jodi, Thematic Project not from scratch
For a general explanation of Thematic Projects, see our curriculum page.
Preview of Thematic Projects 2010/2011
Trimester 3, Apr.-June 2010: Theo Deutinger (TD Architects, Rotterdam): Suck – Direct – Release, a project on the urban space as a programmed medium
Trimester 1, Sep.-Dec. 2010: MODDR_ labs / Gordan Savicic, Danja Vassiliev, Build, Break and Broadcast, a project on hardware hacking and designing media with soldering irons and electronics boards
Trimester 2, Jan. 2011: Inke Arns (HKMV Dortmund): project on contemporary art and media
Thematic Projects 2009/2010
Trimester 1, Sep.-Dec. 2009: Open Events
Project instructor: Rui Guerra (V2_Lab, UnDEAF Festival)
Open events: Communities and their means of encounter
Public events are a privileged arena for cultural and social interchange. Unfortunately, most events are presented to the public as finished products leading to a passive consumer atitude from the public. To contradict such tendency, several events have open up their structure allowing the public to get involved in the overall organization. Events that seek active participation have abandoned an organization structure based on hierarchies and static planning to embrace participation and distributed forms of organization. Involving the public from an early fase has proved to foster participation and to create a fertil soil for forms of culture that otherwise would not have an expression. Grounded on existing cases of open conferences and festivals, it is shown how open, distributed and participatory models have been used to create successful events.
In this thematic project off-line events are analyzed in order to cover and understand the following subjects: Centralized, de-centralized and distributed networks; network cultures: social networks / anti-social notworking; self-organization; participation; agile development; asyncronous server-client communiation; peer-to-peer software.
Rui Guerra is involved in open source culture with a critical view on communities. His works makes use of several media such as photography, video, online and offline installations. Besides teaching at several academies in The Netherlands, he has initiated self-organized communities such as INTK in Utrecht and unDEAF in Rotterdam.
More information and documentation can be found on the course Wiki.
Trimester 2, Jan.-Mar. 2010: Do Kindles Dream of Spirit Duplicators: What is a book?
Project instructor: Renee Turner, Florian Cramer, Aymeric Mansoux
Throughout its history, the book has been declared dead many times, last with the Internet. With the current boom of e-book readers, the opposite seems to happen: electronic documents are becoming books again. All these developments seem to be based on a firm common sense of what a book is. Thorough historical and artistic investigations of the medium book will however reveal that there is no clear answer to the question of what a book is.
The Thematic Project will approach this issue from three angles: Historically (in the Theory Sessions) as an investigation of book utopias from Aldus Manutius to Mille Plateaux, artistically (in the afternoon sessions) as encounters with practitioners of book art and experimental writing, technically in a series of pioneering hack sessions on e-books.
More information can be found on the course wiki.
Trimester 3<, Apr.-June 2010: Suck – Direct – Release
Project instructor: Theo Deutinger, TD Architects, Rotterdam
Rotterdam is taken as exemplary city. The project could be conducted in any city in the Western World.
Seminal questions are: how do we get unique information from the street, process it and put it back onto the street in a newly organized way: suck – direct – release. SUCK information from the streets; DIRECT it, order it and rearrange it and finally RELEASE it again on the streets.
The assignment is to generate interaction between the city of Rotterdam, the Internet and its inhabitants (place / system / people). The crux is to find something of relevance, something of value to gain knowledge at the end of the project. It is possible to interpret or contextualize something apparently useless so that it suddenly assumes great value. The final result – which can be an act, an installation, a poster campaign, or a new program – should alter, change and influence the city and its inhabitants.
In this Thematic Project the mass gets the focus and not the individual. “We are lovin it” instead of “i’m lovin it”; we-phone instead of i-phone, our-space instead of my-space. This project should be not about the individual against the crowd but more about the individual within the crowd.
Rotterdam provides some extreme examples for this. When Feyenoord won the national soccer league in 1998, celebrations went out of hand and looting crowds where rioting in the streets of the city. Afterwards, it was found out that groups had organized this ‘incident’ via mobile phones, making it one of the first spontaneous crowd organizations via mobile media.
SUCK
Start from a hypothesis, a hunch, what you want to do. This hypothesis needs to be supported by evidence provided by newspapers, books, twitter, etc. or your own observation. The hunch can be about any kind of themes and social phenomena: a problem of the city planning department, a crime, a reasonable wish of a community.
SUCK & DIRECT
Map the city – collect the necessary information for your theme and assign it with a location in the city. Go out into the streets and collect unique data that will be processed (= organized according to pre-/ self-defined principles) and brought online as open source (meaning in this respect: in a format that everybody can freely access and alter and add to it). This data set should form the basis of your intervention. The real project will commence when data sets will be combined, eliminated, sorted, enriched, organized, etc. and reinstalled in real space. The collected information is regarded as valuable for ‘the commons’.
A dataset in this regard is everything that can be considered as information. Thus a collection of images, texts, sound etc. is as much a dataset as a string of numbers; information, in this context, is everything that gets processed by the computer into 1 and 0.
If we consider the streets are information channels, all we need to do is to install filters which extract a particular information out of this flow, tapping into the streets.
RELEASE
Release your project in public space in a way that it has the power to alter the data you collected.
Theo Deutinger is the founder and head of TD Architects in Rotterdam. His works include urban and exhibition architectures, software development, and his mapping project Snapshots of Globalisation.
Previous Thematic Projects
Trimester 3, 2008/09: MODDR_labs / Gordan Savicic, Danja Vassiliev: Build, Break and Broadcast (on hardware hacking)
Trimester 2, 2008/09: Nicolas Malevé (CONSTANT, Brussels), Privacy in the “Web 2.0″
Trimester 1, 2008/09: jaromil, The Art, Philosophy and Techniques of Free Software
Trimester 3, 2007/08: jodi, Not From Scratch
Trimester 2, 2007/08: De Geuzen, Host
Trimester 1, 2007/08: Aymeric Mansoux (goto10.org), Unsolvable Problems
Trimester 3, 2006/07: Kristina Andersen (STEIM) + Stock (V2_Lab), make and do
Trimester 2, 2006/07: STEALTH (Marc Neelen, Ana Dzokic) and Kristian Lukic, MetaLife
Trimester 1, 2006/07: Florian Cramer, Command Line Culture