The Piet Zwart Institute will be open for new applications.Due to the quantity of applications the Piet Zwart Institute Master programs receive, regulations regarding immigration, and international opportunities to apply for study funding, we strongly encourage you to apply early.March 6, 2020: Priority deadline for completed applications of Dutch, EU applicants.Final deadline non-EU applicants.April 24, 2020: Final deadline for completed applications of Dutch and EU applicants.Open house: Saturday, February 1 2020, 10am–3pm.The Master Fine Art organizes Open Studios on February 8, 11am–7pm.Only at Mauritsstraat 36/ Karel Doormanhof 45The Piet Zwart Institute houses the international master programmes of the Willem de Kooning Academy at Hogeschool Rotterdam. Named after the pioneering Dutch designer Piet Zwart, who worked experimentally across different media and contexts, our institute offers a rich combination of in-depth specialisation and interdisciplinary exchange in an intimate learning environment.The programmes of the Piet Zwart Institute are located in the heart of Rotterdam’s city centre. While students and faculty come from across the globe, bringing with them a variety of cultural influences, there are also strong connections to the city, its complex history and dynamic urban environment.We have five master programmes: Fine Art, Interior Architecture: Research + Design, Experimental Publishing, Lens-Based Media, and Education in Arts. All are founded on a shared interest in the complex social, cultural and political underpinnings of each discipline. Through a uniquely tailored curriculum combining collective learning, intensive individual tutorial support, practice-based research and theoretical inquiry, our programmes educate young professionals who have a critically reflective and imaginative approach to their work.As an educational institute the notion of “making public” is core to our activities. These public moments are an important resource for students, faculty members and guests, serving as a bridge to the city, a framework for exploring timely and relevant issues, and building a community around areas of interests. Exhibitions, symposia, conferences and publications expand our research beyond the confines of academia, while simultaneously valuing the very necessary speculative space for reflection and knowledge building that is only made possible through the rigorous academic framework of the Piet Zwart Institute.Teaching staff:Fine Art: Liesbeth Bik (artist), Kate Briggs (translator, writer), Bernd Krauß (artist), Mike Sperlinger (writer, curator), Jan Verwoert (theorist, critic), Nina Wakeford (artist, sociologist), Katarina Zdjelar (artist)Experimental Publishing: Aymeric Mansoux (course director, artist, writer), Clara Balaguer (cultural worker, vernacular designer), André Castro (media artist), Michael Murtaugh (computer programmer), Steve Rushton (writer, artist), Natasha Soobramanien (writer), Marloes de Valk (artist, writer, curator), Amy Suo Wu (artist, designer)Lens-Based Media: Simon Pummell (course director, animator & filmmaker), David Haines (artist, drawing, video), Ine Lamers (artist), Javier Lloret (artist, researcher), Barend Onneweer (independent visual effects, animation artist), Steve Rushton (writer, artist), Natasha Soobramanien (writer), Marloes de Valk (artist, writer, curator),Interior Architecture: Research + Design: Alex Augusto Suárez (course director, architect, educator), Golnar Abbasi (artist, architect, researcher), Andrea Bagnato (editor, researcher), Cookies, Federico Martelli & Clément Périssé (architects, designers, researchers), Daphne Heemskerk (graphic designer), Ephraim Joris (architect, tutor), Natasha Marie Llorens (curator, writer), Studio Ossidiana, Alessandra Covini & Giovanni Bellotti (architects, designers, researchers), Olivier Otten (interaction designer).Education in Arts: Ingrid Commandeur (course director), Kate Brehme (museum educator, public practices), Jolande Bosch (artist, educator), Emiel Copini (educator, secondary education), Elizabeth Graham (museum educator, curator), Prof. Dr. Frans-Willem Korsten (educator, researcher), Irina Shapiro (design educator, curator), Renee Turner (artist, educator), Sjoerd Westbroek (artist, educator), Thijs Witty (educator, research, writer).Apply to the Piet Zwart Institute here.

Thursday 12 December 2019 | open: 20:00 | start: 20:30 | end live sets: 23:00

Location: DE PLAYER – Hillelaan 49D, RotterdamAdmission: €8,- | Students: €6,-

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DE PLAYER and Experimental Publishing XPUB / Piet Zwart Institute present:INPUT/OUTPUTA night about new interfaces for sound and performance arts

