User:Menno Harder/self directed

Methodology

Often the creation of a work starts while traveling. Traveling not only in the sense of visiting places I have never been before, but also traveling to places or situations described by people I meet. Projects that I have worked on collaboratively are also my strongest. Who are the people I surround myself with and what keeps them busy? What are their interests and what do I share with them? I can create a dialogue between me and the other person with whatever it is that they are trying to contextualize or provide a visual output to the ideas that they were questioning.

It’s very important to live by the idea that as a visual artist, I am also an activist. As a designer you have a big social responsibility. You can take any kind of information (maybe a fact, an opinion, a status) and either decide to be true and honest towards it, or manipulate it so that it takes on a form that you think serves it right. I am aware that to be able to reach out you have to understand how to announce yourself in the communicative field. With time and growth also come new discoveries of presenting works, this means that a possible outcome or project can be many different things. Adaptation to different kinds of media can be a very strong point in any practice and this is something that I will try and embrace in coming projects. The many shapes a project can take seems to be limitless, and within this lies a lot of excitement and fun.

Key themes
While comparing different works I have done I notice that recurring elements in my work are social movements, city planning, the traveler, mapping thoughts, architectural structures, abandoned buildings, the wall as a canvas, virtual landscapes, rebuilding a space.

Examples of works

These works would be interesting to write more about as they reflect my interests. Some of the works I did quite some years ago are still very valuable to me and are still worthwhile to take a look at and to build new idea's with.

Tuzla & Sarajevo: Documentation of a visit
Tuzla & Sarajevo is a publication consisting of 3 different pieces: 2 booklets showing images and 1 folded letter. The 3 pieces are put together to form the whole publication.

• Booklet 1, printed on 100 grams nacre-glow paper. It is bound together using two staples. The contents of the booklet are various images in full colour. All of the images are in landscape format and have a blank border around them. The images are depicting various architectural buildings and landscapes throughout Bosnia. The images within the book are marked with a number. One picture is placed on the cover, half of it displaying on the front and half on the back cover. There is a certain sequence in which the pictures are shown, a spread with 4 pictures and spreads where only 1 picture is shown are placed after each other. Booklet 2 is placed in the middle-spread.
• Booklet 2, printed on 100 grams bio-top paper. It is again bound together with 2 staples. The contents of this booklet are again images but shown in black and white, without a blank border. The images are placed in landscape format and on it ruined or abandoned buildings can be seen. Every spread shows only 1 image. In the center of booklet 2, there is a letter.
• The letter is printed on 120 grams grey paper. The letter is folded in half and can be taken out. The letter addressess to a person and there is a text written about various encounters during the trip. The text is designed as an analog hypertext, where after certain words or sentences numbers are placed that are pointing towards the pictures found in Booklet 1.

Counter Culture series: Thoughts and perception of a Counter Culture
The Counter Culture series consist of various different media: digital images, posters, and a booklet.

• The digital images are depicting various urban environments, cityscapes, living spaces or parks. An abstract form is drawn through the image, either ignoring or complementing structures and shapes present on the image. Some of the images are with borders, others without. There are images in colour but also in black and white.
• The posters and map are both typographical and hand drawn. There is a city map covered in abstract hand drawn shapes. The other is an A2 typographical poster again using the same style of digitally drawn shapes that cover parts of the typography.
• The book consists of two parts, the first part is a smaller a6 booklet, printed on bright yellow 100 grams paper. It is wrapped around the inner book and in it are various different digitally drawn abstract forms. These forms are also found throughout the inner book, which is printed on white 100 grams normal printer paper (a5). The book itself consists of texts and images in the made in the same tradition as the digital images and typographical posters described above.

Kushtetuta: LGBT zine part of Kosovo 2.0
Kushtetuta is an A5 booklet showing the works of various artists. The booklet is printed on 80 grams white paper. The zine is bound together by two staples. The front cover is designed to resemble the Constitution of Kosovo. The booklet, or zine, appears within the Kosovo 2.0 magazine. The structure of the zine is not pre-defined which in turn makes every spread different from the one before or after. The images depicted are of various sources, some in colour while others are black and white. Some of the spreads contain texts which describe the work shown and other works are texts themselves, for example: a poem. In some spreads the images are bordered but on other spreads they are not. Within the booklet there is no reading direction as images can be found placed upside down or in a diagonal position.

Counter Culture series: My thoughts and perception of a Counter Culture
Fortress Europe: Proposal for a new European flag
Squatters Manual: Squatting in Utrecht
Am Kotti: Creating a virtual environment
Protesters Toolkit: Designing a neutral protesting tool

Excerpts from useful annotations

Synopsis Marx *RULING CLASS and RULING IDEAS*
The ruling intellectual force of any society is simultaneously also the class that controls material production. This means that whoever is intellectually stronger over the other will have more power. They rule as thinkers, and are the ones producing ideas and giving structure to society itself by these ruling ideas. They are the dominant force. The division of labour can be divided into mental and material labour: mental labour is driven by active, concept ideologists, creating ideas and illusions about this class. while the material labour is accepting these ideas and illusions passively and receptively. Hostility between these two classes may occur, but if the whole class itself is endangered this comes to an end. Examples are given of ruling dominant ideas: during the time of aristocracy the concept of honour and loyalty were dominant, during bourgeoisie the concepts of freedom and equality. These ideas have to have a form of universality in order to survive and also represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution represents the whole of society confronting the one ruling class, because it has not yet developed as the particular interest of a particular class.

Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media *Andres M. Kaplan, Michael Haenlein*
There is no systematic way in which social media can be classified, and also, because of the daily ongoing and upcoming changes to and appearance of new social media an ever-growing classification scheme should be created. This scheme is based on a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure), these are the two key elements of Social Media. Social presence is defined by the level of intimacy between two users. The higher the social presence, the larger the social influence that the communication partners have on each others behavior. Media richness states that, the goal of any communication is to reduce uncertainty and resolving ambiguity or being as clear as possible. Self -presentation and self-disclosure are elements of social media wherein users create an image of themselves to have control over the impression that people have of them, during which they share personal information consistent with the image that is presented.

Also: From Counterculture to Cyberculture