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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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.
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.
Wednesday April 18 2012, 19:30 hrs
Location: Piet Zwart Institute
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45 Rotterdam
Psychedelic Noir
An evening of readings, book shredding, and verbal acrobatics with artist, writer, pamphleteer, and activist Stewart Home.
Stewart will be reading from his novels, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and Defiant Pose.
Stewart Home was born London in 1962. He is the author of more than a dozen novels and almost as much cultural commentary. Reviewing 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, The London Review of Books said: “I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home.” Last year a mini-retrospective of Home’s gallery work as an artist was held by White Columns in New York, and that exhibition is currently on show at Space Studios in London. His most recent novel is Blood Rites of The Bourgeoisie (2010).
Tuesday April 2 2012, 21:00 hrs
Location: WORM, Rotterdam
Address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, 3012 XA Rotterdam
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 year without images
Screening with Eric Baudelaire
The Master of Fine Art department of the Piet Zwart Institute is collaborating with WORM Rotterdam, in conjunction with the guest tutoring of Eric Baudelaire, to screen Baudelaire’s film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 year without images.
In artist and photographer Eric Baudelaire’s complex, incisive film, contemporary Super 8 views of Tokyo and Beruit are entwined with TV clips and film excerpts to form a backdrop for reflections and memories from two lives spent in exile. May – daughter of the Japanese Red Army’s founder, Fusako Shigenobu, and Adachi Masao – the legendary filmmaker who gave up film to fight for the Palestinian cause, both speak of everyday lives spent in hiding… politics, cinema, exile and the fascinating relationships between them.
“The revolution has been continuously my main subject… People said: Revolutionary Cinema. I said: No. It’s Cinema for Revolution.” Masao Adachi
Course Director of the Master Fine Art programme, Vivian Sky Rehberg, will lead a post screening discussion with Eric Baudelaire.
Monday April 23 2012, 21:00 hrs
Location: WORM, Rotterdam
Address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, 3012 XA Rotterdam
Colonial Hauntology with Vincent Meessen (artist) and Sophie Berrebi (critic)
Two films, one discussion
The Master of Fine Art department of the Piet Zwart Institute is collaborating with WORM Rotterdam, in conjunction with the guest tutoring of Vincent Meessen, to explore the theme of Colonial Hauntology with Meessen and art historian and critic Sophie Berrebi.
This evening’s screening brings together two films – Vincent Meessen’s ‘Vita Nova’ [be 2009] and Miranda Pennell’s ‘Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed’ [uk 2010] – that confront us with phantoms from suppressed histories and colonial pasts. Family secrets, frontier photo albums, Paris-Match meet Roland Barthes and the memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands. Historical fact, reality, artistic interpretation, and imagination are conflated, and the spectator is invited to piece together the fragments of the story, creating pertinent and distinctive ‘factual fictions’.
Following the films, Sophie Berrebi – lecturer in the history and theory of photography at the University of Amsterdam – will lead discussion with Vincent Meessen.
WHY COLONEL BUNNY WAS KILLED – Miranda Pennell
Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed is a reflection on British self-representation. Triggered by the writings of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, a distant relation of the filmmaker, the film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed during a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people.
VITA NOVA – Vincent Meessen
Vita Nova takes as its point of departure a mythic cover of the French magazine Paris- Match, from 1955. On this cover, a child soldier is depicted in the act of making a military salute. Taking this cover as his cue, the artist weaves together phantoms from the colonial past, the writings of Roland Barthes –who wrote about this particular image in his famous Mythologies – historical facts, reality, and artistic interpretation.
The film raises issues that centre on the representation and re-writing of history, its repressed narratives as well as the spectral nature of photography. From Paris to Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), passing by Bingerville (the old capital of the Ivory Coast), the spectator is invited to piece together the fragments of this layered unfolding of events and accounts, as temporalities are dislocated and chronologically disconnected. Drawing on a variety of media and archives, Vincent Meessen creates a parallel and updated story in which a new character is born (Vita Nova) and with him a new narrative.
The film gives life to the autobiographical story of a character: Roland Barthes, revisited by the phantom of the colonial. With his new film, Meessen not only brings to the fore repressed or marginalised narratives but also reflects on the artifice that forms part of historiographical discourse, using the fiction of ‘realism’ and the experience of the archive to elaborate his own personal, ‘factual fiction.’