with: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL) and the students of Experimental Publishing — It is time for printed circuit boards (PCB’s), patterns, deformation, imitation, stretching, remoteness, alphabets, notification, phonetics and more. Together with the students of the The Piet Zwart Institute Experimental Publishing course, we are stepping into an unstable and unknown area in which the processes and challenges for the artist are equal to those for the audience. During this evening we will present the results of a collaborative seminar on modules, in combination with different specific tools designed by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros from EVOL and other artists. This event is part of our research project ‘)HRHED(‘, in which we investigate new social and artistic interfaces for sound and performance arts. Recently, together with Spatial Media Laboratories (SML), we presented a workshop on interfacing inaudible phenomena. In our program for next year we have already scheduled full event presentations of new works, together with ITU (Anni Puolakka & Miša Skalskis), Evelin Brosi and Caz Egelie, who are also part of this research project. — ■ Roc Jiménez de Cisneros will present a brand new EVOL project called ‘SOUP’, a MIDI sequencer based on Hanne Darboven’s 1984 Opus 17A – a piece EVOL has been reworking multiple times since about five years ago, and this one is likely to be their last version. ‘SOUP’ is a little box that plays the original sequence of notes in Darboven’s piece, and lets you modify it by tweaking six knobs that alter a number of things such as length (from one note to the whole score), speed (from regular to f*cked *p) and so on… Basically, you can either play it conservatively (the same way as a pattern in an old-school synth), or play around with it and quickly turn Opus 17A into weird “techno”-sounding arpeggios and wonky sequences. In contrast to a conventional sequencer, you can not enter any notes. In that sense, the sequencer operates autonomously. It also doesn’t produce any sound on its own, but only sends out MIDI messages over USB – and it is entirely up to the user to decide what to do with them. It is a very conscious decision they made to ensure it will produce wildly different results in various hands. Only ten units have been made, all done by hand and very low-key. ■ Together with the students of The Piet Zwart Institute Experimental Publishing course, we have been researching new interfaces within the field of publishing. Over the course of one trimester, each of the students worked on their own sound module and tweaked it into their own conceptual project. No restrictions on INPUT. No restrictions on OUTPUT. This resulted into a series of ten multilingual printed circuit boards, offering different stand-alone devices which can be noodled or joined together based on customer demands. All the individual projects, as well as the whole research project, will be presented and tested on this evening. In addition to the modules, a publication is included in the form of a 30 by 30 centimeter printed circuit board containing all the background information of each individual project, plus a printed booklet with the guidelines for assembling all devices through DIY efforts. Soon available in our webshop, and during the event itself. → In below some extra liner notes to give you a glimpse of all the individual projects within this seminar: • Avital Barkai – ‘Generator’; an image maker controlled by both hardware and external sound. • Damlanur Bilgin – ‘Carbon‘; a synthesizer that uses graphite markings on paper to manipulate sound. • Sandra Golubjevaite – ’seven [‘7’]’; a straight forward .print&.read device that unfolds a poem depending on the user’s interaction with it. • Tisa Neža Herlec – ’DISTRACTION MANAGER’; a wearable “notification” generator, a stimulator for awareness, a trigger apparatus for human beings. • Max Lehmann – ‘GLARE’; an accessible, gesture controllable sound interface. • Clara Noseda – ‘remote control’; a tool for storytelling, where different narratives around the same topic can blend with each other to generate new trains of thought. • Anna Sandri – ‘VISIBILE SPEECH’; this project employs phonetic vocabularies and other oddities to visually reproduce conversations. It communicates by using constructed & non-constructed languages, human-readable and machine-readable alphabets. • Mark van den Heuvel – ‘Flakes’; an audio playback device that combines the functionalities of an analog cassette tape player and a digital sample playback module. • Ioana Tomici – ‘MODULAR LINGUISTICS’; an application based on a series of electronic objects which are programmed to speak. The words chosen to be part of its vocabularies are spoken in unison, generating new associations between terms. • Mika Motskobili – ‘TXX.uo’; a module which consolidates two contrasting radio frequency implementation modes: the RFID reader scans and sonifies the cards, while the LCD screen displays a Q-code and converts it into sound. The module also sends out binary signals. —

de player: https://www.deplayer.nl/events/de-player-experimental-publishing-xpub-present-inputoutput

The floor is an inevitable surface and western architecture has strived to keep it flat, to mute it, and it is therefore rarely questioned. The ground, from which the soil constitutes the superficial living layer, is the source of all the materials traditionally used in architecture.Undermatters is focusing on what sits below our feet as a lens to understand space from a different perspective and ultimately create an architecture able to address gravity, materiality, deep time and material sourcing.

Ana Cecilia SariolYiyang LiuMao ZhangYoungji LeeJitivi BanthaisongHedvig Maria Koertz MikkelsenPhilippa LorenzenJulia Anna LowinskaMateusz TkaczenMirela AtanassovaIngmar KönigRicardo Nemeye Van WijkVera Sofia SchneiderSaskia de Fabritiis

Wednesday December 11Cookies HQ Basement150 Eendrachstraat 3012XR Rotterdam from 18.00 to 21.00.

