Open Set Dutch Design Summer School 2016, catalogue

memories of the future

open set 2016 | catalogue

tutors & speakers open set summer school 2016 Maki Suzuki is a member of the graphic design collective

Åbäke (UK), which is international in membership and eclectic in interests. The members Patrick Lacey, Benjamin Reichen, Kajsa Stahl and Maki Suzuki have worked together since graduating from the Royal College of Art in London. In addition they are also singers, painters, photographers, curators, fashion designers and DJs. Members of Åbäke have founded the record and fashion label Kitsuné, the architectural production Sexymachinery, the publishing house Dent-De-Leone, the Victoria & AlferD museum project, investigation group Suzuki åffice and are agents of the artist Charlotte York.

Dr. Sebastian Groes is Senior lecturer in English

Literature at the Department of English and Creative Writing, Roehampton University, United Kingdom. He specialises in modernist and contemporary fiction, has written on authors including Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, and published The Making of London. He is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC and Welcome Trustfunded The Memory Network. The Memory Network is a multi-disciplinary enterprise that brings together researchers, authors, artists, and organizations to provoke and fuel original thinking about memory in the 21st century.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol have worked collaboratively since 1995 as Bik Van der Pol. They live and work in

Rotterdam. Bik Van der Pol explore the potential of art to produce and transmit knowledge. Their working method is based on co-operation and research into how to activate situations so as to create a platform for various kinds of communicative activities. Recent work includes the performances What if the moon were just a jump away? (2013), Biennale of Mercosul, Porto Alegre; Not all those who wander are lost (2013), Hoog Catherijne, Utrecht; and the Frieze project accumulate, collect, show (2011) at the Frieze Art Fair, London.

Liza Enebeis (UK-NL) is Creative Director and Partner at

Studio Dumbar, Rotterdam, and Host and Co-founder of Typeradio, a podcast on type and design. Studio Dumbar is a highly influential Dutch graphic design agency with outposts in China and Korea. Its work has helped shape, not only Dutch, but international design for over three decades. The company has won an astounding number of awards. On D&AD’s all time list, Studio Dumbar is the third most awarded design outfit, beaten only by Apple and Pentagram.

Bruno Setola (NL) is a Process Architect. He specialises

in designing gameful and playful processes that engage and empower stakeholders. He has designed innovative co-creation games that are used to generate design principles for 21st Century learning and working environments.

As Head of the four-year Way of Play curriculum, which Bruno has designed at the Willem de Kooning Academy, he leads a dream team of nine tutors who teach students play-based approaches to art and design.

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Graphic designer & Illustrator Rejane Dal Bello (BRUK) is an award winning designer with a great range of iconic case studies. She has gained international recognition working for the biggest Alzheimer Foundation in Holland, rebranded the merger of the Insurance Company ‘Ag2r La Mondiale’ in France, rebranded the City of Delft in Holland, worked on the new brand for the Dutch Government, the 2 year Poster series for the contemporary Amsterdam Symphony in Holland, the Children’s Hospital’s visual identity and the signage system of Peru.

Caetano Carvalho designs environments and situa-

tions to instigate temporary social constructions. He uses performance, sound, light and other electronic gadgets in order to create the cognitive space which holds these social encounters. Caetano Carvalho started working as a web designer in 1996 at a small web bureau. Over the next 10 years this developed into a career working across Europe and South America for international agencies such as BBDO, DDB, Champagne Valentine, Lobo.cx, AQKQ, MTV Brazil. Eventually he got tired of limiting his creativity to Photoshop skills and decided to get some Western art education.

Curator and creative director on cross-disciplinary (social) design projects Joanna van der Zanden (NL) is particularly interested in the exploration of cultural formats where the public at large gets involved in the curatorial process of research, questioning and making. Until January 2010 Van der Zanden was artistic director of Platform21, the incubator of a new design centre in Amsterdam. For 2011 and 2013 she was appointed artistic director of the Rotterdam Design Prize, a bi-annual Dutch design award that aims to stimulate debate on the role of design in a cultural and social context.

Korean designer Young Na Kim has been making waves with her vibrant graphic style and visual language. She was part of the Werkplaats Typografie programme in the Netherlands in 2006 as a Hongik University graduate and launched her own studio two years later. Kim also initiated her own magazine project, umool umool, conceptualised and designed for internationally-recognised GRAPHIC magazine, and participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Graphic Design Worlds at Milan Triennale Museum in 2011 and Millennium Magazines at MoMA in 2012.

Olia Lialina (RU) is one of the net.art pioneers and is a

co-founder of Geocities Research Institute that contains One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, a collection of restored webpages from Geocities, a free hosting service that was closed in 2009 by Yahoo. She studies the visual lexicons as well as the relationships of the members in these internet communities. Alongside her online art practice she writes about new media, digital folklore and the vernacular web, and curates experimental film and video. She is also a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.

Author and curator on graphic design and visual culture, Els Kuijpers (NL) was head of the research centre and editor of academic publications at Jan van Eyck Academy.

Currently she teaches design history and theory at The Royal Academy of Art The Hague and exhibition design at ArtEZ Academie voor Art & Design Zwolle. She curated exhibitions for the Kunsthal Rotterdam and Museum for Communication in The Hague. She authored the books “Ootje Oxenaar, designer + commissioner” and “Strategies in communication design” and writes for Creative Review, Étapes and De Groene Amsterdammer.

Rick Poynor (UK) is a writer, lecturer and curator, special-

izing in design, photography and visual culture. In 1990, he was the founding editor of Eye Magazine, building the magazine into a leading international review of graphic design during his seven years as editor. Eye Magazine was not his only worldwide influential project: in 2003, he co-founded the Design Observer website, where he writes a weekly column about photography. His critical writing has also appeared in Blueprint, Print, Icon, Frieze, Creative Review, Etapes, Metropolis, Adbusters, and many other publications.

Paul Soulellis (USA) is a New York-based teacher, artist,

designer and publisher. He founded his research-based graphic design and publishing studio Counterpractice in 2014, as an inaugural member of NEW INC at the New Museum. He is a contributing editor and curator at Rhizome and an Assistant Professor of graphic design at Rhode Island School of Design. Soulellis’ work explores experimental publishing and network culture. He frequently participates on panels, develops workshops and delivers talks in the US and Europe; recent engagements include Google Design, Printed Matter, Miss Read Berlin Art Book Fair, Art Directors Club of Tulsa, and others.

The experimental, critical art/design research practice Thought Collider comprises the work of Mike Thompson (US) and Susana Cámara Leret (ES). Their projects focus on the exploration of the meanings and values that can be derived from alternative ways of experiencing built and mediated environments, motivated by emerging technologies.

Aside from self-initiated projects they develop consultancy work for industry and academia to activate novel insights and innovation. Regular collaborators include Waag Society, Wageningen University, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and MU Eindhoven.

Alexandre Motta (NL) is a research scientist in

Immunology at Unilever R&D in Vlaardingen (Nederland).

He has worked as a fundamental researcher for more than 15 years. He holds a postdoctoral degree in Immunology (allergic asthma) from UMC Groningen (Nederland), and a PhD in immunology (respiratory allergy) at Pierre et Marie Curie Paris University. He collaborates with artists and designers on various projects on the border between art and science.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.

com. Based in Seoul, YHCHI create their signature

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tutors & speakers open set 2016

animated texts set to their own music in 26 languages and have shown many of them at some of the most important art institutions in the world, including the Tate, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Whitney Museum and New Museum, New York. Young-hae Chang (KR) and Marc Voge (US), the two principals of YHCHI, were recent Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellows.

René Boer (NL) works as an urban and architectural researcher, writer and activist in Amsterdam and Cairo, is managing editor at the Failed Architecture research studio and is part of the Non-fiction team. He is currently a critic-in-residence at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and is working on a documentary on Amsterdam’s A10 ring road. He is an advisor for the architecture think tank and publishing house Archis/Volume, where he worked on the research project and exhibition The Good Cause: Architecture of Peace. He has written for, among others, Harvard Design Magazine, Volume and Studio.

Max Bruinsma (NL) is an independent design critic, editor, curator and editorial designer. Since 1985, his critical writings have been featured regularly in major Dutch art and design journals and in a range of international design publications. In 1997, he succeeded founding editor Rick Poynor as editor-in-chief of Eye, the international review of graphic design. He has been the editor of the Dutch design magazine Items, he has published and edited several books on graphic and new media design, and has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

Theo Deutinger (NL) is an architect, urban planner, writer

and designer of socio-cultural maps. His work has been published in various magazines including Wired, Domus, and Mark Magazine. Recent projects include the book ‘Help Me I Am Blind’ with the artist Heidi Specker, a collaborative exhibition design with the Bauhaus Dessau in Berlin and a research-design contribution to the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism & Architecture in collaboration with Droog. Theo Deutinger holds lecture and teaching positions with various institutions including Harvard GSD, Strelka Institute Moscow and the Bauhaus in Dessau.

Prof. Dr. Ben Schouten (NL) is a Full Professor of Playful Interactions at the Industrial Design Department, Eindhoven University of Technology and Lector of Play & Civic Media Research at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He is an advisor for the European Commission on the ‘Internet of Things’ as well as for the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, responsible for E-culture.

Josephine Bosma (NL) is a journalist and critic. She fo-

cuses on art in the context of the Internet. In 1997 Bosma became one of the key figures participating in and molding the then new sphere of critical Internet discourse (and practice) taking place in email lists such as Nettime and Rhizome. Since then her writings on net art and net culture have appeared in numerous magazines, books and catalogues, both on- and offline. Since 2011 Josephine Bosma has been an external PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.

tutors & speakers open set seouls sessions Karen Lancel is a part of the duo Karen Lancel and

Mediabus

Hermen Maat, who design objects, projections and digital networks to create Meeting Places in city public spaces.

These Meeting Places are designed as seductive, visual performances and installations. Each Meeting Place or social sculpture functions as an ‘artistic social lab’ in which the artists invite their audience as co-researchers. Through their artworks Lancel and Maat research contemporary social systems in a mediated society. The Meeting Places are shown internationally in dynamic urban public spaces and smart cities, such as museums, squares, theatre halls, trains stations; among others in the cities of Seoul, New York, Melbourne, Shanghai, Beijing, Istanbul, Paris, London, Amsterdam.

Mediabus is a small publishing house based in Seoul, Korea. It was founded in 2007 by independent curators with the collaboration of designers. Mediabus publishes zines & books, produces and distributes, organizes exhibitions & events, directs a workshop, and carries out project or book commissions for companies & institutions.

Mediabus is run by the director Kyung Yong LIM, and the editor in cheif Helen Ku.