On Saturday March 24, the Piet Zwart Institute will organise an Open House.
Our annual Open House offers prospective applicants the opportunity to meet both students and staff and learn more about the diversity of research at the Piet Zwart Institute. There will be guided tours through various workshops and facilities, the studios will be open, and our postgraduate students will present works in progress throughout the day. Next to these activities there will be impromptu performances and interventions exploring the musical as genre and its transformative potential through collective participation.
Our two buildings will be open. The visiting addresses are Blaak 10 and Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam. These two locations are only a 10 minute walking distance located from each other.
Blaak 10, Rotterdam
- 1st year Master Interior Architecture & Retail Design students and staff
- Master Education in Art students and staff
- Wood-, metal-. textile- and ceramic workshops
- AV-studios
- Digital and analog photography studios
- Media studios
- 3D printer demonstrations
- Library
Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
- Master Fine Art students and staff
- Master Media Design & Communication students and staff
- 2nd year Master Interior Architecture & Retail Design students and staff
Presentations
Each department will give special presentations for the visitors. These presentations will take place at the Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam. The presentation schedule is as follows:
- 10:00 – 15:00 Master Interior Architecture & Retail Design
- 12:00 – 14:00 Master Media Design & Communication: Lens Based & Networked Media specialisations
- 14:00 – 15:00 Master Fine Art
Musical Symposium
Alongside these activities, impromptu performances and interventions will take place that explore the musical as a theatrical and cinematic genre and its transformative potential through collective participation. These activities start at 16:00 hrs at the Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam.
Open House Piet Zwart Institute
Date: Saturday March 24 2012
Time: 10:00 – 15:00 hrs [starting from 16:00 a symposium will be organised by the Master Fine Art department]
Addresses: Karel Doormanhof 45 & Blaak 10, Rotterdam
March 21 until March 24 2012
Location: Piet Zwart Institute
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45 3012 GC Rotterdam / Telephone Booth gallery space, 1st floor
I’m In This Weird Part of Your Tube Again
Popular music and whale songs combine with white fatties and ultra-offcut. Here is an alternate realisation of that weird part of your Tube.
A casual collaboration between a group of artists using video. A communal YouTube channel was set up to share videos made or found for the Video Handel Project. In the project we used one username and password; this anonymity allowed us the freedom to recycle, reuse and continually adapt and respond to each other’s shared work. For the duration of the exhibition we will continue to upload work to the YouTube playlist which will be streaming in the Telephone Booth Gallery.
Something special will happen on Wednesday night; other things will ooze in.
Participants: Jenna Bliss, Edmund Cook, Laura Cooper, Olivia Dunbar, Ian Giles, Tulapop Saenjoroen and Deniz Unal
Opening: Wednesday 21st March 2012, 19:00 hrs
March 16 2012, 20:00 hrs – with sounds at 22:00 hrs
Location : Magic Bar
Address: Pompstraat 44c, Rotterdam
Piet Zwart Institute recommends:
Book launch: Anthem for the People’s Tomorrow at Magic Bar
A collaborative project by the Master of Fine Art graduates of the Piet zwart Institute 2011, jung+wenig and Ellen Blumenstein
Intrepid individuals, emerging from the cold bedrooms of Rotterdam, have ventured into the wild territories, the hidden secrets, and the dark concoctions of exquisite sound-making. They will be exhibiting their herculean achievements for the delectation of your eyes and ears at the MAGIC BAR.
Authors: Giles Bailey, Martijn in’t Veld, Rachel Koolen, Serena Lee, Arvo Leo, Anna Okrasko, Susana Pedrosa, Linda Quinlan, Lee Welch, Camilla Wills, Timmy van Zoelen.
Edited by Ellen Blumenstein
Design by jung wenig
Publisher: Spector Books, Leipzig and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Musicians for the evening: Rubén Patiño, André Castro and Bottle Dave & the Sliders
Friday March 23 and Saturday, March 24 2012
Location: Piet Zwart Institute
Address: Karel Doormamhof 45, Rotterrdam
Musical Symposium
Organised by the Master of Fine Art department of the Piet Zwart Institute.
The project is initiated by Toon Fibbe and Kirsty Roberts.
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