This is the fourth issue of the monthly DAI-bulletin in the academic year 2008-2009, informing you about our program and about important dates and events. Eventual alterations can be found on our website under DAI-bulletins.
Please scroll for ‘This Time it is Private’, with announcements on exhibitions and other public activities of DAI students and alumni. Please send items for that specific section to [email protected].
DAI-week December 8 till December 12
DAI-CANTINA
Lunch will be served daily from 13:00-14:00
Dinner Monday from 20:30, Tuesday-Wednesday from 18:30-19:30, Thursday: a quick dinner at WT in Arnhem
This weeks’ DAI guest cook is Constantina Roussou: “I am currently a student at Rietveld Academie on the part-time education program. When moving from Greece two years ago for studying purposes, I carried along my Mediterranean culture; which, among other things, has a strong relation to food. As kids we grew up around the table and woke up from the lovely smell coming from the kitchen, tasting ingredients straight from the garden;
This strong relationship left me no choice (!) but making cooking an experience I want to share with others. Last years I work as a cook mainly to Greek and Italian restaurants in a range of classical recipes to modern ones, but always quality of ingredients is the first rule. I always appreciate a nice, good looking presentation, but I truly believe that sensation comes from taste”.
TAKE NOTICE:
-In this schedule we will only publish biographical notes on guests that are NEW to our programme. Information about the other guest lecturers is to be found on our website under ‘mentors and guest tutors’.
- All parts of the curriculum have to be attended by ALL students unless it is mentioned otherwise.
Monday December 8
11:30-13:00 Projectroom.
Toolkit: The Art of Writing a Thesis
John Heymans.
Exclusively for second year students
14:00-20:30 Projectroom
Web Wayfinding, Web Wayshowing, Web Waysharing
A Workshop for all students supervised by Ronald van Tienhoven and Ricardo Liong-A-Kong.
During three one day-long sessions until the end of 2008, a small group of artists, (web) designers and digerati will elucidate both opportunities and bottlenecks of Web Design and the development of a digital portfolio.
Today’s special guest: Koert van Mensvoort
Koert van Mensvoort (www.koert.com) started his career in the late eighties with the creation of videogames – belonging to the first generation of whiz kids who are now no longer kids. In the nineties he moved on and studied computer science, philosophy and art. He received a M.Sc in computer sciences from Eindhoven University of Technology (1997), got a MFA from Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam (2000) and bought a MBA in Executive Management on the Internet.
Koert does not work in one specific medium or style, but rather uses all media to visualize his ideas. Much of his work revolves around the relation between people and media. Koert thinks our technological world is so complex it has become a nature of its own.
Among his works are the Data fountain (an internet enabled water fountain connected to money currency rates), the TV documentary ‘The Woods smell of Shampoo’ and the Fake for Real memory game (about the tensed relation between reality and simulation). He directed the motion capture dance film ‘Drift’, about a dancer without a body. He is the presenter and co-organizer of the Biggest Visual Power Show, an intellectual show that blends between a scientific conference and a pop concert.
He is director of the All Media Foundation, a non-profit organization that conceives, researches and visualizes current cultural issues. Furthermore he is a part time assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (Industrial Design Department).
Tuesday December 9
9:30-10:30 Project room
Round table with all students, course director Gabriëlle Schleijpen and course manager Rik Fernhout.
TODAY: 3 ONGOING TRANSNATIONAL PROJECTS
1. DETROIT UNREAL ESTATE AGENCY
A curatorial project, which re-values the city of Detroit and the practices it’s made up by.
Run by Partizan Publik
10:30–18:30 space to be announced
Exclusively for participants of Detroit Unreal Estate Agency
MARKET EXPLORATION
As with the real estate market we intend to do a demand and supply analysis of Detroit’s unreal estate as a way of understanding, engaging with and imagining the city. Focusing on the intangible value or the cultural significance of a place we will explore practices and experiences, which make up everyday life. Examples to think of are art practices, architecture, homeless life, hip hop culture, museums, house music, health services, religious practices and labor patterns.
MAPPING URGENCIES AND OPPURTUNITIES
The narratives, images, projects and propositions of the unreal estate market will have to be researched and laid out; a brief overview of location specifics and qualities.
Central questions will be: Where and why is the market tight and is unreal estate valued highly and where are possibilities for interventions by our agents? Where is the market corrupted and who is responsible? Are open urban spaces examples of a corrupted market? As such, a first intervention will be creating an alternative lens for viewing and valuing the city, not ignoring its socio-economic problems nor the accompanying violence. In addition we draft the Unreal Estate mission statement. Also, our participants would have to work on a quick-scan of possible clients, from the fields of municipal politics, academics, real estate and property, arts and culture. These people are as much an audience to our work and ideas, as the people who can carry them further, intellectually and practically.
