Kai Franz

Kai Franz is an artist and professor born in Cologne, Germany and based in Rhode Island. His cross-disciplinary practice—an evolving constellation of architecture, sculpture, computation, ritual, performance, and land-based inquiry—might be thought of as Arte Povera à la Digitalis: materially humble, conceptually expansive, and deeply attuned to the fluid dialogue between human and non-human making.

Franz holds architecture degrees from RWTH Aachen and ETH Zurich, where he began integrating digital culture and material agency. His early career included work at Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and New York. Pivoting toward a more experimental practice, he became a Fulbright Fellow at RISD and later earned his MArch from Princeton University, where he was awarded the KPF Traveling Fellowship and numerous prizes for his degree thesis Low-Res Architecture. From 2013–14, he was artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.

His project Plopper (2011–ongoing) utilizes a self-built sand-and-resin deposition machine to explore post-digital materiality through chance, entropy, and co-creation with non-human forces. Recent iterations of his practice have expanded through a deepening engagement with Indigenous philosophy, particularly during field research in the American Southwest. These experiences have led Franz to incorporate site-responsiveness, ritual, and the ethics of listening into his process—asking what it means to make alongside, not upon, the land.

Costume-making and performance, grounded in the carnivalesque heritage of his Cologne roots and informed by shamanistic modes of transformation, have become vital extensions of his artistic practice, opening the sculptural and conceptual work and blurring the relationship of art/life. These elements form a language of embodiment that interacts with the sculptural, the machinic, and the ecological, creating moments of collective resonance in spaces ranging from the desert to the classroom.

Franz’s work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, including in solo shows at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery. His publication Serial Nature (Edition Solitude) reflects on his practice in conversation with theorists across art, architecture, and media studies.

Franz lives in Pawtucket, RI with his family. He continues to explore making as a mode of relation and ritual—an act of being present within a cosmos of shared agency and becoming.