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.

Fortress Europe: Proposal for a new European flag
Squatters Manual: Squatting in Utrecht
Kushtetuta: LGBT zine part of Kosovo 2.0
Counter Culture series: My thoughts and perception of a Counter Culture
Tuzla & Sarajevo: Documenting a visit to Bosnia
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