Conference: Prototyping Futures / Occupying the Present
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Student Andre Castro shows work at WORM
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The Echo Chamber: a reading on listening, with Luke Williams and Natasha Soobramanien
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May 19, 20 and 21, 2012
Address: the conference will take place on several locations in Rotterdam, the Netherlands
See the Prototyping Futures / Occupying the Present website for full schedule and bios of contributors
Schedule of Events
- Saturday, May 19th: Lectures, panel discussion and Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…book launch (Location: Auditorium Kriterion, Groothandelsgebouw – above Cafe Engels, Rotterdam)
- Sunday, May 20th: Workshops at various locations followed by a screening at Worm
- Monday, May 21st: Wrap-up and documentation for publication (The Piet Zwart Institute)
Reservations
Lectures on the 19th are free & open to the public.
Workshops are also free, but registration is required as there is limited space.
For reservations: please send an e-mail to: pzwart-info@hr.nl
Prototyping Futures / Occupying the Present is a three-day conference with workshops initiated by the Piet Zwart Institute, a centre for postgraduate studies and research in the fields of art and design. The event will gather scholars from diverse disciplines to explore strategies of resistance, intervention, and critical production in response to the crises of the present. Rather than foregrounding critique, the focus will be on experimental practices that work towards the production of alternative narratives and the imagination of different futures. The term “media” is at the center of the symposium’s conceptual frame and is interpreted in its broadest sense so as to encompass a variety of methodologies and approaches that materialize ideas through technological, spatial, ephemeral, and poetic forms.
Key to the event is the notion and ethos of prototyping. Used in fields such as architecture, software programming, and design, the word has a range of meanings from simple working models to developmental processes. The prototype––in its etymological and theoretical senses––is an original form, an archetype. But it is also––in the applied fields of software development, design and architecture––the alpha version, made to test a concept and with the expectation of flaws, bugs, kinks, and failures. Rather than hammering down prototyping to a single definition, this symposium seeks to embrace its tentative, iterative, and speculative qualities, with the aim of promoting interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration.
The event will also be a participatory occasion through which to launch an alternative to the traditionally edited essay collection. Working with Active Archives and other multimedia, our aim is to create an online volume that documents and reflects upon on the various issues and projects discussed and produced during the conference.
Contributors:
Contributors: Inke Arns / Bik Van der Pol / Karin de Jong of PrintRoom / Alessandro Ludovico / Danja Vasiliev / Julian Oliver / Paolo Davanzo & Lisa Marr of Echo Park Film Center / Michael Murtaugh / Failed Architecture / Jan Jongert of 2012Architecten / Mitchell Joachim of Terreform ONE / Nicolas Maleve / Steve Rushton / Gordan Savičić / Florian Cramer of Creating 010
Editorial Team:
Renee Turner, Rita Raley, Carolyn Guertin & Allison Carruth
Saturday May 26 2012, 11:00 – 16:00 hrs
Location: Worm
Address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam
Tactile Noise Workshop
The tactile noise instruments are based on small integrated-circuits (op-amps), usually employed as amplifiers, that do not produce sound on their own, except when integrated into a recursive network (its output is connected to its input).
For the recursive network to be activated and sound to be produced, is necessary the intervention of a body that touches and connects the circuit’s vital nodes, its contact points. When the body touches these points it acts as a resistance, becoming part of the circuit’s electrical flux, and changing the produced sound as a result of its positions, humidity and pressure exerted over the instrument’s contact-points. Such configuration makes these instruments, despite their simplicity, very amusing and challenging to play, a sort of a sonic puzzle, with which the player has to relate in order take control over its sounds.
André Castro
With this workshop is my hope to contribute to the demystification of electronics, as well as encourage a DIY approach to instruments’ making. In the present moment, in which we live surrounded by technology, and this plays a vital role in our lives, it seems awkward that often we are clueless about how must technology works, how it is composed and how it can be repurposed for creative means. If in our own artistic practice we employ technology, and want to explore its potential, and be aware of its implications, it becomes necessary to understand it, rather than letting it take possession of our work. As referred by Kristina Andersen: “By using our crude and clumsy hands to make aspects of computational machinery we are re-inserting ourselves into a process that we are otherwise excluded from”.
Entrance: 40 euros per person
Reservations can be made via lukas[at]worm[dot]org
Wednesday May 9 2012, 19.00 hrs
Location: Piet Zwart Institute
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45 Rotterdam
The Echo Chamber: a reading on listening, with Luke Williams and Natasha Soobramanien
Luke Williams and Natasha Soobramanien will be reading from Luke’s first novel, to which Natasha contributed two chapters.
