Dennis de Bel, Offline, 2007
Reflection of media
The term “media” has vastly different meanings for different practitioners, theoreticians and schools. Often enough, current media theories and design approaches are little more than a product of the content that currently dominates them. Aside from that, media look radically different from a Western European city such as Rotterdam than they do from the other side of the globe. Issues of access, technological infrastructures, economy and education create the terms on which media are experienced.
In the Networked Media programme, we consider the critical reflection of these issues a necessary prerequisite for any advanced media practice.
Information in context
Information systems thus do not exist in a historical, cultural or political vacuum, and information does not exist without context.
Even the low level information technology we use is not neutral or objective, but embedded into and shaped by social, political, aesthetic governance and ownership. Our programme reflects these issues, and helps you develop and rethink your practice based on that reflection.
Design your own media
Practically speaking, the focus of our course is on computational, networked, digital media or information systems. Unlike many, if not most, other art school media programmes, we do not merely consider computing and the Internet digital updates to analog audiovisual tools, but media in themselves that have their own culture and specific design requirements. For us, it is important to understand media design as design of media as opposed to merely designing with media.
We do not think of artistic media design as just creating “cool” audiovisuals on top of prefabricated information architectures. Rather than taking information technology off-the-shelf and out-of-the-box, you are encouraged to rethink and design your own media.
Open Source & do-it-yourself
This is why Free and Open Source Software and do-it-yourself ethic play a key role in the programme. Aside from its obvious benefit of giving you advanced operating systems, server software, database engines, programming languages, network clients and audiovisual authoring toolchains at zero cost, Open Source software tends to be extremely modular, open to DIY and custom applications. It gives value to seemingly outmoded hardware, and provides you with building blocks for your own projects rather than solutions that strongly preformat the function and aesthetics of your work.
Do-it-yourself also means that – within reasonable limits of a non-engineering school – you learn to program, administer and build your own projects instead of having them built for you by programmers and technicians.
Technological / critical / artistic study
How can the overall issues and collisions of “media” translate into a practice that embraces information technology while keeping a critical view of it? This is a basic question, and continuous effort, of our study programme, both for students and staffers. It explains why our media design approach is based on both intellectual and practical, multidisciplinary skills.
Our course has different components that are tightly interrelated to each other and reflected by different teaching modules: thorough technical learning, critical study, and practical design and artistic work.
In our technical sessions, you learn not just to use digital media, software and hardware, but how to program, to build and rebuild them. This gives you a thorough insight into how digital media work at a low level, not only in terms of their functionality, but also in regards to the politics, aesthetics and economies coded into their architectures.
Design, art, activism, research
With this knowledge, you will be able to critically reflect media, involve yourself with cultural and media theory, art and design history and develop media designs as practical research. Theory is not an end to itself, but a hands-on empowerment tool for your practice – regardless whether you identify your own work more specifically as design, art, activism or research. Our approach to media design strives to combine and cross-pollinate all four while guiding you to succeed as a professional media practitioner.
Partners
Many of the thematic projects are realised in collaboration with local and international cultural and social institutions or partner art academies. Local partners and friends include WORM / MODDR, De Player, WLFRT project space and V2_Institute for the Unstable Media. International friends and partners include the CONSTANT media organization and Open Source Publishing in Brussels, the GenderChangers Academy, the Pathway New Media of Merz Akademie Stuttgart, Germany, L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Etienne, France; and others.
Willem de Kooning Academy
As part of Willem de Kooning Academy, we are part of a lively media, design and art school including, in particular, the CrossLab, a cross-disciplinary new media work and project space at undergraduate level. With the CrossLab, we develop regular joint presentations and projects.
Research programme
Alongside the Master in Media Design/Networked Media, we run an ambitious research programme Communication in a Digital Age that researches the future of communication design, and the shifting relations between mass media and personal communication, in the light of recent technological and social developments. It involves research fellows – international theoreticians and practitioners of communication design -, public lectures, annual conferences, book and online publications. Students may participate in these events both as audience and with their own projects and research contributions, and research fellows are available as visiting tutors.
For further information, please see the research page.