Program
- Discussion literature outlines and questions
- Presentation by group A and group B
- Lecture: Mireille Roddier: 3 forms of contemporary practices: Puppets, Vanguardistas & Guerillas” A lecture on various modes of creative operations in the city, and the various forms of occupation they attempt to resist”
- Lecture: A music history of Detroit
- Screening: Paul Verhoeven RoboCop (1987).
Evening lecture:
“Playtime giddiness at high attitudes”
Recent projects by Mitnick Roddier Hicks
Mireille Roddier teaches design studios and contemporary architecture theory at the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She likes to read about, discuss and lecture on the politics of the public realm. Her interest in public amenities and gendered spaces were expressed in her book Lavoirs (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). Mireille is the Roddier in the design practice Mitnick Roddier Hicks. MRH has received numerous awards including the 2004 Young Architects Forum Award from the Architectural League of New York, and were among the ten international firms featured in Architectural Record’s 2005 Design Vanguard awards issue. Their work has appeared in various books and journals, most recently in Phyllis Richardson’s collection XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2007), and Mark Magazine’s February 2009 issue. They pursue all opportunities to participate in temporary public urban festivals—most recently, they designed one of the courtyard installations exhibited in Montpellier’s Festival des Architecture Vives 2008.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/mroddier/home
More information to be found under Projects,
http://partizanpublik.nl/
2. Edition 111- MASQUERADE
Masterclasses by If I Can’t Dance
The If I Can’t Dance/DAI course will depart from a special interest in the ‘performative’ and will look at elements of rituals, gestures, normalized as opposed to transgressive behaviour, covert as well as manifest action and differing approaches to role playing, power positions and appearances.
Day-program:
10:30–18:00 Studiovisits
Today this DAI week’s contributors Martha Zarzycka and Flora Lysen will have face to face conversations with each participant in this project.
Dr. Marta Zarzycka is assistant professor at the department of Gender Studies at the Utrecht University. She teaches and publishes in the fields of art history, visual studies, and the politics of the representation. Her latest research is on the press photographs of atrocities and their visual transport across genres and media.
Flora Lysen is an Mphil-candidate in Art History at Leiden University. Her special interest in (visual) historiography was initiated during a research scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a co-teacher of a course on contemporary art at the department of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and she taught a course on ‘artist’s books’ at Leiden University. She works as a researcher and editor at If I Can’t Dance... and is coordinator of the DAI-‘Masquerade’ course for If I Can’t Dance...
Evening-program:
19:30 Lecture by Martha Zarzycka
Exclusively for participants of Masquerade
The lecture will focus on the problem of masquerade (understood through a series of concepts such as parody, staging, masking, repetition and gesture) in the art of the American photographer Cindy Sherman. The masquerade in Sherman’s work, engaging for years with the impersonations of feminine stereotypes, will be analyzed in connection to the question of subjectivity, performativity and gender. While Joan Rivière argued in 1929 that femininity is no more than a series of masks which women adopt to survive in the system of patriarchal values and identifications, Sherman, drawing viewers’ attention to the excessive use of make-up and wigs, often presents femininity as absurd, exaggerated, shifting, and grotesque. In connection to the platform If I Can’t Dance…, Sherman’s work will been looked upon through its relevance to pastiche, self-referentiality, fragmentation, and multiplicity.
More information to be found under Projects,
http://www.ificantdance.org/test2/index.php
3. GOODTRIPBADTRIP
The artwork as and in relation to the trip
Curated by Mark Kremer with contributions by John Heymans
Day-program:
10:30–18:00, space to be announced
Exclusively for participants of GoodTripBadTrip
Collective Meeting, artists/students with John Heymans and Mark Kremer. An interactive day with discussions, readings, viewings. We will backtrack to Psychedelic Art and psychedelia at large, to its contemporary heritage and artistic counter-positions of the times, via texts of Sture Johannesson, Lars Bang Larsen, Chrissie Isles and J.L. Locher, a.o.
In the afternoon John Heymans presents his theory column.
Also we will start to investigate Op Art via records of relevant exhibitions, artist oeuvres, art theory.
Evening lecture
19:30 space to be announced
Ronald Schimmel: “Hope for Happiness”
Dutch artist Roland Schimmel presents his body of work in which a key role is played by optical phenomena that are produced by the human body when exposed to certain visual data. In paintings and animations that have been made in the last twenty years, he makes way for and gives a place to so-called after-images. The artist has a specific view on the source of this natural phenomenon, quote Schimmel: “I regard after-images as the expression of the longing of my physical body for its origin, the light.”
Sophie Tates and Andreas Broeckmann wrote about the work (in: cat. Deep Screen, Art in Digital Culture, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2008; text abbreviated by MK):
“Schimmel constructs his paintings (airbrush on canvas) and animations (computer-generated) with care. These are abstract works that, in terms of form and color, already resemble after-images with black and colored dots in the picture and vividly colored but often vague patterns in the background.
The visual effect is overwhelming: the afterimage on the retina slides over his painting, creating an impression that is more than only the work. It is no longer possible to tell where reality stops and projection begins. This perception of the artwork, however, is short-lived: after a few seconds the image slowly gets vague again.