‘The narrator of Luke Williams’ epic debut novel, Evie Steppman, is holed up in an Edinburgh attic, writing against time. Born 54 years previously with what she believes to be superhuman powers of listening, Evie’s memories are rooted in the aural. But she’s going deaf. Her memory is failing along with her hearing and Evie must write her story before the sonic archive that is her past disintegrates into a howl of feedback. Through Evie, Williams has set himself the task of writing a Proustian paen to sound and its Beckettian shadow, silence. Specifically, the silence Evie begins to crave through narrative exhaustion after her digressional, expansive and bewitching history takes us from the Old Testament to pre-war Oxford to colonial Nigeria…’ (Thequietus.com)
About The Echo Chamber:
It was published in 2011 by Hamish Hamilton in the UK, Viking Penguin in the US, Neri Pozza in Italy and will be published in Germany by Hoffman Und Campe later this year. It won the Saltire First Book Award in 2011 and has just been shortlisted for Best First Book in the 2012 Scottish Book Awards.
About the writers:
Luke Williams studied History at Edinburgh and Creative Writing at University of East Anglia. His essay on W G Sebald, A Watch On Each Wrist, was published in the collection Saturns Moons in 2011.
Natasha Soobramanien has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia and her first novel, Genie and Paul, a cannibalistic translation of Bernardin Henri de Saint-Pierre’s eighteenth-century romance, Paul et Virginie, will be published by Myriad Editions this August.
Natasha and Luke are now collaborating on a hybrid prose work, ‘Diego Garcia’, a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction and the transcription of extant documents, which seeks to examine how power uses narrative to enforce and extend its position.
Opening: Thursday May 3 2012, 17:00 – 20:00 hrs
Exhibition: May 04 – May 20 2012
Location: BLAAK10 Gallery & Store
Address: Witte de Withstraat 7a, Rotterdam
Double take
During the Dutch Electonic Art Festival 2012 (DEAF), the BLAAK10 Gallery & Store of the Willem de Kooning Academy will present the work of the following alumni:
Birgit Bachler
Walter Langelaar
Olivier Otten a.k.a. Selfcontrolfreak
Jonas Vorwerk
Leonie Urff - In collaboration with Anja Hertenberger, Ricardo O’Nascimento and Meg Grant from the eTextiles Workspace group
Birgit Bachler and Leonie Urff are both alumni of the Master Media Design & Communication: Networked Media programme.
In DOUBLE TAKE these artists paraphrase analogue forms of media with a digital attitude in order to provoke surprising experiences. Some of them let the analogue and digital forms merge where others let them meet in the unknown.
The exhibition is designed by Bowie Barbiers, Daphne Rijkoort, and Nikki Spil, second year Bachelor Spatial Design students of the Willem de Kooning Academy.
DEAF 2012: The Power of Things, May 17 – June 3.
May 12 – June 17 2012 (opening Friday May 11, 21:00 hrs)
Location: Roodkapje
Address: Meent 119, Rotterdam
Biyonse
Be immersed in Dennis van Vreden’s contemporary Versaillesque larger than life installation where one can feel as if they are Beyoncé.
Surround yourself by surrealistic elements; clouds, shells and excessive drapes, while you simultaneously merge into one with the queen of R&B. Get drawn into Van Vreden’s fantasy world where you find cross dressing with pop and the anciene régime.
Thursday May 17 2012, 12:00-17:00 hrs
Location: WORM
Address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam
(workshop room on the ground floor next to the WORM.shop)
Open logo design session with Piet Zwart Institute alumnus Emanuele Bonetti and the Kenniscentrum Creating 010, Hogeschool Rotterdam
Introducing Creating 010
Creating 010 is a new research center of Hogeschool Rotterdam (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences). It is affiliated to the Willem de Kooning Academy and the Institute of Communication, Media and Information Technology and conducts applied research on new forms of interdisciplinary and project-oriented work in the creative sector: design, arts, media and IT. Open media and participatory design are chief concerns for Creating 010.
The experiment
Creating 010 and Designplatform Rotterdam invite designers to participate in a session where Creating 010’s logo is collaboratively designed in an Open Source, peer-to-peer process, without traditional team hierarchies. The workshop is coordinated by the Italian graphic designer Emanuele Bonetti who developed this methodology as his Masters project at the Piet Zwart Institute.
You are invited
Participants will include everyone who wants to participate, next to designers who research at Creating 010. The process includes collective brainstorming, visual research using Wiki-like software and group negotiations towards an end product. If the logo developed in this process will be adopted by Creating 010, a fee of 1000 Euro will be split among all external participants. There will be free catering and lunch during the workshop.
Registration
We kindly ask everyone who wants participate to send an informal E-Mail in advance to creating010@hr.nl, no later than on Monday, May 14th. For logistical reasons, a maximum of twelve people can participate in the session. All participants are asked to bring their own laptops; WORM’s WiFi will be used.
The session will be held in English.
This event is in collaboration with DEAF 2012.
Friday May 18 2012, 12:00 – 17:00 hrs (lunch break at 2 p.m.)