Lancel & Maat collaborate with cultural institutions worldwide and contribute to the most prestigious shows, such as the 56th Venice Art Biennale: China Pavillion; TodaysArt conference; ISEA Istanbul and Istanbul Biennale Turkey; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam NL; Banff New Media Institute and many others.

Jeroen Barendse (Studio LUST). LUST is a multidisci-

plinary design practice based in The Hague, Netherlands.

LUST works in a broad spectrum of media including traditional printwork and book design, abstract cartography and data-visualisations, new media and Interactive Installations, and architectural graphics.

Annelys de Vet is a founder of bureau DEVET, which

focuses on graphic research and cultural design. DEVET’s work explores the role of design in relation to the public and political discourse. The practice of design is manifested as a critical agency of social processes, which can govern dialogues, reflection, understanding and debate.

DEVET initiated a series of subjective atlases that map countries from a human perspective. Previous editions concerned Palestine (2007), Serbia (2009), Mexico (2011), Hungary (2011), Fryslân (2013) and the Belgium province Hainaut (2013).* Upcoming editions include Colombia (2015) and Pakistan (2016).

Dr. Koert van Mensvoort is an artist and philosopher best

known for his work on the philosophical concept of Next Nature, which revolves around the idea that our technological environment has become so complex, omnipresent and autonomous that it is best perceived as a nature of its own. It is his aim to better understand our co-evolutionary relationship with technology and help set out a track towards a future that is rewarding for both humankind and the planet at large.

Van Mensvoort studied computer science, philosophy and art. He received a MSc in computer sciences from Eindhoven University of Technology (1997) a MFA from the Sandberg Institute, Masters of Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2000) and a PhD in industrial design from Eindhoven University of Technology (2009).

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Sulki Choi and Min Choi are graphic designers living and

working in Seoul, Korea. Sulki studied communication design at Chungang University, Korea, and Min at Seoul National University, Korea. Both earned their MFA degrees in graphic design at Yale University, New Haven, US. We worked as researchers in design at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, from 2003 until 2005.

They have participated in many exhibitions at institutions including Frankfurter Kunstverein, International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno, Ningbo Graphic Design Biennale, Anyang Public Art Project, Arko Art Center, Platform Seoul, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 2006, they held our first exclusive exhibition at the Gallery Factory in Seoul, for which we received the Art Award of the Year from the Arts Council Korea. Additionally, they also make and publish books through our own Specter Press, often collaborating with contemporary Korean artists and writers. The list of their clients is impressive: BMW Guggenheim Lab, a collaborative project initiated by the Guggenheim Foundation and BMW, during its three-year operation in New York, Berlin and Mumbai, for which they created an interactive graphic identity system based on on-line participation. In 2013, Min curated Typojanchi, an international biennial of typography in Seoul, as the curatorial director.

Jinyeoul Jung is a graphic designer and professor at

Kookmin University, Seoul, where as a student he pursued studies in philosophy and visual communication. He then completed an MFA at Yale in graphic design. He has received awards from ADC, OUTPUT and TDC. With Kim Hyeongjae, he published The Hidden Space, an examination of space and urban social phenomena. He is interested in the relationship between words and identity: how events, ideas, peoplesounds, places are given names, and what these verbal constructs reveal about their intangible counterparts. Typography is the visual representation of these names, and the human complexities that precede them.

Peter Bilak is a designer based in The Hague,

Netherlands. His truly multi-disciplinary practice involves the fields of editorial, graphic and type design, as well as publishing, writing, collaboration on creation of modern dance performances, teaching and lecturing.

In 1999 started Typotheque type foundry, in 2000 founded, edited and designed art & design journal DOT DOT DOT; in 2009 co-founded The Indian Type Foundry; and most recently the excellent Works That Work magazine in 2012 – where he’s also editor.

Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho’s recent artistic en-

deavors center on News from Nowhere, a collaboration project that focuses on creating an interdisciplinary platform. News from Nowhere series was first presented at Kassel dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) which expanded as a site-specific project as it travelled to the Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013). The next edition of the project will unveil at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich in August 2015. The duo has participated in other notable group exhibitions including Fukuoka Triennale, Fukuoka (2014); Beyond and Between, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2014); Singapore Art Biennale, Singapore (2013); Home Works 6, Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2013); Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); and Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2012).

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table of content 8

allow multiplicity Irina Shapiro, artistic director

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nostalgia for a future past Max Bruinsma, design critic, editor and curator

seoul sessions 30

in its content and backend shopping list for time travelers Sulki & Min, design studio

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imagining new eurasia Jihoi Lee, curator

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civility in a mediated society & workshop ‹the body keeps it in mind› Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, Lancel / Maat

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dongdaemun design plaza René Boer, Failed Architecture

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pyramid of technology Koert van Mensvoort, Next Nature

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the human computer Jeroen Barendse, Studio LUST

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prepare yourself for future neighborhood life!

Jin Jung, designer & Nathalie Shin, curator Total Museum

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utopian education & workshop ‘unmapping the world’ Annelys de Vet, DEVET

summer school 74

the future of memory & workshop ‘let’s go camping!’

Sebastian Groes, writer and academic

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networked collective memory Patty Jansen, former participant Open Set

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20 years mbcbftw & workshop ‘diving into one terabyte of kilobyte age archive’ Olia Lialina, net artist and critic

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digging and redevelopment & workshop ‘one day collection for a future project’ Joanna van der Zanden, Throwing Snowballs

106 a sense of whatʼs to come Susana Camara Leret & Mike Thompson, Thought Collider 102 close encounters of the third kind. decoding information for future communication Rejane dal Bello, Liza Enebeis & Bruno Setola 116

where it as if Bik van der Pol, art duo

118 web-to-print-to-street Paul Soulellis, designer 122 greatest hit Na Kim, designer 124 from cabin to castle to capsule: the end of design YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, art duo 126

staging the message. strategy, method and language use Rick Poynor, critic & Els Kuijpers, writter, curator

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allow multiplicity! irina shapiro Artistic director Open Set Open Set 2016 was developed in a time of crisis, a time of fear — the fear of losing European national identities and their historical values, losing the certain order of things. I am referring to the process of European society welcoming refugees from Syria, who represent ‘different’ traditions, unknown to the European cultural majority. It is a crisis of collective memories and national identities: “We are in need of a narrative that binds us in a uniting feeling, a togetherness...”1 Togetherness is what creates ‘Us’. It’s Us who face the fear of uncertainty: new unknown friends of Our children who might influence them in an unknown way; new unknown neighbors with unknown habits and rituals; unknown changes in Our labor market, etc.

Brexit, the British withdrawal from the European Union, is a very fine example of the public’s reaction to uncertainty.

But when did this incredible need for certainty begin? It was the mid 17th century — the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The end of this particular conflict heralded new relationships between science, religion and the individual, where, according to the argument of philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009), only one attitude towards these was accepted. He identifies it as the very moment that (European) society sought an ‘absolute certainty’ in these fields. The pluralism of the 16th century and differences of ideologies and traditions had resulted in the years of terror: “if we do not have an absolute certainty we cut each other’s throats” — says Bruno Latour while elaborating on Toulmin’s argument. People will fight for the ‘usual order of things’, close the borders, rather than question their instinct for certainty.

Objective evidence Absolute certainty is not only abstract and does not only appear on a societal level.

It manifests itself in forms of communication and memorizing things in a particular form or image. “Collective memory does take on corporeal form in means of memorials, museums and lives on in the minds of the people who feel aligned with this specific memory.”2 If we look at the reasons and methods that memories are fixed in the minds of people, we again come back to Toulmin’s argument.

Visual manifestation of absolute certainty provides an absolute clarity of narrative, and suggests a particular interpretation of the visual materials/documents. This interpretation of conventional narratives from the past is usually characterized as objective, common, dogmatic, etc., and these visual narratives from the past are the instruments through which we understand our world and history. But the manipulated order of their interpretation also influences the way we understand the world.

In one of the following articles Networked Collective Memory (p. 25) Patty Jansen describes this influence in the words of sociologist Manuel Castells: “History is first organized according to the availability of visual material, then submitted to the computerized possibility of selecting seconds of frames to be pieced together, or split apart, according to specific discourses.” It is interesting that the manipulation which Castells introduces is unseen by the masses and is eroded by time. What we are left 8

open set 2016 | catalogue

with is an archive of visual materials, or objective evidence, which is our instrument for understanding the world.

Nowadays when we say ‘visual narratives’ we don’t refer to text documents, but more and more to images (including images of text). It does not matter how surreal these images might be, they still (paradoxically) pretend to be objective.

What makes our contemporary visual environment and images particularly evidential or objective? “Technical images are essentially different from traditional images.

Traditional images are produced by men and technical images by apparatus3. The painter places symbols onto an environment in order to mean a particular scene.

Apparatus are black boxes that are programmed to devour symptoms of scenes and to spew out these symptoms in the form of images. Apparatus transcode symptoms into images. Technical images pretend […] that they are symptomatic, “objective.””4 — explains philosopher and writer Vilém Flusser. The symptoms create the effect of evidence. “The difference between a symbol and a symptom is (when) [..] the word “dog” symbolizes and the tracks on the ground symptomatize the animal.”4 If a technical image – any photo or video – shows the footsteps of a dog on the Moon, it still irradiates the confident message that the animal was there. This confidence of the message (of the image), which pretends to be objective, hides the surrealism of this situation.

The further editing, arranging and manipulation of the images, whose objectivity is unconsciously accepted by us, creates an ‘everyday’ visual environment (online or offline): a playful, overcrowded, destructive visual narrative which does not allow us anymore to read the very content of this narrative. It is produced to irradiate messages on the unconscious level. We just ‘swallow’ the content, unconsciously storing all messages without filtering and reflection. We swallow the messages which are hidden behind the content — the unconscious messages, — while still accepting them as reality.

During the Open Set Seoul Sessions5, I struggled to read the messages on the streets. Not necessarily because the signs were written in Korean (English was used as well), but because of their great number: texts, drawings, brands, neon, colors, shapes and forms, human and animal faces. All together they did not make any sense. At first glance this visual informational environment communicated that it did not want me to know or understand anything. But at the same time in combination with Seoul’s progressive urban landscape this ‘technological’/ smart environment paradoxically also communicated an image of a successful, progressive place.

The objective visual narrative of the city was of a dynamically developing and technological capital. But the unconscious message was that I was not meant to see and understand what lies beneath this surface.

Emancipation from objectivity How can we emancipate ourselves from the illusion of objectivity, to give space to our own thoughts and interpretations of the messages hidden behind the content?

Flusser suggests a recipe: “‘Imagination is the specifically human capacity to step back from the objective world, and then to use what one sees there as a model for future manipulations of the objective world. […] Where does one step back to? […]

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One steps back into oneself. […] (One’s self ) has acquired such elegant names like ‘subjectivity‘ and ‘existence’.”6 This subjective manipulation of the objective world — a very interconnected process — is the key to thinking about the future as anything other than a collective programmed destiny.