The body of work is an exploration of the dividing line between reality and appearance. If you look at his work, close your eyes and see the complementary colors appear on your retina, you also gain a sudden insight into the unrealized possibilities underlying every word, action, choice: the complementary forms of what actually exists.” See also: www.rolandschimmel.com
Wednesday December 10
9:00-17:00
Face to Face meetings between individual DAI-students and individual guest advisors; Mark Kremer, Florian Göttke, Roland Schimmel, Rod Dickinson, Sithabile Mlotshwa, Marta Zarzycka, Partizan Publik and Flora Lysen.
Sithabile Mlotshwa (born in 1975) is a contemporary artist, founder and director of Thamgidi Foundation and Artistic director of IFAA 08.She was born in Zimbabwe and has travelled extensively through international exhibitions and artist in residency programs, among others the Konstepidemin in Gothenburg Sweden. In 2006 she was commissioned by the Kelvingrove museums and galleries to make an installation that is now displayed at the Gallery of world cultures. This piece is displayed alongside Picasso, Dali and Rembrant. She was officially invited to be at the presence of her Majesty the Queen of England for the official re-opening of Kelvingrove Museums and galleries, the second largest museum outside London.
In May of 2008, she was elected to be the 2008 President of the Jury of the Dak’art biennale in Senegal. She has exhibited in many international exhibitions, won awards and was selected for the Asia-Europe network training program of Independent Autonomous art centres in Paris organized by Asia Europe Foundation, Trans Europe Halles & Artfactories. She is the former chairperson of “VAAB” the visual arts association in Bulawayo Zimbabwe and founder of the gift shop that finances the Thamgidi Foundation activities. Her foundation is a partner of the Dak’art biennale and of the Conservatoire in Bamako Mali. Her foundation has given 10 Thamgidi Foundation awards, 8 of which were given at the Dark’art biennale in 2006 - 2008 and has also given supportive grants which included travel grants, and documentation grants. She also runs the educational program that supports and works with children from different parts of the world. Besides this she collects contemporary Art from Africa and other parts of the world, has created an artist archive of Contemporary Art from Africa.
She has works in the permanent collection of the National gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo with most of her works collected world-wide. She has illustrated books and participated in the restoration of the Cyrene Mission (restoration of a church which is on UNESCO world heritage list).
Rod Dickinson is an artist and lecturer based in London and Bristol, his work explores ideas of belief and social control. Using detailed research into moments of the past and present, he has made a series of meticulously re-enacted events that represent both the mechanisms that enable belief, and the social systems that make belief systems function. In 2002 he recreated Dr Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1961 social psychology experiment 'Obedience to Authority' at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. Where participants were asked to give apparently lethal electric shocks to an unwilling victim to test how far they would be prepared to obey an authoritative scientist and inflict pain on a protesting person.
Dickinson has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, including: Kunst Werke, Berlin, The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco), the Prinzhorn Galleries in Heidelberg, Witte de With (Netherlands), Science Museum (London), Bergen Kunsthall (Norway), ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia). He currently is exhibiting in “The Return of Religion and Other Myths” at BAK, Basis Voor Actuele Kunst, Utrecht
www.milgramreenactment.org, www.thegameofwar.net
11:00–15:00 Projectroom
Groupmeeting, workshop If I Can’t Dance with Martha Zarzycka and Flora Lysen
10 minute presentations by participants, reflecting on self-portraiture and role-playing in their work, workshop.
Exclusively for participants of If I Can’t Dance
19:30-21:00 Project room
The Half Way Lecture – Rod Dickinson
“The presentation will revolve around two pieces of work, The Milgram Re-enactment 2002 and Greenwich Degree Zero 2006.
I will draw on these works to look at the ways in which history is recorded and presented. How the notion of an ‘event’ is constructed and mediated, and how the narratives of history are a live and fluid process that originate primarily in the present.
Both the works also revolve around the use of reconstruction and re-enactment of past events. I will look at how a live re-enactment inflects the way we might understand the original event. And discuss the kind of performance that takes place in a historical re-enactment. Where it is neither spontaneous, or even properly live, but neither it is located in the past. What kind of model of history does this produce?
More broadly I will also discuss how the repetition and the mediation plays an increasing role in our daily lives, and how we have become self conscious performers in our own historical narratives”.
Thursday December 11
Todays programme will take place in Arnhem, Nijmegen and Utrecht. First year students will join guest tutor Sithabile Mlotshwa who organised a IFAA exhibition tour and debate at Artez, Arnhem for the DAI, whilst second year students will spend the day with Delphine Bedel at Werkplaats Typografie. Late in the afternoon, all will travel to Amsterdam for two lectures in the series ‘Now is the time”
9:00 SHARP DEPARTURE BY BUS FROM THE RANDSTAD BUILDING AT ENSCHEDE STATION for all students
10:30-17:00 Tour and Debate Perspectives on Art, Migration and Identity –Sithabile Mlotshwa