Projects by second year students from Master Interior Architecture – Research + Design (MIARD) at the Piet Zwart Institute

Tutors : Federico Martelli, Clément Périssé – CookiesCourse Director : Alex Augusto SuarezCourse Coordinator: Zoraïma Hupkes

MIARD warmly invites you to the Borderland Exhibition opening on Tuesday December 10th, 2019 from 18:00-22:00 at Wijkcoop010, Rotterdam. Projects by first year students from Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design (MIARD) at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Borderland is a project about historical and cultural entanglement. Projects presented in this exhibition work through the idea that the world we inhabit today cannot be understood in separation from an imperialist and colonial canon. As such, we are concerned with forms of ideological and aesthetic representation in ways that allow us to develop curatorial installations in relation to postcolonial theory; (re)negotiating  implicit  transitional  qualities, questioning the prefix “post” of “postcolonial”.

Date: Tuesday December 10th, 2019 from 18:00-22:00Location: Wijkcoop010, Zomerhofstraat 75, 3032 CK Rotterdam

Looking forward to see you!

Angelo Ciccaglione, Leila El-Kayem, Eva Garibaldi, Noélle Ingeveldt , Katharina Kasinger Nury Lee, Gavin O’Leary, Rachel Refael, Milena Sekulic, Denisse Vega de Santiago, Maria Dorothea Weis

Tutors: Dr. Ephraim Joris, Natasha Marie Llorens, Olivier Otten, Daphne Heemskerk Course Director: Alex Augusto SuárezCourse Coordinator: Zoraïma Hupkes  

Anthony Green

Date: Tuesday 10 December, 2019 from 19:00 till 20:30Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Mitigating Multiplicities: a study of a complex practiceAs politics, social environments, geographies, and climates continue to change, how do artists keep up – i.e. continue, remain relevant, but also avoid compromising?What does a complex practice look like in a world where the role of art seems to be losing value?In this talk, composer, performer, and social justice artist Anthony R. Green discusses these issues in the context of his interdisciplinary practice, focusing on how identity, history, current political trends, and absolute music and art can function synergetically. 

The practice of Anthony R. Green (composer, performer, social justice artist) is concerned with the metaphysics of the opressed, hyperbole and embodiment of injustice, and continuous questioning.His work has been presented at Tivoli Vredenburg (Utrecht), StadsSalon (Amsterdam), studio ilka theurich (Hannover), Cité de la musique et de la danse (Strasbourg), Symphony Space (New York), Spectrum (New York), LiteraturHaus (Copenhagen), The Shoe Factory (Nicosia), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Charles River Esplanade (Boston), and others.His work has been interpreted by Gabriela Díaz, Wendy Richman, Ashleigh Gordon, Hayk Melikyan, NOISE-BRIDGE, ALEA III, the Fidelio Trio, the Playground Ensemble, BLY, counter)induction, the Keuris Sax Quartet, Ossia New Music Ensemble, and Alarm Will Sound, to name a few.As a performer (interpreter, performance artist) and scholar, he has performed and presented research for various conferences and festivals as an invited guest in the USA, the UK, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.He is a former McKnight Visiting Composer fellow, a past resident artist at institutions in Europe and the US, and the composer-in-residence and associate artistic director of Castle of our Skins: celebrating Black Artistry through Music.  www.anthonyrgreen.com ; www.foundwork.art/artists/anthonyrgreen

VOLITIONAL VOLUTIONS OF THE VOLATILE WATERS BY MERVE KILIÇER

Date: Friday 6 December 2019 from 15:30 till 17:30Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC/ Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam

This Friday, from 15.30-17.30 we invite you to the Open Studio of Merve Kılıçer, the first of our alumni to occupy a new research studio in Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam.With this initiative we hope to consolidate and extend ongoing conversations across all the Masters of the Willem de Kooning Academie about the capacity of artistic research, while supporting the recent graduate.For the last four weeks Merve has been in residence at Karel Doormanhof 45, and on Friday we welcome you to explore her emerging work as part of the project Volitional Volutions of the Volatile Waters.Refreshments will be served.http://mervekilicer.com/about/http://mervekilicer.com/volitional-volutions-of-the-volatile-waters/

Book Talk # 4: Thurs Nov 28, 19.00 – 21.30 hrs

Field Essays: Éloj Kréyol

With: design-duo dach&zephir (Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach), Rolando Vásquez, associate professor in sociology at University Utrecht/University College Roosevelt.

Moderator: artist/researcher Sophie Krier.

Location: Research Station, Willem de Kooning Academy, Wijnhaven 61

Admission: free, the presentation is open to the public

How can we decolonize design, and its curriculum? The fourth issue of the experimental editorial series Field Essays brings to the fore the research Éloj Kréyol by design-duo dach&zephir (Florian Dach and Dimitri Zephir). Initiated in 2015, Éloj Kréyol is an attempt to reconcile, reactivate, and transmit neglected artisanal and cultural lifelines in the genealogy of the French Caribbean archipelago. Field Essays is a research platform that explores peripheral practices probing unknown territories, methods and works. It is initiated and led by artist / researcher Sophie Krier and released through Onomatopee.