Imagination is a tricky word. In the twenty-first century the term imagination is associated with virtual or surreal imagination, a way of escaping from reality. I would specify that the imagination used in this paper differs from this in its purpose. The purpose is not to escape from, but to relate in a subjective way to reality. To act consciously within reality.

Flusser’s recipe requires a) a (subjective) imagination towards the future and b) (collective) memories which are the ‘objective’ system of knowledge, values and tradition.

These two — subjective imagination and objective memories — are interconnected, but it’s critical to distinguish them in order to know where ‘one’s self’ is, to allow subjectivity to interpret and find itself in the objective world. Objectivity is a manifestation of the system: objective calculations of a camera to project images, or objectivity of the filters for information. The same objective manifestation can be found in the standardization of knowledge production, educational and institutional systems, cultural economy and behavior in online social media.

Objectivity comes when we need to settle (establish) the order of things — when we need absolute certainty. Subjectivity implies the diversity of an individual ‘self’ and incalculable relationships between ‘selves’. Subjectivity abstracts us out the objective world. Objectivity keeps us within the objective world and does not allow us to imagine a future which does not belong to this world (or in other words, to the standardized system or apparatus). Subjectivity implies a multiplicity of futures: “We should, then, not fear the future, but accept the current indeterminacy and uncertainties with a spirit of openness and plasticity that posits the increasingly conditional and relational nature of life in the twenty-first century as a form of control […]” — says dr. Sebastian Groes, one of the contributors of this Reader.7 What is this plasticity and openness described by Groes? I would say it’s an emancipation from the control of the system: emancipation from standardization and objectivity. Plasticity means subjectivity and tolerance to the multiple subjectivity of others. In the end, plasticity is about the question: how can we (different, subjective selves) live and work together in this increasingly uncertain order? In the multiplicity of subjective selves?

Examples of contemporary contexts Earlier in this paper I introduced the connection between certainty and images: images are basically manifestations of certainty (or uncertainty, depending on the purpose). Therefore the figure of the image maker — designers as well as artists, film makers, photographers — is equally relevant in this broad social context.

Two practical examples of contemporary fields where image makers can work towards the emancipation from the system are online social networks and science and bio engineering. In the context of corporate platforms such as Facebook (or similar) we act within their parameters, we play with the tools which are prescribed by them.

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Art and design can help us to expand the pallet of Facebook tools, but it can only result in still acting within the limits of this system. It does not matter how creative this play seems to be, that creativity is predicted by the system and remains the “thoughts and actions that are programmed by the apparatus”8 If we, again thanks to critical art or design projects, become aware of the hidden agendas of Facebook, the question is not simply solved automatically — we still take part in social platforms, as it’s part of a bigger picture of our life: connecting with friends, promoting events, playing and having fun. Would the total rejection of the system be the answer? The challenge is to create the possibility not of just being aware, but to have the ‘food’, form and tools required to act critically within the system. I specifically find relevant the projects which try to find a solution within a collective debate, like Immaterial Labour Union, initiated by Lídia Pereira. This project includes debates of concrete proposals on specific social media issues. The proposals range in format from academic texts, to poetry, illustration, photography, digital collage and personal rants.

In the context of the contemporary scientific debate, one question that is discussed is how we, humans, relate to the living world — to the systems of nature, their meaning and evolution. The ‘invisible’ work scientists do in this field could be compared to the closed black box of the system. What we (society) will see as the result of this work is new definitions of food, healthcare and nature, which will be introduced but not explained. An image, and therefore the image makers, makes this sophisticated, technical scientific process tangible and accessible to the broad audience, allowing them (people) to relate to this debate. An image has a potential to open this black box.

Remarkable examples of such art manifestations are the projects of Next Nature in the Netherlands, an organization which explores how our technological environment becomes a new nature of its own, which involves many artists and academics, organizes events and initiates publications, as well as the multi-annual project Soft Control in Slovenia — which aims to open scientific labs and theory to artists and to the large public, includes educational activities, performances, events and art projects.

Multiplicity & the curriculum of the Open Set program I would now like to focus further on the contemporary urgency for multiple subjectivity in relation to the Open Set program, in a) the production of visual environments (image-making) and b) in the ‘production’ of the producers of the visual environments (education of the image-makers). These are interconnected: the institutional apparatus (education) ‘frames’ the producers of the ‘objective visual environment’.

And this environment ‘frames’ public imagination towards the future. There is no neutral act in image-making. Any small announcement on the street, any bus ticket or flyer, as well as magazine or newspaper, music video or dance performance, website interface or online game — is the food/lexicon of the subjective imagination, or on the other hand, for the “thoughts and actions that are programmed by the apparatus (the system)”.

The design field is a struggle between objectivity and subjectivity. The systematic and objective approach is being promoted by data-informatics, game theory, interaction design, survey design. Design approaches which empower and welcome subjective interpretation by the audience are considered more artistic and experimental.

I would not differentiate these two based on how they are presented in the field or operate in the market. If it’s just about the network and market, I would say, both 11

‘objective and subjective’ designs are ways to industrialize and standardize creative activity such as design. I would suggest to look at it from the position of a designer towards the audience. Who is the audience? Is it an objective mass of consumers?

What is the capacity of the audience to read and understand the messages? How should the audience react to a piece of design — should there be room for misunderstanding or misuse of the design proposal?

If we start from the audience and the role of the designer in society, the question of what is the right definition of design becomes less important. If we think about the audience not as a (small or big) standardized crowd, we are no longer working within the standard meanings and manifestations of design — within the standardization of the styles, criteria, networks and profiles of successful results. Those are not essential anymore. Design inspired by the audience and the personal commitment and curiosity of the maker helps us to break open the definitions and functions of design. This formula helps us to eliminate the competition and open up the potential applications of ‘subjective’ design.

This position is at the heart of the Open Set curriculum. The combination of the very diverse creative approaches presented by our tutors, regardless of their ‘specialization’ — brand design, experimental communication design, net artists, speculation critical design, choreographers, etc. — helps to unlearn the (unconscious) standardized, which means in many cases institutionalized, objectively correct basics of what the participants consider to be design. The tutors involved in the program share the opinion that the liberation of the material surface/visual culture towards the individuality of the audience is vital. But they address it from absolutely different techniques, contexts and inspirations. With this approach the participants are confronted with many different ways of creating and different contexts of manifestation. Through this confrontation they attempt to unlearn the conventional objective (from within their own context) definition of design and allow multiple applications of design. They define their own subjectivity in the non-institutional, self-organized structure.

Open Set has developed into a platform which exists outside, in-between and in collaboration with institutions. The Open Set space is a continuation and reflection on existing educational institutions. We should not forget that the experts and the staff of Open Set represent institutions (by being either teachers or alumni). Starting from Open Set’s operational structure, to the network and relationships within the organization, Open Set aims to undo and interrupt the existing system of organization of ‘academia’ and professional networks, with the purpose, again, to introduce subjective multiplicity and to oppose to standardisation. This goal is addressed by facilitating the internal conditions of the educational platform, which stimulate: a) the curiosity of the participants; 2) the multidisciplinary aspect of the subjects and debates, which can bridge an art/design practice with current political and social situations; c) and solidarity, meaning the bond amongst the participants, and the key to building networks and collaborations.

These internal conditions are related to each other, as curiosity helps a participant to recognize the social relevance of his/her practice and capability to collaborate with different fields (the multidisciplinary aspect), which, together with the support of 12

one’s colleagues (solidarity) can empower this young artist or designer to discover the best individual version of his/her practice. This empowerment creates a further step, that of discovering the social urgency of his/her artistic practice and therefore becoming an agent for social ‘contribution’ (whether this means understanding or changing the situation).

External conditions (such as, primarily, sustainability and infrastructure) influence the ‘survival’ capability of the platform (as with any school9), although it’s fascinating to think about how the internal organization of participants, tutors and involved parties could sustain the platform further.

Plasticity and multiplicity are very challenging to achieve. As Groes argues, we need them in order to survive. As Flusser suggests — we need plasticity and multiplicity to emancipate ourselves from the regime of an apparatus’ programming. But as Toulmin demonstrates, they can provoke a panic as a reaction. How can images contribute positively to this challenge? And more importantly — how can the image makers, seriously considering the societal impact of their practice, use design (or other image producing disciplines) to facilitate plasticity and multiplicity in the minds of millions?

1,2. Patty Jansen, Networked Collective Memory, Open Set Reader, p. 24 3. The general definition of Apparatus, which Flusser offers in his Towards a Philosophy of Photography: “It’s a complex plaything, which is so complex, that those playing with it are not able to get to the bottom of it; its game consists of combination of the symbols contained within its program; at the same time this program was installed by a metaprogram and the game results in further programs; whereas fully automated apparatuses can do without human intervention, amny apparatuses require the human being as a player and a functionary.”

4. Vilém Flusser, Post-History, Flusser Archive Collection, edited by Siegfried Zielinski, Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis 2013, p. 91-98.

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5. Open Set Seouls Sessions was the first part of the Memories of the Future annual program and took part in Seoul, February 2016 6. Vilém Flusser, Toward a Philosophy of Photography, essay for Art Journal, to Max Kozloff, p. 2 7. Sebastian Groes, The Future of Memory, Open Set Reader, p. 21 8. Vilém Flusser, Toward a Philosophy of Photography, essay for Art Journal, to Max Kozloff, p. 2 9. Greek skholē, meaning of leisure, philosophy, place where lectures are given

nostalgia for a future past max bruinsma From: De Gids, volume 175, nr. 3 (2012) SPEAKER: OPEN SET SYMPOSIUM, 2016 27/07 LOCATION: WITTE DE WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

What on earth has become of “the year 2000”? As a teenager growing up in the 1960s I pictured us in the new millennium, smoothly hovering along the streets, surrounded in radiant modernity by ‘automatic’ things. A world which was visualized by the Das brothers as if it was already there. That was the lure of the year 2000 — everything would be different then. The promises of the present, budding in a faltering technology, would magically become reality in the year 2000.

With the futile panic of the millennium bug, this enchantment has evaporated like air from a deflating balloon. Our wild imaginations of the future shrinking away, we now look back. How cozy it used to be. And the future looked so much cheerier, back then.

The 1960s and ‘70s were a time in which utopia was reinvented. After the War, our parents had rebuilt the world from scratch and decided it was time to finish the job permanently now. What had remained standing during the war was in many places enthusiastically torn down after all, or at best seen as obstacle of progress. Nostalgic lumber. I remember with horror how close a large part of the old Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt neighborhood — where I now live — came to falling prey to the tabula rasa approach with which the planners of the city’s subway looked at the terrain above it. Still, their motives were optimistic, built on a vision of cheerful and hard working folks in a smoothly organized city which would facilitate life as a well oiled engine. “Away with all your superstitions”, the social democrat governors and engineers of Amsterdam must have hummed while erasing the filigree of the city’s medieval center, deemed unfit for modern life.

