March 9, 2011, 19.00: Lecture Olia Lialina
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Olia Lialina, Forever in the 90s Presentation on Rotterdam’s cybercafés / belhuizen and related ‘low cultures’ [...]
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Conference: Internationalization of Art Education
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On March 14 and 15 2011, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University will organise an [...]
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Conference Imagine an Audience – day 2
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Imagine an Audience Day 2, 01022011, a semi-live report The second day focuses more [...]
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Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina is the new fellow in the research programme Communication in a Digital Age of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy. From October 2010 to early 2011, she will complete a comparative study of the popular media culture in the telecafés and small Internet access shops of Rotterdam, Stuttgart and Moscow. Her research fellowship is a collaboration with the Goethe Institute Netherlands which hosts her as an artist in residence.

Olia Lialina, born in 1971 in Moscow, is a pioneer of net.art, among others with her site teleportacia.org. Since 1999, she lives in Stuttgart, Germany where she is a professor in the Pathway New Media of Merz Akademie, a design and art school. Her most recent research concerns what she calls the “vernacular web” and Digital Folklore. Her project for the Piet Zwart Institute will continue this research and develop it more specifically for the context of the multicultural city of Rotterdam.

As part of fellowship, Olia will give a “Digital Folklore Workshop” at the Goethe Institute Rotterdam and work with both Bachelor and Networked Media Master students of the Willem de Kooning Academy and its Piet Zwart Institute. Her geust teaching will result in a “speed show” of student work at a Rotterdam-based telecafé.




Staff

  • Florian Cramer, lector (research professor) and head of the research project, J.J.F.Cramer [at] hr.nl
  • Eva Visser, project coordinator, VisEv [at] hr.nl

Associated staff (kenniskring) researchers

  • Deanna Herst, Ph.D. researcher on Authorship. Design and Space of Participation
  • Aymeric Mansoux, Ph.D. researcher on Distributed development and open source practices applied to computer-assisted design and art
  • Kim de Groot, staff researcher, project Visual Research
  • Simon Pummell, associated researcher, project Exploring the Interaction of Code & Hand through the Creation of Figure Drawings Extended in Time

Research project (’lectoraat’): Communication in a Digital Age

Communication in a Digital Age is a four-year research programme financed by the Stichting Kennisontwikkeling (SKO) and Rooterdam University.

The project researches the future of communication design in the light of radical changes in the technology and common use of media: What, for example, are the implications of the web taking over papers as primary news media, and Internet video sharing becoming the major audiovisual medium? What does it conversely mean that print has become the long-term medium of electronic documents? How does this affect the work and education of designers? Still the research project is not exclusively about ‘new media’, but broadly covers media media and audiovisual, graphic and editorial design, and advertising. Rather than reinforcing these boundaries and differentiations, we are questioning conventional divides. Key points of departure for the project are:

  1. The blurring difference between personal communication and mass media – from phones as audiovisual production devices to personalised print-on-demand, to scratch only the surface;
  2. The blurring difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media.

Structure and activities research fellowships
Every year, we invite two visiting researchers, each for a period of five months. These fellows typically have professional backgrounds in publishing and communication design, and research new developments within their work field:

All research of our fellows will be published as books and online.

Conferences
Every year, the research project organises a two-day thematic, international conference on a subject linked to our research and the projects of our visiting fellows. All conference proceedings will be published as books and online.

Associated research (’kenniskring’)
Two Ph.D. candidates conduct their research on user-generated design and community-based Open Source media within the research project. Staff teachers and graduate students of Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University contribute individual research work.i

  • Simon Pummell, associated researcher

Associated staff & contributors

Research fellows