Location: de Dépendance, Schieblock
Address: Schiekade 189, Rotterdam (nearby Rotterdam Centraal)
back to the boutique?
digital everyday culture vs. the art school
Expert meeting organised by the research center Creating 010, Hogeschool Rotterdam with Felix Stalder, Olia Lialina, Alessandro Ludovico, Gordan Savicic, Arie Altena, Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey, Richard Vijgen, Aldje van Meer, Florian Cramer and many others.
An extra public discussion session will be held on Sunday, May 20th, during the Piet Zwart Institute symposium Prototyping Futures – Occupying the Present.
Quantitative research conducted by Aldje van Meer in our research center tells us that in 2012, art students intensively use computers and the Internet as communication and production tools – mostly for social media and the Adobe suite -, but almost never produce works that are digital themselves. Digital media skills and knowledge, from writing HTML to knowing contemporary media arts and design, have even decreased, sometimes dramatically. Dutch art schools have shut down most of their digital/interactive media study programs in the past couple of years. Such lack of engagement is all the more worrying in a time where digital media are no longer techno futurist visions, but the mainstream media and everyday communication tools.
In the meantime, media design education has migrated to technical universities and technology colleges. Nothing needs to be wrong with this. But it results in designers who consider themselves mere technicians and are unfamiliar with art and design history, visual languages, artistic experiment and critical reflection of visual culture.
Conversely, art schools are now mostly chosen by students who love manual craft such as drawing and handmaking of tangible products. Often, for example in zine and print making, this is motivated by cultural opposition to electronic media. Nothing is wrong with this either since it could be productive as a critical point of departure. But it is ultimately producing a culture of making beautiful collectible objects that goes back to the boutique model of art and design. This potentially throws the arts back into the 19th century, undoing the work of among others constructivism, Bauhaus, de Stijl, Fluxus and Situationism which all redefined art as intervention into everyday culture.
This development does not seem to be specific to the Netherlands, but can be seen all over Europe. Many art schools stopped their new media programs or reverted them into film/video or fine art programs. Part of the issue are former ‘interactive design’ and ‘interactive art’ departments that did not keep up with the times but remained stuck in 1990s machine art paradigms.
This expert meeting will be a mostly informal roundtable of artists, designers and theoreticians with a long experience of teaching new media in art schools.
This event is in collaboration with DEAF 2012.
On Tuesday April 17, the exhibition Fabrikaat of the Master Interior Architecture & Retail Design department has opened at Ventura Lambrate 2012.
FABRIKAAT is an exhibition investigating the re-emerging role of the garden through a “research through making” approach to design and craft. In a digitally saturated world, this body of work celebrates and promotes research, ideas and the nuances of making by hand.
The work exhibited was made during an intensive three-month thematic design studio with integrated seminar and media courses, by first year students in the Master of Interior Architecture & Retail Design programme. The spirit of FABRIKAAT became an integral part of the culture, programming and deployment of the courses during this period.
The exhibition will be open from Tuesday 17 April 2012 – Sunday 22 April 2012
Location: Ventura Lambrate
Via Massimiano 6
20134 Milan, Italy
Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2012
Sunday April 15 2012, 13:00 – 15:00 hrs
Address: Tamboerstraat 34, Rotterdam
Under/Up the Stairs in Rotterdam
Site-specific video, poetry and desires for a staircase
- Screening of Noe’s Kidder “What We Call Music” — a short film inspired by the combined legacies of John Cage, Nicolas Cage and Nick Cave.
- WITH AN EXTRA SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCE BY ELEANOR GREENHALGH! who will present a text on embracing anxiety and unknown outcomes.
Under/Up the Stairs is a temporary project and event space on staircases, by our student Inge Hoonte. In alternating venues, Under/Up investigates hiding/revealing, absence/presence, private/public. Embracing the transitory and in-between nature of these spaces, Under/Up aims to connect places and people, locally and remotely.
Currently our Master of Fine Art student Jasper Griepink is showing his work at Roodkapje in Rotterdam. The exhibition ‘Epicenter for the Contemporary Urban Wizard Practice’ transforms Roodkapje into a habitat of the contemporary city wizards Jasper Griepink, Toine Klaassen and Piet Langeveld. Magical performances, rituals, sculptures and experimenting sculptures and their secret sounds will arise from the ‘Epicenter for the Contemporary Urban Wizard Practice’. At the work and research station existing social structures are turned inside out, broken and rearranged in an important manner.
On Wednesday April 18, from 19:30 until 21:30 hrs, Jasper will be participating at Patat MET, together with Piet and Toine’s. MET is a new side program of Roodkapje.
For the first edition of MET, these contemporary urban wizards will bake you an ordinary ‘Patatje MET’ in the middle of the exhibition space. MET is food for the body and food for the mind! While visitors fill up their belly, the artists give a presentation about their work. Visitors will find out more about their work by experiencing it and learning more about Jasper, Piet and Toine’s background and where they get their inspiration.
Supersale: free homemade patat MET!
Admission: free
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