Their utopia is now dystopia. Awake, the dream of radiant modernity appears as a dysfunctional suburb. The year 2000 — so long the gauging point of a great future — transpired to be a fleeting moment of intoxication, after which everything returned to normal. Not a dream but reality. It is like the philosopher Ernst Bloch remarked: “The here-and-now lacks distance, which, although alienating, produces clarity and overview.1 Therefore, immediacy, in which reality takes place, is experienced as essentially darker than the dream image, even from time to time without form, and void.”

Not Yet Bloch is the philosopher of utopia as guideline for acting hopefully in the grey reality of the now. His stressing of the importance and value of the present is remarkable and in his days — the first half of the last century, a bloody battle ground of utopias of various kinds — almost masochistic. Bloch is less concerned with a specific goal as he is with the way to reach it, the process that takes place in the now. The essence of his philosophy is to regard the world and any meaningful human activity in it as 14

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“noch nicht.” These two words — “not yet” — are the most concise way to connect present and future. Bloch contrasts his thought with that of Freud, who according to him doesn’t reach beyond “nicht mehr” — “no more.” For isn’t the Freudian subconscious the forgotten, the repressed, the “no-more-conscious” which has quite literally sunk below the threshold of consciousness? “All psychoanalysis,” Bloch summarizes his critique on Freud, “is therefore by necessity retrospective.” As phenomenologically inspired Marxist he sees the Freudian subconscious as an expression of a bourgeois “class beyond its expiry date, in a society without future.” Aurora versus twilight: “The not-yet-conscious is the psychic imagination of the not-yet-existent in a certain time and in its world, at the frontier of the world.” The imagination of man, daydreaming.

In all his future-prone idealism — and he is among many who made the mistake of defending Stalinism as ‘realized utopia’ — Bloch is primarily the philosopher of the dynamic now, of ‘yet.’ That distinguishes him from utopists who pin down the imagined future as something that is a fact for all intents and purposes — something that merely needs to be realized. It is the planners’ hubris, the intractable ambition of designers, of modernism tout court. For designers and planners in the modernist tradition the design is a model, which once made is fixed — not a proposal but a prescription. Not a process but a product. The result is that the design’s links with present and past are severed. The design is ‘immediate’ in the sense Bloch meant, and yet distanced. Real and yet unrealized. A modernist design is absolute. It exists beyond time.2 The modernist claim of objectivity and the ensuing procedures for design and social construction have been increasingly criticized from the 1960s onward.

Functionalism — modernism’s design methodology — reduces not only the built environment and the useful products that furnish it to their respective functions, but also the people in it. One is a pedestrian or driver, clerk or worker, traveller or resident, and design provides each of those functions with a tailored environment: 15

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bicycle paths, highways, office towers, factories, train stations, suburbs. The connections between all of this are a matter of logistics, not of sentiment. But sentiment is hard to eradicate. The defenders of the old tight city fabric with its small houses in the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt neighborhood grounded their actions on a sentiment, which connected the past to the future while improvising the present. Working from a ‘pre-consciousness’ of a better world — not a grand design. Human dimension and human action versus the ‘human function.’ Theirs was the not-yet-crystalized imagination of the daydream — not that of the Das brothers. In the daydream, according to Bloch, “the important destination of the not-yet-conscious is revealed;” hope, a sentiment that demands people to “actively leap into the burgeoning world.” There is a DIY element in this thought that makes Bloch topical once again in our times...

Kulturindustrie Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, utopia has become suspect once again. Countless thinkers have declared and analyzed its end, and while they were at it also proclaimed the end of history, politics and, why not, the future itself. It seemed that, in the 1990s, at the threshold of the year 2000, we were not simply on the brink of a new era, but that the new millennium would herald the end of time per se. Perhaps Karl Mannheim, the knowledge sociologist, was right when — even before the war — he worried that “in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideology and utopian elements”?

Mannheim’s fears resound in a recent essay by cultural critic Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair.3 He remarked that in the past twenty years — roughly the first two decades of the 21st century — there have been massive changes especially in the technological organization of our lives, but that these are hardly reflected in stylistic innovation, apart from a few really new digital gadgets. This is strange. Compare and contrast the attire and interior decoration of someone in 1992 with how the same person dressed and lived in 1972, and you’ll see an almost total make-over. Try and do the same with images from 1992 and 2012 and you’ll have great difficulty assigning each the right date. Andersen calls it the two Great Paradoxes of Contemporary Cultural History.

The first is that the past older than twenty years seems to take place on a different planet while the recent past has been the spitting image of the present for the last two decades. The second paradox is that this freezing of stylistic innovation coincides with a public obsession with style on a scale never seen before. Strangely enough, he writes, this intensified consciousness of style does not lead people to look for new and unseen things, but to hark back to what has been there all along. It has been observed by others as well, that the past decades are marked by a penchant toward the past, a nostalgic hindsight. The year 2000 has become retro.

Andersen explains the current lack of stylistic innovation in part as a compensation for radical changes in other social arenas — the digital revolution, the ongoing reshuffling of world power and other disruptions; nostalgia-in-times-of-insecurity flavored with a hint of Decline-of-the-West. But he locates the main cause in the economization of culture, which is fatal for culture’s aesthetic and stylistic innovation: “We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle — economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past 16

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and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.” That this vicious cycle is not broken is caused by the intensive commodification of culture. Self expression, this essential driver of style, has become a consumer product available for larger markets than ever, which consequently is provided as mass product by an ever growing Kulturindustrie, as Adorno termed it.

Thinking of Adorno — read through the lens of Baudrillard —, one may also see the stylistic stagnation as a perversion of functionalism, specifically when it comes to the design assumptions behind these mass products. For modernist functionalism is at the root of design; a design needs to be functional. But functional for what, for whom? Once, this functionality lay in the inherent usefulness of the product, the way it fulfilled a user’s need. Nowadays, the focus has shifted to how the product is functional to its producer. Anything that keeps the wheels of industry turning is functional. Use as social function is narrowed (or dumbed) down to economic function, and revenue dictates the production process. So when a product sells well, its manufacturer’s competitor will not think “how can we make something like this, but better?” but “how can we make this same thing, cheaper?”

The all important function of a product thus becomes its potential to hitch a ride on the bandwagon of commercial success. Innovation stagnates while the market — read: the producer — thirsts after new products. What, in this mirror palace of self-replicating life-style industries, is more obvious than copying proven successes from the past, marginally adapting them and market them as new?

Nostalgia The introduction, around the year 2000, of the Volkswagen New Beetle (1998) and the Chrysler PT Cruiser (2000), heralded the definitive demise of modernism. The only functionality of the design of these cars was a cheeky sentimental one. The PT Cruiser was a family car inspired by cool hot rods from the 1930s and 1940s, lowbrowed muscle cars in which American young men used to dare each other, cruising along Main Street or in hair raising short track races in the suburbs. The PT Cruiser placed this testosterone surrogate in the hands of the average office clerk to pose like a rebel without a cause and still have place for his two-and-a-half kid on the back seat. Convenient. Sales statistics showed that the car was especially popular with women, which was probably even more lethal for its robust image than the weak engine and the poor driving qualities. Production of the car, a huge success in its early years, was terminated in 2011. It had become outmoded.

The evolution of the Volkswagen Beetle to the New Beetle reflects the course of recent history; from diligent thrift to droll opulence. The New Beetle is technically closer to its current bigger brothers like Mercedes or Audi than to the bashful working man’s car it once was. It’s a lot fatter too. The Beetle and Cruiser can be filed as two of the earliest large-scale retro products of the new millennium. The start of a still rising swell of things that pretend they are of old, icons of a nostalgic longing for an idealized past. On the road they were followed by updated versions of the Fiat 500 ‘Topolino’ and the Mini, cars once designed for the common man and now upgraded to toys for young and hip urbanites. Fitted with everything a modern car needs on the inside in terms of power, ease of use, safety and econo17

my; pure styling on the outside. Remarkable in the design of all of these cars is its cuteness. A cartoonish charm of which the effect is comparable with the smile of nostalgic recognition triggered by old photos; how young and sweet and clumsy we were back then. And so authentic.

It is nostalgia of the sweetest kind. A longing for better days, softened by additions of luxury we would definitively not want to do without. The simplicity of the past with today’s amenities. If you’ve ever driven an original Topolino, you’ll recognize the incongruities. You can also call it a disorder of the imagination, the description given to the pathology of nostalgia by 19th century medicine.

Nostalgia is a word that, syntactically at least, does what it says: it seems to hark back to an august past but is in fact a relatively recent construction. The classical Greek sound denotes a problem that was only diagnosed in the 17th century. A Swiss doctor, Hofer, used the combination of νόστος (home coming) and ἄλγος (pain, longing) to describe the sometimes lethal afflictions and panic attacks he found with Swiss mercenary soldiers abroad. In the ensuing medical literature, nostalgia was classified as variant of melancholy and as such a suicide risk. In the 19th- and 20th century this psychopathology gives way to a more general description — a curable yearning for a geographic home changes into an incurable ache for times gone.

Already in 1798 Kant had remarked that people who returned to their coveted Heim after years of absence were often disappointed; they had not so much longed after the place they had left, as the times they had lived there. Nostalgia is the woeful response to the fact that one cannot turn back time.

In her essay ‘Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern,’ Linda Hutcheon reminds us of this history of the term, departing from the thought that postmodern irony seems to preclude any idea of nostalgia. 4 Insatiable longing doesn’t tolerate ironic distance 18

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and critique. But Hutcheon — a leading expert on postmodern irony — sees a parallel between the two concepts: their two-faced nature. They are both ambiguous, a term with paradigmatic status in postmodern theory. Irony says what it doesn’t say; and nostalgia projects an idealized past onto a disappointing present. The effect of both terms — of both affects — is disrupting. Of course, as Hutcheon also observes, there is undiluted nostalgia, which radically rejects the present and obsessively tries to re-stage the past. Disney’s Celebration, for instance, a gated community just outside Disneyland in Florida, is a decidedly un-ironic retro-utopia, a really existing fantasy modeled on a 1950s version of the American Dream. But the cars mentioned above seamlessly match nostalgia and irony. As Hutcheon remarks in another context: “...invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is — a comment on the present as much as on the past.” In the postmodern version, that is, “nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized.”

