User:Lassebosch/Finissage: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:11, 18 May 2014

This year’s graduation show of the Master of Media Design & Communication (Lens-Based & Networked) at the Piet Zwart Institute perhaps reflects a shift in popular culture. Whereas no self-respecting media self-help book or newspaper article published in the last decade missed having 'linked' or 'stay connected' in the title, a more recent rash of articles and runaway best sellers feature words such as 'introvert' or 'silence.' Have we reached a consensual moment where we might all agree it has become urgently necessary to critically look at how the words 'social' and 'media' might be used together? Is it now pressing to explore how contemporary media forms part of pervasive networks of both communication and miscommunication, now look at how media can foster community yet also create isolation and foster loneliness? Is the spectre of loss increasingly haunting contemporary digital media? The range of works in this show of the work of the 2014 graduating artists and designers of PZI MMDC at TENT are extremely diverse in terms of their formal approaches and aesthetic pre-occupations yet there is a strand of such concerns running through the works: a persistent focus on displacement, erasure, and loss.

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-'''Graduates:'''
+This year’s graduation show of the Master of Media Design & Communication
+(Lens-Based & Networked) at the Piet Zwart Institute perhaps reflects a shift in popular culture.
-'''Yoana Buzova’s''' [BG] Leaveamessage is a participatory project, a network of voice mailboxes that
+Whereas no self-respecting media self-help book or newspaper article published in the last decade missed
-allow members of the public to record and distribute audio messages in public space. The boxes are
+having 'linked' or 'stay connected' in the title, a more recent rash of articles and runaway best sellers feature
-installed in different counties, cities, and contexts. Connected to each other, the boxes provide playful,
+words such as 'introvert' or 'silence.' Have we reached a consensual moment where we might all agree it
-performative moments for strangers to break from their routine and enter into a network of anonymous
+has become urgently necessary to critically look at how the words 'social' and 'media' might be used
-voices.
+together? Is it now pressing to explore how contemporary media forms part of pervasive networks of both
+communication and miscommunication, now look at how media can foster community yet also create
-'''Marlon Harder''' [NL] has created Template Gallery, an installation that transposes the web template
+isolation and foster loneliness? Is the spectre of loss increasingly haunting contemporary digital media?
-inside the wire frame of the gallery space, and vice versa. It is a visual representation of our current
+The range of works in this show of the work of the 2014 graduating artists and designers of PZI MMDC at
-template culture. We are living in an age of “insert your content here”, a concept that is discernible in
+TENT are extremely diverse in terms of their formal approaches and aesthetic pre-occupations yet there is
-every aspect of life: from the white walls of a museum to the #ffffff background of a microblog. These
+a strand of such concerns running through the works: a persistent focus on displacement, erasure, and loss.
-Template spaces are rigid in their requirements and yet infinitely displaced, they create spaces that a user
-must fit into to, but without any reciprocal ability to recognise the user's individuality.
-'''Nan Wang’s''' [CN] art practice is the experimentation and search for the intersection between memories
-and technology. In her DUST series work, she considers the dust she collected from her room as a self-
-portrait of her life and physical being, an instrument for sound, as elements for images, as object to sort,
-and as a grammar for her works.
-'''Roel Roscam Abbing’s''' [NL] Pretty Fly For A Wi-Fi examines a contemporary movement that attempts a
-strategic disconnection from the www. In the form of a ‘wunderkamer’ of pots and pans, dishes and cans
-through which people from around the world give shape to their collective dream of making an alternative
-Internet, this installation is a testament to new dreams of dislocation.
-'''Nicole Hametner's''' [AT/CH] installation, a large projection of a dark, almost unreadable, portrait
-dominates the gallery space. Opposite, the image's essentially ungraspable nature is imaged in a video
-depicting a water tank filled with floating photographs. Both works observe the fragile moment, the
-threshold of an image's existence that oscillates between presence and absence.
-Menno Harder [NL] is fascinated by the city of Rotterdam and in particular the Middelland
-neighbourhood where he lives. On the 21st of November 2013 a local resident - a near neighbour to
-Harder - was found to have been lying dead in her apartment for at least 10 year. How this had
-happened in a bustling and social neighbourhood, where an eclectic mix of people live next to each other
-and the streets are busy day and night? His installation is a monument to all those that were or are
-forgotten: 'Monument for the Forgotten Person'
-'''Niek Hilkmann''' [NL] performs as an art-historian, composer, teacher, conductor, designer, filmmaker
-and more, all at once... A true excess of a meta-modernist age! His research work as a media archaeologist
-- Time and time again, a cabinet of curiously conditioned calamities - roams around the
-borders of the lost, defaced and unforeseen in the land of redundant contraptions.
-Michaela Lakova [BG] takes a lost and found approach to media. Her field of research and practice
-involves catchy bits and bytes of errors: system malfunctions. The exhibited work [DEL? No, wait!
-REW] asks the question, is it possible to delete? Through a system that relies on feedback, interface and
-screens, the work aims to confront the visitor with the following dilemma: whether to
-COPY/TRANSMIT/SHARE or to DELETE/REMOVE/ERASE retrieved files.
-'''Lasse van den Bosch Christensen''' [DK] has undertaken research that engages with the phenomena of
-crowdsourcing. Dear Google is a collection of fictive gifts addressed to Google by a group of volunteers
-who chose to create digital models for use within a system dictated by Google and inhabited by individuals
-who must comply to remain in the community. The project explores what happened to that community
-when Google changed the rules.