and correction, and how they continue to shape behaviour, values, and our sense of self long after they enter us. The project draws on real responses collected through a public questionnaire, weaving anonymous voices from across cultures and generations into a shared environment of childhood experience. You are invited to contribute your own remembered instructions, allowing the work to remain a living, growing organism that changes with every person who enters it.

“When I began this project I thought I was making something about childhood. I did not realize […] that I was making something about now. The instructions we received as children do not stay in the past. They travel with us. […] Most of us follow them without knowing we still do. That gap between the instruction and the person it made, that is where this work lives.” - Adaeze Okaro

Dive in

Fá Maria, Lullabies for Machines, 2026. Technical implementation by David Lazãr

Lullabies for Machines is a web-based audiovisual project that asks what happens when intimate, profoundly human practices such as lullabies are transformed through computational systems. You are invited to hum or sing into an AI model trained on donated lullabies from different voices, ages, and cultures. The result is not simply the user’s own voice, nor a finished collective song, but a hybrid vocal encounter: one voice passing through the traces of many others, intermediated by AI. 

“A lullaby is usually associated with care, closeness, memory, and reassurance. When this passes through an AI model, it becomes unstable and unfamiliar, but it can still retain traces of tenderness. The project became more focused on that tension: the voice remains personal, but it is also altered by the presence of other voices inside the system.” - Fá Maria

Start singing

Mining Raw Letters (Nell May & Kevin Kuhn), For Children custom School Pixel game level and editor, 2026

School Pixel is a video game built around a font — one drawn from a workshop with 130 children held in New Zealand. Moving through a custom level inspired by the exhibition “For Children. Art Stories since 1968,” you are invited to play navigating a drillbot through narrative worlds in search of Energy Letters. Shifting from player to maker, users build their own worlds with the School Pixel For Children game editor – Erase to carve paths, Paint and Fill landscapes Elements and type words for the drillbot to collect – test play and submit into the evolving online collection of levels for others to try.

“"For Children. Art Stories since 1968" became the custom level inspiration. The School Pixel For Children game editor draws on childhood memories of pixel painting on a Macintosh Plus. Its friendly interface invites world-making.” - Mining Raw Letters

Play School Pixel