In our context, we are reminded of Bloch’s critical view on psychoanalysis. For the rise of postmodernism coincides with a renewed interpretation of Freud’s work, and it is not so hard to view postmodernism’s fascination for his “necessarily retrospective” analysis as sign of our culture’s uneasy relationship with the present. Nostalgia and irony are expressions of this unease: they undermine the here-and-now. “If the present is considered irredeemable,” says Hutcheon, “you can look either back or forward.” That is also the analogy between nostalgia and utopia; they both reject the present, albeit in opposite directions. Still nostalgia is not necessarily the reverse of utopia, as cultural historian Andreas Huyssen remarks.5 He infers a shift in our time of the “temporal organization of the utopian imagination from its futuristic pole toward the pole of remembrance.” Utopia and the past, rather than utopia and the year 2000. If in other words we are imagining a future now, it is that of the past.

A past in which we could still daydream expectantly about how nice life would be thirty to forty years from now. But that is a future without present, or — worse — one that considers the present as its repressed failure. The present of disenchanted baby-boomers who have abandoned their former utopian zeal and have left any serious engagement as ‘so nineteen sixties’ behind them. It is the present of “the prison of mere presence, in which we cannot even move nor breathe,” as Bloch formulated it in his late years. This insight emphatically points us to the necessity of utopia, once again. Not as a model but as a prospect for action, as pre-consciousness of a deep rooted longing for a future which we have not yet realized. Or in the words of Huyssen: “The end of utopia, it turns out, is the end of the real.”

1. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Frankfurt am Main, 1959 (written in the US between 1938 and 1947) 2. Max Bruinsma, An Ideal Design is ‘Not Yet’.

Amsterdam, 1999 3. Kurt Andersen, You Say You Want a Devolution? Vanity Fair, January 2012

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4. Linda Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern. Toronto, 1998 5. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories - Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York, 1995

networked collective memory patty jansen Participant Summer School 2015 in Rotterdam

A nation challenged ‘portraits of grief’ (2001), The New York Times

The past has become remarkably adjustable. The digital network allows users to actively and simultaneously produce and reproduce their and other versions of a collective past. Collective memories are open to entire communities and their form has become as fluid and in flux as their traditional concept inherently is. A generative multi-memory is created, in which the browser is used as a collective memory-tool, providing the possibility to react and upload real-time. We can write our past for the future to come from our homes, in our chairs, at our desks. By circulating images and image sequences online, the image repeats itself and comes back again. The collective memory is embedded in the spreading and repetition of these creations.

They become a collective memory tool and simultaneously, a collective representation. Users insert a bit of themselves into the production and send it across the web for others to use and commemorate. Here, memory is literally figuratively on the move; images and videos are posted on various websites to show the user’s concern with the collective memory. As the concept of collective memory is in flux, networks are constantly in flux, they do not fall silent. Geert Lovink already stresses this point

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in Networks Without A Cause1 (2011); the web has no memory, it does not store — how are we able to understand all of this information when its context is always in transition? Memory and commemoration, official and individual memory now co-exist in the ever changing network. Can we make sense of the merging of these ever changing concepts in order to design our past and present into the future?

Google Search by Image, screenshot (October 2015 29)

Mediating Memory Ironically, one of the most fundamental aspects to the abstract and complex concept of collective memory is that its context is always developing and open to meaning.

Where memory relates to our identity, collective memory relates to our national or community identity. “We are in need of a narrative that binds us in a uniting feeling, a togetherness — the feeling that we are not alone in this.”, Carolyn Kitch writes in Mourning in America: ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 112 (2005). This national identity can survive and evolve over time, Kitch explains, meaning that content-wise, it can and will change, if only because of the ever changing collective. However abstract it may seem, collective memory does take on corporeal form in memorials and museums and lives on in the minds of the people who feel aligned with this specific memory. The collective memory depends heavily on mediation: it needs production and performance, since we cannot actually possess this moment in history we try to remember (Neiger 2011)3. We need to mediate to remember. This is where Pierre Nora’s concept of Les Lieux de Mémoire comes to mind: the places of memory, such as physical monuments, which are built with the main purpose of preventing the loss of our shared memory and in this way, stand apart from history. In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (2011), Motti Neiger3 (a.o.) points out that collective memory is mediated through rituals, ceremonial commemorations and mass media texts. Examples are:

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a nation’s flag at half mast as a sign of mourning on specific dates to commemorate specific events or performed right after specific events to show grief and respect; the ‘Dodenherdenking’ on the 4th of May in the Netherlands, where two minutes of silence at eight o’clock in the evening commemorates those who died for ‘our’ freedom in WWII; and the special supplement of the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad from July 2014 that commemorated the victims of the MH17 airplane crash. Another significant example of such mass media texts is the awarded section of The New York Times during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, called A Nation Challenged which ran till December 31 2001, but will remain indefinitely on www. nytimes.com and played an important part in the nation’s mourning process by portraying victims in a very personal and honourable way. This section is a very good example of what we call public memory: an intersection of official memory by institutions and vernacular memory, which represents almost literally the voice of the people, or, you could say, the individual experience of a collective memory.

The web has shown itself sto be open to combinations of official and vernacular memory such as for example the german online magazine SPIEGEL where online users can submit articles on German history (Donk 2009)4 and TIME Magazine’s Portraits of Resilience from 2011 where survivors, family members, US officials and the President share their personal stories of 9/11 on video. However, more and more users circulate and share their own creations of a certain collective memory.

Temporality On the web and digital interfaces, a memory is generated which moves back and forth between past, present and future. It shapes a complex memory, and in the shaping we lose memory by deleting, uploading, producing and reproducing over and over again and at the same time, we gain a collective memory in the form of these processes and the relationships they render. Quoting Media Theorist & philosopher Wolfgang Ernst5 on his concept of processual memory: “The web provides immediate feedback, turning all present data into archival entries and archival entries into data — a dynamic agency, with no delay between memory and the present. Archive and memory become metaphorical; a function of transfer processes.”, which Ernst describes as an economy of circulation — permanent transformations and updating. There are no places of memory, Ernst states, there are simply urls (Ernst 2013). In other words; digital memory is built from its architecture, it is embedded in the network and constituted from how it links from one to another.

The dynamics of the network, history and the collective have fallen into each other, something we can start to rethink of as Manuel Castells’ concept of ‘the space of flows’ where humans, computers and the network are connected, manifesting eventually into something physical but how, where and when is determined by the network itself (Castells [1996] 2010)6. “History is first organized according to the availability of visual material”, Castells writes, “then submitted to the computerized possibility of selecting seconds of frames to be pieced together, or split apart, according to specific discourses.” (Castells [1996] 2010)6. Both Ernst and Castells connect the notion of the network to time: the way a certain medium produces time, is the way experience and memory are generated. Historical static time, the narrative, the chronological ordering we all seem to depend on, meets digital media temporality. In Castells’ theory this is also influenced by the maker and its interpreter: “The user-producer and user-consumer organise information, perception and expression by their impulses, distorting the historical ordering of chronological events and be22

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come arranged in time sequences based on these impulses.” (Castells [1996] 2010)6.

Castells describes this as a culture of the eternal and the ephemeral; it reaches back and forth across the sequence of our cultural history of events but at the same time it is transitory because each arrangement and sequence depends on the context and purpose for which it is constructed (Castells [1996] 2010)6. We are not in a culture of circularity, Castells concludes, but we find ourselves in the midst of undifferentiated temporality of cultural expressions (Castells [1996] 2010)6. What Castells tries to point out here is that even in a time-based medium such as the digital network, present discourse in the Foucauldian sense is still just as highly influencial. Collective network memory does not only concern time, it is time projected on time, over and over again.

Networked Collective Memory Ernst describes the idea of a digital museum and archive cautiously as ‘non-places’.

From Nora’s places of memory7 we are now moving towards digital non-places of memory. In the context of networks, these nonplaces of memory can be seen as processes of memory; a generative memory with its meaning, collective and mediation always on the move. For example, the images and GIFs of 9/11 have had the opportunity to grow over the past fourteen years. When we compare their size and content to a much ‘fresher’ and ‘smaller’ and yet still very political trauma like the crash of MH17, we can see that a development of size and content has taken place overtime. Not only has the web become the primary medium to our contemporary existence over the past decade, the content has also evolved into much more symbolized content, instead of only news reporting and photos of the wreckage or places where the disaster took place. There is the collage image, which appears frequently on the web. In content it does not differ very much but it still has very subtle user-additions. These collages often follow banner, GIF and movie-like aesthetics; shorts texts and strong symbols.

In many examples, the burning towers, the American flag and the American eagle are combined into one picture. Variations contain photos of rescue workers, the Statue of Liberty and wreckage of the two towers. Blurring and opacity techniques have been used to blend the different symbols coherently into one picture and to give a dreamy, timeless and movie-like touch. There is repetition of images in these collages, which stirs a feeling of recognition. The more it is repeated, the more repetition it shows in itself. This falls back on network dynamics; “Spreading leads to more spreading,” Anna Munster writes in An Aesthesia of Networks (2013)8, “The more things go viral, the more they become networked. It folds back on itself in order to replicate, it builds on itself towards one point but simultaneously generates something new; platforms, sensations and unpredictable relations” — and a new form of collective memory, I might add. The image is shared and picked up by the collective: the one image is influenced by or created from the other image. And while it is picked up, a little bit of the user is rendered into these images and sent along the web. The image, in this sense, is always in transition and refers back to the collective of its creation. Statements are added to keep the memory close, to invoke it: We Will Never Forget, We Will Always Remember. We try to ensure that we still possess this memory we try to keep near us, even more so in the overwhelming quantity of the web. What is created here is a collective monument spread along urls, always open to individual additions, interaction and loss, and where the actual mediation, the actual collective memory, lies in the repetition and sharing of this mediation. We are looking at a digital Lieu de Mémoire — obviously, we are in need of a new definition.

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Designing Time We have only just tackled the idea of the places of memory and now we have to move our attention to memory developing and fading at a much higher speed in a network that renders relationships and experiences in a way we are only beginning to understand. In both concepts, time is everything. Collective memory sets out to connect people from the present to people and events from the past in order to build future memory. Digital time, in comparison to static time as presented by historical writing, is an inherent temporal concept. There is the possibility to publish immediately and what is uploaded can be altered minutes later, sometimes lost forever.

With the possibility of the public to be co-writers, designers and editors of collective memory, another memory is generated, which is constituted solely out of the sum of uploads, repetition, edits and deletions of its users; a transformative memory with its context always being processed. As designers and researchers, it becomes apparent that it is about time we design our relationship towards time. Are we makers, interpreters, conservators, archivists, observers, constructors, are we all or maybe we seek to forget? As designers and researchers, we have to distinguish ourselves from the memory creating crowd in order to envision and shape future ‘better times’.

1. Lovink, G., (2011) Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, Cambridge andMalden: Polity Press.

2. Kitch, C. (2003) ”Mourning in America”: ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11’, in: Journalism Studies Vol. 4 (2) pp. 213 — 224.