After a short introduction by Sophie Krier on the process of making the book, designers Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach will share the cultural, ecological and economical stakes of their field research in Martinique. In a short statement, respondent Rolando Vázquez, associate professor in sociology at University Utrecht / University College Roosevelt, will be asked to share the questions, which the book raises, from the position of his field of work, decolonial aesthesis. A concluding round table will open up questions regarding the book’s content, form, and motives to the audience.

dach&zephir is a design studio based in between Paris and Guadeloupe, transforming History, habits, and cultural contrasts into objects/things. They define themselves in between the industrial world and the research part in design. They aim to create a space where spreading is in fact reassembling, where cultures, stories, habits and technics become a way of creating. Stories and History are their entry point in design, from domestic behaviors, memories or cultural heritage there is always more than a “pretty shape” in their projects. For them objects are “a medium of the mind”, if we pay enough attention to it, it can tell you something, ask you something or make you realize something.

Sophie Krier is a relational artist, researcher, educator and editor. Through her work she interweaves biographies of beings and places, and conceives tools and situations for collective narration and reflection. Her practice moves between intense periods of fieldwork and editorial/publishing activities (book- and filmmaking, exhibition design and moderation). Between 2004 and 2009 Krier led the undergraduate programme designLAB (Rietveld Academie, NL). On invitation of University College Roosevelt (NL), Krier developed Art & Design Practice, an undergraduate programme on visualising ideas in the spirit of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Since 2008, Krier leads Field Essays, a series of hybrid publications, which enables listening pauses between practitioners and thinkers across disciplines.

Rolando Vásquez contributes to the movement of decolonial aesthesis and thought. He is associate professor of sociology at University College Roosevelt, affiliated to the research institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) and the Gender Studies Department of the University of Utrecht. With Walter Mignolo he has coordinated for ten Years the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School. In 2016 with Gloria Wekker et. al. he wrote the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam. His work seeks to transgress the dominion of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and modernity/coloniality. Developing the questions of ‘precedence’ and ‘the end of contemporaneity’ he seeks to contribute to decolonize institutions and subjectivities, epistemologies and aesthetics.

Image: Field Essays 55.3_Couverture_©dach&zephir_2019

 

We are happy to invite you to the opening of Maquette, a photography and moving image exhibition of Piet Zwart Institute & WdKA students.

Date: Opening on the 14.11.2019 

Time: Starts at 18:00 

Address: Weena 10, 3012 CM Rotterdam

Maquette is a photographic and moving image exhibition presenting the work of five artists-students from the Piet Zwart Institute and the Willem de Kooning Academy. The exhibition focuses on the dynamics that are emerging from the contiguity and porosity of singular representations of the world. With artworks varying in their format, processes, perspectives and narratives, differences and contrasts have been given a central position in the curation. We are pleased to present works by Julia Gat, Yael Laroes, Sonia Mangiapane, Felix Obermaier and Ugo Petronin.

Initiated and coordinated by the collective Leaving Space, the exhibition takes place in temporary space granted by Hilton Rotterdam, which was once the breakfast room of the hotel. 

http://leavingspace.org

Alessandro Bava is an architect and writer based in Naples, Italy and London, UK. He runs a studio in Naples making exhibitions, installations, interiors and architecture projects. From the academic year 2019-2020 Bava teaches a history and theory of architecture course at the postgraduate master B-PRO at UCL Bartlett in London. He is the co-founder of åyr, an art collective which made installations and research on contemporary domesticity, and the independent ecology magazine and publishing platform ECOCORE.

Alessandro’s talk will address the thematic issues set by the design team Cookies for the current Thematic Design Project. It is a presentation specific to the interest on the floor, addressing material, ecology, politics and labour.

http://www.ecocore.com

Navigating the Virtual, a workshop by Anja Kirschner Tuesday 5 November.

Anja Kirschner’s seminar will consider immersive technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and other digital simulations (in gaming, training and design), not as ‘neutral’ technologies for modelling physical reality, but as technologies that have emerged from the military-entertainment-research complex and are actively shaping the physical world and modulating affects, behaviours and dispositions within it.

Drawing on Harun Farocki’s exploration of digital animation and Virtual Reality exposure therapy and the way these inform recent theoretical texts on navigating the virtual (by Tom Holert, Pasi Väliaho, Orit Halpern), we will explore the politics of virtuality, artificiality and survival (Claire Colebrook).

In particular, we will look at the rise of dominant navigational paradigms and at what the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has called decolonial countervisuality, or the right to look, which “refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power, first as law and then as the aesthetic.”

Anja Kirschner is an artist working in the moving image. Currently she is a PhD researcher at the Royal College of Art, London.

www.anjakirschner.com