3. Neiger M., Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (eds) (2011) On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a new Media Age, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

4. Donk , A., (2009) ‘The Digitization of Memory: Blessing or Curse? A Communication Science Perspective’, pp. 1 — 17. Presented at the Media in Transition Conference “MIT6:

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Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission”, April 24 — 26, 2009, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston.

5. Ernst, W., Jussi Parikka (ed.) (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

6. Castells, M. [1996] 2010 The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed.). West Sussex: Wiley and Blackwell.

7. Nora, P. (1989) ‘Between Memory and History’, in: Representations No. 26, pp. 7 — 24.

8. Munster, A.(2013) An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Open Set program 2016 I. Seoul Sessions

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program Three day workshops

Public events

February 15 – 17 • The Body Keeps It in Mind | Karen Lancel (Lancel/Maat, NL) • Shopping List for Time Travelers | Studio Sulki & Min, KR • February 20 – 22 • Prepare Yourself for Future Neighborhood Life! | Jin Jung & Nathalie Shin (KR) • Unmapping the World | Annelys de Vet (NL) • February 20 – 22 • The Human Computer | Jeroen Barendse (Studio Lust, NL)

February 15 • Open Set symposium | public opening lectures at Kookmin University | Karen Lancel, Sulki & Min, Jin Jung, Max Bruinsma

One day workshops February 18 • Designing for the Future | Peter Bil’ak (NL) • Imagining New Eurasia | Jihoi Lee (KR) February 24 • Pyramid of Technology | Koert van Mensvoort (NL) • Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza | René Boer (NL) & Jeong Hye Kim (Listen to the City), KR

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February 17 • Rethinking practices | public lectures at The Book Society | Peter Bil’ak & Mediabus, moderated by Max Bruinsma February 19 • Journey to Dutch Design | CA Conference | Dongdaemun Design Plaza | Talks: History of Dutch Design Max Bruinsma; The Designer as a Ghost, Floris van Driel; Dutch-American-Korean Design, Alfons Hooikaas & Jaewon Seok; The Past The Now The Future, Mirte van Duppen; A Mental Journey to Dutch Design Mentality, Nuankhanit Phromchanya February 23 • Leeum — Open Set Symposium | 2016 Intermedia Theater — World Citizenship & Open Set Dutch Design Seoul Sessions ‘Memories of the Future’ | Talks: Kim Sang-kyu (Seoul National University of Science and Technology), Autonomy and Communality of Design; Jeroen Barendse (Studio Lust) Mediumlessness; Annelys de Vet (Studio DEVET, Sandberg Instituut) Disarming Design Practices; Koert van Mensvoort (Next Nature Network) Next Nature: The Nature Caused by People; Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho News from Nowhere: A Platform for the Future & Introspection of the Present. Moderator Kim Seong-eun (LEEUM)

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location #1 the college of design kookmin university Kookmin University is the first national private university located in Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, South Korea after the liberation of the Republic of Korea from Japan. It was established in 1946. After South Korea was liberated from Japan, Gu kim, Soang Jo and Ikhee Shin who are the members of the cabinet in a provisional government had agreed to cultivate a great leader among the Republic of Korea in perspective, which soon became the banner of the Kookmin University.

The College of Design held the first rank in three fields and the second rank in two fields among a total of five fields as a result of a nationwide assessment in 2007 in South Korea. The college has been ranked among the top three departments in Korea with Seoul National University and Hongik University.

location #2 dongdaemun design plaza The Dongdaemun Design Plaza, also called the DDP, is a major urban development landmark in Seoul, South Korea designed

by Zaha Hadid and Samoo, with a distinctively neofuturistic design characterized by the «powerful, curving forms of elongated structures». The landmark is the

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centerpiece of South Koreaʼs fashion hub and popular tourist destination, Dongdaemun, featuring a walkable park on its roofs, global exhibition spaces, futuristic retail stores and restored parts of the Seoul fortress.

location #3 leeum, samsung museum of art Since the establishment of the Samsung Foundation of Culture in 1965, the Samsung Museum of Art has passionately collected and organized exhibitions of exceptional artworks, encompassing both traditional masterpieces and contemporary works. In 2004, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, opened its doors in its magnificent new facility in Hanam-dong, Seoul. Leeum has phenomenally expanded the depth and range of its collection, enhancing its vast trove of Korean cultural treasures with numerous representative works from the most celebrated contemporary artists from around the globe. As such, Leeum is now internationally recognized as one of the preeminent cultural institutions in the entire world.

location #4 the book society

location #5 jung lim foundation

The Book Society is a project space and bookshop by mediabus, which is located in Seoul, Korea.

Jung Lim Foundation was established to promote a healthy ecosystem of the Korean architecture. A variety of programs aim at community activation through social roles and building constructions as well as platform of strength in the world of arts and culture. They focus on active exchanges, media to be a balanced mediator of Korea Construction Culture, education, forums, exhibitions, community research, publishings and progress.

Mediabus is a small publishing house based in Seoul, Korea. It was founded in 2007 by independent curators with the collaboration of designers. Mediabus publishes zines & books, produces and distributes, organizes exhibitions & events, directs a workshop, and carries out project or book commissions for companies & institutions.

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shopping list for time travelers studio sulki & min TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 15/02 — 17/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

The time capsule: that relic from the past, when the idea of progress was still believable, the future still looked amazing. Who cares about them anymore — especially when everything is recorded and stored in real time for future references. But a time capsule is more about how the world is supposed to be, than how it actually is: it projects a certain micro-image of here and now to the future, and in that respect, it is a form of storytelling.

”We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, tribute albums and box sets, anniversary festivals and live performances of classic albums… Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is… its past?”

— Simon Reynolds, Retromania, 2011.

During the workshop the group of the participants tested the Reynold’s observation: each participant defined Now as distinguished from Then, and possibly from Tomorrow, too, by creating an inventory for an imaginary time capsule.

In the best spirit of science fiction, each of the participants made a list of things that are deemed to define now, and made a concrete representation of the list. As our time capsule was a purely imaginary one with no practical dimensions to worry about, there was no limit to the nature of the things to store. They could be objects, structures, people, phenomena, messages, or events. But the representation of the list hade to be designed and implemented in a way that reflected the arguments behind the selection, as well as the nature of the stored.

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For the reference, here is

• 1 plastic savings bank

Dr. Jacobs’ voice)

Shopping for Time Travelers the inventoryLists of artifacts • 3 plastic pieces • 1 pencil painting stored in the Crypt of Sulki and Min for Open Set Seoul, February 2016 (miscellaneous)

Civilization (picture), one • 1 cut and 2 illustrations of the first modern time • 1 plastic display case for from cut capsules constructed watch We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for at the Oglethorpe • 1 set Helios (game University in Atlanta, Band • 1reformations set Lionel modeland trainreunion board and pieces) commemoration. tours, Georgia, and sealed on (6 cars, I track)• 1 • 2 carved glass panels tribute and boxcigarette sets, anniversary festivals and live May 28, 1940.albums The Crypt holder is designed for opening in performances of classic albums…

Could it be the • 1 that set Bridgeomatic • 1 model air conditioner the year 8113 AD: (game) greatest danger to theapparatus future of our music culture is… its • 5 phonograph records • 2 micro-film readers • 1 boxRetromania, of eight plastic2011 past? —Simon Reynolds, (transcriptions) and 2 micro-films sample (Oglethorpe Book of • 2 bird records (songs of s• 1 set of scales (hand) Georgia Verse) birds)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

During the workshop, we will test Reynold’s observation: each • 1 Ingraham pocket • 1 obstetrical model (2 • 3 records in album participant will define Now as distinguished from Then, and watch pieces) • 5 recordsfrom Tomorrow, too, by creating an inventory for an possibly • 1 Regen’s cigarette • 1 set graduates (sealed) (miscellaneous) lighter imaginary time capsule. The time capsule: that relic from the • 1 Micarta gear • General Gannett and past, when the idea of progress was still believable, the future • 1 Ingraham wrist watch Acompo 8 records • 1 package containing still looked amazing. Who(woman’s) cares about them anymore – 6 miniature panties, • 1 transcription (Premier • 1 sample of gold mesh 5 miniature shirts, of Canada)when everything especially is recorded and stored in real time 3 drawers• 1 sample • 1 Gen-A-Lite flashlight • Phonograph records in for future references.

But a time capsule is moreplastic aboutradio howcase 2 boxes – History of • 1 be, Toastolator (electric) the world is supposed to than how it actually is: it projects • 2 Lennox china vases, 1 • Mines – 37 10» records, blue china bowl 2 12” records Monroe calculator • a certain micro-image of• 1here and now to the future, and in • 1 Emerson radio • 1 container of beer • 1 set Lincoln Logs (toys) • that respect, it is a form of storytelling. (about one quart) • 1 sample of aluminum • 1 mannikin (female) in • foil • 1 plastic bird, 1 plastic glass case In ash thetray best spirit of science fiction, each of us will make a list • 1 sample technicolor • 1 mannikin (male) in • of things that are deemed to define now, and make filmaonconcrete display card • 1 beetle plastic glass case ornament and bowl • representation of the list.

As our time capsule •is1 abrasive a purely wheel • 1 telephone instrument (Aloxite) • 1 vanity make-up mirror dial phone (desk type) to worry • imaginary one with no practical dimensions about, with light • 4 skeins of rayon, • there will be no limit to •the natureofoftextile the things to store. They 10 samples 1 electric iron • 11 miscellaneous upholstery • can be objects, structures, people, phenomena, messages, or recordings • 2 electric lighting • 4 samples plated events.

But the representation of the list shouldfixtures be designed and 2 acetate • • 6 recordings (Artie plastics shades Shaw) • and implemented in a way that reflects the arguments behind • 1 3-cell flash light • 1 set of binoculars in • the selection, as well as the nature of the stored.

• 6 recordings (Richard • Audio Scriptions leather case Himber) • (2 records of • For your reference, here is the inventory of artifacts stored in • the Crypt of Civilization (picture), one of the first modern time 31 constructed seoul sessions • capsules at the Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, • Georgia, and sealed on May 28, 1940. The Crypt is designed • for opening in the year 8113 AD: •

1 container of beer (about 1 plastic bird, 1 plastic as 1 beetle plastic ornament 1 vanity make-up mirror wi 11 miscellaneous recordin 6 recordings (Artie Shaw) 6 recordings (Richard Himb 1 plastic savings bank 3 plastic pieces (miscellan 1 plastic display case for w 1 set Lionel model train (6 1 cigarette holder 1 model air conditioner ap 1 box of eight plastic samp 1 set of scales (hand) 1 Ingraham pocket watch 1 Regen’s cigarette lighter 1 Ingraham wrist watch (w 1 sample of gold mesh • 1 recording 1transcription, Gen-A-LiteKing flashlight Gustav of Sweden 1 Toastolator (electric) •16 Monroe transcriptions “We, calculator the People” radio 1show• set Lincoln Logs (toys) 1 Kodak (small) 1camera mannikin (female) in glas •11 plastic drinking glassin glass mannikin (male) holder 1 telephone instrument dia • 1 sample of catlinite 10 samples of textile upho • 1 Schick Electric Razor 4(set) samples plated plastics 1 3-cell of flash light • 1 sample Lucite Scriptions •Audio 1 Comptometer, Ser. (2 record J246635 1no. pencil painting •12 cut ashtrays, and plastic 2 illustrations fr forms of gears 1 set Helios (game board a • 1 package Butterick 2dress carved glass panels patterns 1 set Bridgeomatic (game) • 1 DuPrene glove (rubber 2substitute) micro-film readers and 2 •(Oglethorpe 1 set silver plate 1847 of Georg Book I knife, 1 fork, 1Rogers, obstetrical model (2 piec 1 spoon 1 set graduates (sealed) • 1 copy of The New Herald-Tribune 1York Micarta gear (especially prepared 1copy) package containing 6 mi miniature shirts, 3 drawe •51 Masonic deposit badges,plastic I metal radio cas 1(5sample plaque in case, sealed) 2 Lennox china vases, 1 bl • 1 glass jar containing 12Emerson radio pen holders, 3 pencils, 1 slide rule 1 sample of aluminum foil and instructions, 1 1set sample technicolor film o colored crayons, 1 plastic ruler, 1 fountain 1pen abrasive wheel (Aloxite) and pencil set, 6 4corks skeins of rayon, 1 electr electric lighting fixtures •21 glass refrigerator dish and cover 1 set of binoculars in leath 1 recording transcription, 6 transcriptions “We, the P 1 Kodak (small) camera 1 plastic drinking glass ho 1 sample of catlinite 1 Schick Electric Razor (se

• 1 Mazda lamp exhibit (component parts)

packages rickrack, 2 packages bias binding

• 1 model Edison’s original and 1 Mazda lamp

• 1 package of samples oil cloth

• 1 package assorted wearing apparel

• 1 lady’s breast form

• 1 package samples of laces and ribbons • 1 pair ladies stockings • 1 package – 1 towel, 3 washcloths • 1 framed painting (roses reproduction) • 1 framed picture (reproduction, painting of a house)

• 1 package cellophane dish covers, 3 belts, 1 package 2nd carbon copy of teletype news • 1 yellow china bowl, 7 “What-Not” ornaments, 1 package picture hooks, curtain rings and ends, 1 napkin and napkin ring

• 1 rafia covered glass powder jar

• 6 packages wooden forks and spoons set toy paints, 1 tea bowl, 1 package fish hooks, 1 package drapery pins, 1 June bug spinner, 1 package curtain rings, 1 fly, 2 toy watches, 1 pocket knife

• 1 sample of soap (figure of a bull)

• 2 smoking pipes, 1 bottle Vaseline

• 1 package assorted hair pins

• 1 porcelain figure, 2 small glass ornaments, glass coal scuttle

• 1 package containing 6 wood and plastic pictures

• 1 package containing 6 pieces, assorted costume jewelry • 1 glass jar containing miscellaneous ornaments and 4 berets, 1 hair net, 1 clip• 1 glass jar containing 1 hair bow, 1 gem razor, 1 package blades, 1 shaving brush, 2 powder puffs, 2 compacts, 3 samples powder, 1 eyebrow brush, 3 lipsticks, 1 hair remover, 1 toothbrush, 1 rouge, 1 nail brush, 1 ivory stick, 1 pair manicure scissors,1 eyelash curler, 5 hair curlers, 1 package dental floss, 1 pair tweezers, 1 package Mallene, 1 package corn pads eye cup, 1 set artificial finger nails, 1 set artificial eyelashes, 1 package playing cards, 1 set Bridge tally cards • 1 package containing 2 combs, 1 change carrier, 1 package of paper cleaning pads, 1 identification book, 1 pair dark glasses, 1 lady’s comb, 4 pair shoe laces, 2 pair shoulder straps, 1 flashlight, 2 dice, 1 cigar holder, 1 cigarette holder • 1 package containing 5 spools of silk thread, 1 crochet hook, 1 thimble, 2 packages needles, 2

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• 1 small glass vase, 1 glass teakettle • 1 package paper clips, 1 package cellophane ribbon, 1 set measuring spoons, 1 doughnut cutter, 1 plastic salt and pepper shaker set, plastic picture frame, 1 set Curtain holdbacks • 1 toy whistle, 1 golfball, 1 cake of soap• 1 cover for milk bottle, 1 plastic knife, fork and spoon, 1 salad fork and spoon • 1 funnel, 1 barometer, 1 glass container and cover, 1 scouring pad, 1 package of marbles, 3 outlets, 1 socket plug, 1 switch, Pull chain socket, 3 house numbers, 1 rule, 1 can opener

• 1 package rayon chemicals • 1 piece sheet music, 1 sample of mahogany treated with bakelite varnish orange reamer and bowl, 1 glass water bottle for refrigerator, 1 package paper drinking cups • 1 coffee set (drip coffee maker, cream and sugar), 1 cream and sugar set, 1 flower holder, 2 Pyrex dishes, 1 covered china bowl, 5 drinking glasses, 1 wine glass • 1 whiskey glass jigger, 1 liquor measure (jigger and cup), 1 vase, 1 set measuring cups, 4 red glass goblets, 1 Willow ware cup and saucer, 1 pottery bowl, 1 kitchen brush, 1 toilet brush • 1 candlestand (candle and globe), 1 package soap and miscellaneous items (sealed) • 1 sales ticket register, 1 Detrola radio • 1 fishing rod, 1 badminton set and net • 1 package fly swatter, coat hanger, etc.

• 1 assortment of cuff links, buttons, etc. (sealed), 8 packages assorted buttons • 5 handkerchiefs, and silk scarves • 1 Yankee screwdriver, 1 screwdriver and special screws • 12 packages RayonComponent parts and displays, 1 watt-hour meter, 1 tube rayon thread, 1 set of 6 radio tubes• 1 toy pistol, 1 pinball game, 1 toy airplane

• 1 carving knife and fork, 1 rule, 1 screwdriver

• 1 Negro doll, 1 toy flying gyro, 1 wrecker

• 1 grapefruit corer, 1 potato masher, 1 ladle, 1 spoon, 1 pancake turner

• 1 toy greyhound bus, 1 tractor, 2 dolls (white), 1 1-one Ranger, 1 ambulance

• 1 asbestos mat, 1 red china plate

• 1 Donald Duck, 1 set toy tools, 1 toy tank, 1 pacifier, 1 bubble pipe, 1 rattle

• 1 glass bookend (girl’s head) • 1 toy automobile, 1 toy stagecoach, 1 image of Buddha (incense burner)

• 1 toy equestrian, 18 toy soldiers, 12 toy civilians, 1 toy cannon, 2 muses, 1 anti-aircraft gun, 1 set samples of better ware

• 1 small china plate, 1 small china bowl, 1 glass rolling pin,

• 1 blotter, 1 inkwell (sealed)• 1 DuPrene sample (artificial

open set 2016 | catalogue

rubber) • 1 sample ILICite (plastic) 1 sample textile (cotton), 1 sample of rayon cloth • 1 auto-point pencil, 8 Voca-films • 1 transcription (Roosevelt, 11 parts) • 1 transcription (King Edward VIII) • 1 package Masonite (sealed) • 1 denture (Lipper), 1 box samples of Micarta (sealed), 1 box samples of carpets, 1 crystalite, 10 rings • 5 Iconoscape television tubes • Spectacle frames, buckles, 8 auto handles, bottle caps, beads, 22 miscellaneous plastic samples, 9 color samples tennite, 1 sample insulation, 1 distributor head cover, 1 thermometer case• 1 instrument panel, 7 samples Formica • 14 samples Formica (set) • 1 set A-C spark plugs (sealed)

women’s age requirement project by yoon-jung jang & sung-yeon wo This Time Capsule will be opened after 1,000 years (or more). The most interested thing in the future is how they maintain their life. How long will be the life expectancy, How much progress will be in technique of antiaging,and even living forever will be possible? So we put the source that could show the life in 2016: age require-

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ment. The age requirement indicate the people who needs protection: children and senior citizen. And it could reflect the present’s lifecycle. And we select age requirements about our age: The women who are adapting themselves to mature member of society.

huizenlijn & woonkamer in nl project by mirte van duppen

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things that are on the internet 2015-2016 project by nuankhanit phromchanya A printed collection of trending contents that are playing dominant roles in the current digital world. The work is made with an intention to reserve digital content for future generation when internet platform as we know it, will no longer exists.

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two timeszones and a motherfocking crossfader project by floris van driel & cyanne van den houten According to the jetlag proceeded during the travel from Amsterdam to Tokyo to Seoul. Living in (+11 hours) the future, while having contact in other timezones.

The first three days Floris van Driel and I worked on a project named: Two Timezones and a Motherfocking Crossfader.

A digital web application, that makes you able to look/experience two timezones/ places in the sametime on one place. It’s a iteration on the viral website: www. twoyoutubevideosandamotherfockingcrossfader.com (the application to make smooth overfades like a dj with 2 youtube videos). Day one we started collecting a shoppinglist for a culture shock. To export our collective memory/most shocking roadtrip-experiences to Holland.

(Outcome: Img. 01 www.cyannevdh.nl/ opensettokyo)

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Day two we discussed the timeless zones, as the internet functions. Like social media, what mostly functions as a linear system where other timezones disappear in a “black hole” of time. What makes it impossible to follow all the updates. How could social media function without time or as globalized as the world is according to a new system. What happens if you have 3 RSS-feeds syncing the timezones into a new global time. By a website where you can put 3 sources in, is this a new way of storytelling?

By not being able to code the system in three days, this this lead to a Two Timezones and a Motherfucking Crossfader. An online place where time and space merge.

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imagining new eurasia jihoi lee Imagining New Eurasia is a multiyear project to research and visualize the historical precedents and contemporary reconstructions of the continent as a union of Europe and Asia.

As a mapmakingatlarge, the project imagines new relations between East and West, and a renewed identity for Eurasia. Through a narrative sequence of three distinctive chapters, each with different subjects, Imagining New Eurasia Project will present the importance of cities, networks and territories. In so doing, the project envisions how the movements of commerce, migrations and cultural exchanges could bring about an age of balance, where greater relations and understandings between different societies could help avoid clashes of civilizations.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 18/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

The workshop aimed to share some of the key concepts of the project and what it hade achieved through its architecture, curatorial, algorithmic and participatory components in its inaugural exhibition of the first chapter. The participants were invited to engage in developing their own idea of interpreting the geopolitical and sociocultural landscape of Eurasia as a single tectonic plate, elaborating ways of visualizing data into a spatial product. The workshop experimented with ways to visualize how materials, products and labor move through the infrastructures that network the continent as one, such as the Old Silk Roads, New Silk Roads and other transcontinental routes of Eurasia.

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Installation View of exhibition ​Here, There, and Everywhere: Eurasian Cities, Imagining New Eurasia Project​ Chapter 1, photographed by Kyungsub Shin, Image Courtesy of The Asia Culture Center and Imagining New Eurasia Project.

Workshop: Imagining New Eurasia

Imagining New Eurasia​ is a multi­year project to research and visualize the historical precedents and contemporary reconstructions of the continent as a union of Europe and Asia. As a map­making­at­large, the project imagines new relations between East and West, and a renewed identity for Eurasia. Through a narrative sequence of three distinctive chapters, each with different subjects, ​Imagining New Eurasia Project​ will present the importance of cities, networks and territories. In so doing, the project envisions how the movements of commerce, migrations and cultural exchanges could bring about an age of balance, where greater relations and understandings between different societies could help avoid clashes of civilizations.The workshop aims to share some of the key concepts of the project and what it has achieved through its architecture, curatorial, algorithmic and participatory components in its inaugural exhibition of the first chapter. The participants are invited to engage in developing their own idea of interpreting the geopolitical and socio­cultural landscape of Eurasia as a single tectonic plate, elaborating ways of visualizing data into a spatial product. The

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euresiataurant: fusion identity project by nuankhanit phromchanya, cyanne van den houten & yoonjung jang A collection of randomly generated restaurant logos that mashed up the cliche cultural symbols of The Netherlands, Thailand, and Korea. These logos are part of a research collection focusing on the cross-over food culture within Eurasian countries.

Thinking about a new way to indicate or redesign the borders of Eurasia (Europa and Asia). A one day workshop where I collaborated with Belle Nuankhanit and Yoonjung Jang.

We all come from different backgrounds: Belle is from Thailand, Yoonjung is from Seoul Korea, and myself I come from Holland. Comparing the exported cultures of our cultures in each others countries. We thought about the ultimate Eurasia foodindustry.

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Collected all the Thai and Korean restaurants in Amsterdam and the menu cards.

We concluded that a lot of food is fake-oriental or just from another country in Asia.

Samelike Dutch Coffee is a concept in Seoul, without it is excisting in Holland.

As output of the day we made a generative logo-maker what picks 3 oriental visual elements from foodculture as known in other countries.

communicating in the future eurasia project by noura andrea nassar & floors van driel In the project we explore the possibility of creating a new form of nonverbal communication, adapted from a post-economical apocalyptic world.

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E.E.G. KISS | The End of Privacy Festival (photograph

by Anna van Kooij, 2016)

civility in a mediated society karen lancel* & hermen maat Interview by Noortje van Eekelen TUTOR: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 15/02 — 17/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

The challenging and exceptional projects by Lancel/Maat invite the public to experiment and play with social technology. As a team, the artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat design objects, projections and digital networks to create meeting places in public city spaces. With these initiatives the audience is welcome to reflect on their perception of the public space, experience of body, identity and social cohesion. Lancel/Maat’s universally shown meeting places are located in dynamic urban public spaces such as museums, squares, and theatre halls. You might recognise their sophisticated installations and performances from the past few years. Works such as E.E.G. KISS, Saving Face and TELE_ TRUST are so impressive that you want to know more about the expertise behind them. Our following interview explores Lancel/Maat’s artistic approach and their speculations regarding emerging future scenarios and possible alternative environments.

We all know E.E.G. KISS, Saving Face, TELE_TRUST and Master Touch. Could you say something about the social attitude and motives behind Lancel/Maat? How far does it go?

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We design objects, projections and digital networks to create reflective Meeting Places in public city spaces and the digital domain. In carefully hosted, techno-social Presence Rituals, we invite our public to experiment with social sys-

tems and to reflect on their perception of the city, and their experience of body, intimacy, presence, identity, privacy and social cohesion.

With Saving Face you allow an audience to collectively combine their faces into an amalgamation of moments, identities. Could you explain a little more about the new kind of environment that emerges from these aggregated interactions?

First About the project Saving Face: 1. Tele-presence technologies extend our bodies beyond biological boundaries in time and space, but prevent us from touching (Arjen Mulder).

When we meet in the public domain, we trust each other based on reciprocal body language, face-to-face connection, and touch. However, in today’s social structures, these sensory experiences are increasingly replaced by identity scanning technologies. In the digital public domain, we are faced with the paradox of ‘the higher surveillance, the lower trust’.

How do we experience our bodies and identities, technically being measured and turned into fixed, controllable ‘products’? How does this interfere with our identities as social constructs, constantly appearing and disappearing when interacting with others? Can touch-based perception play a role in ‘tele-matic trust’?

Can I touch you online?

to endlessly meet, caress, mirror and merge.”

3. Saving

Face is a Smart City Meeting Ritual, and exists of 1. Come close 2.

Caress your face 3. Merge and Mirror.

4. Saving

Face uses your face as a tangible social interface The ritual includes an interactive city sculpture with camera and face-recognition technologies, connected to an urban screen. In front of the camera, you are invited to caress your face. By caressing your face you ‘paint’ your portrait on the screen, where it appears and then slowly merges with the portraits of previous visitors. The portraits merge further through every face-caressing act of following participants, co-creating transparent, untraceable, fluid, networked identities. Each composed identity is saved into a user generated database, to be printed as a Saving Face Passport.

5. In

dynamic public spaces such as museum halls or city squares, all co-created identities appear on screen as ’digital personas’, sharing with us our contemporary public domain. When traveling to various geographical and cultural contexts, SF playfully connects — both online and offline — different personal, historical and cultural backgrounds.

Participants in cities worldwide ‘TeleTouch’ each other to meet.

2. Touching

is the new Scanning The artists deconstruct and turn around control technologies, to facilitate intimate meeting experiences: “Saving Face is an experimental technological bio-feedback system for a poetic meeting-through-touching ritual. With the help of a personal Touching Face Scan, participants caress their own faces, to connect online with family, friends and strangers worldwide. In Saving Face, we are digitally tangible and visible to each other, in a relational process, a ‘social sculpture’; 44

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6. The

portrait on screen is part of a social process. Within the tradition of the composed and ‘morphing’ portrait, the artists orchestrate ‘a social process to create a portrait’. This process connects the physical ‘realness’ we feel when touching our faces to the interaction with a virtual identity. Each identity on screen appears as a digital ‘persona’ in our contemporary public domain. As an alternative social construct, it constantly appears and disappears in the process

Lesion (2010), Andrew Carnie

of merging with others. We imagine ‘the right to be forgotten’ could be realized by creating multiple identities.

We would disappear by merging with others. This would absolutely confuse a control system.

We regularly see a great variety of works from you as Lancel/Maat.

Projects such as E.E.G. KISS and Saving Face have received a quite some international attention. Were they difficult to produce? Can you tell us more about your way of working?

1. We develop our works as artistic research. In our Meeting Spaces and Meeting Rituals we deconstruct automated control technologies (surveillance, social media, brain computer interfaces, quantifying biometric technologies) to rethink and inspire sensitive and reciprocal relationships based on intimacy, relational presence, tacit knowledge, digital synesthesia, bio-synchronisation, sensory and aesthetic perception.

2. In

an iterative process, we deconstruct disrupted communication models and social systems. This process is both social and technical. It is inspired by audience dialogue; developments in media-theory, art, science and technology. The works are labor intensive. They consist of long preparatory periods of research and sequences of presentation stadia. Each presentation is like a stepping stone in the development of the final visual and interaction concept.

3. But

even when having finalized the visual and interaction concept, the works keep changing. Each cultural geographical context evokes a specific tension and meaning. For example, when showing our interactive, full body DataVeil on a square in Istanbul, audience reactions are different from when we show it in Banff, Canada. And kissing in 45

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E.E.G. KISS is a different challenge in Amsterdam than in Hong Kong.

4. Furthermore,

each public presentation space creates a different context.

For example, at the Venice Biennale 2015, IASPIS Stockholm, De Appel Amsterdam and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, our work is part of a museological experience. But at Media musea, festivals and conferences we show our work in the context of media history and its societal impact; for example at ISEA Hongkong, Helsinki an Istanbul; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Ars Electronica Linz. And while showing our work in dynamic city centers the visual orchestration changes again, as well as the audience viewing behavior, for example at Festival ad Werf Utrecht, NABI Art Center Seoul and Connecting Cities Berlin, Dessau. At Art Science & Technologie exhibitions such as TASIE Beijing the audience focuses on the experience of social systems, technology and innovation. And for the

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, we created a specific ‘Saving Face’ version called ‘Master Touch’, to question and sensitize the reflective mode of the museum visitor.

5. So

on many levels each presentation is context-specific, and inspires the dialogue. The research and dialogue take place in a varied partner network. Many of the works are co-supported by art funds, such as Mondriaan Fund, AFK, Stimuleringsfonds. Not only do we work with art related institutions, but also with Universities, research groups, and sponsors. Our works that emerge from the artistic research are further conducted at Delft University of Technology in the context of Lancel’s PhD trajectory (Advisors: Prof. Dr. Frances Brazier, Dr. Caroline Nevejan). For the research we collaborate with programmers, often at (artistic) media labs such as V2_Lba, STEIM and Waag Society. Various research steps within one project can take place at artist residencies, for example TASML Beijing, Digital Synesthesia Group Vienna, IASPIS Stockholm and Bannf Center Canada. E.E.G. KISS was also tested at TNO, sponsored by Fourtress and Philips in Eindhoven, and invited by Baltan Laboratories.

6. Many

of the various steps in these processes are invisible at the end. On the one hand, we would love to open up this information, and all the specific exciting findings in the research, for example in books and blogs. On the other hand, this would be very elaborate. More importantly, we appreciate the seeming effortless quality of the works, as if in fact the act of interfering in systems is a ‘light’ and accessible gesture. We hope this ‘lightness’ inspires and communicates the possibility as well as the individual power and responsibility to interfere.

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It strikes me that you as artists predominantly research the interactions between humans and technological development? How do you view the tension that currently exists between the ever present memory and the “right to be forgotten”?

We are interested in the connection between physical, embodied memories and digitally networked memories.

1. First

about memory in relation to our bodies. Our bodies incorporate memories. The body can be seen as a container, or a carrier, of memory. Our memories are embodied. Our embodied memories ground our individual and collective understanding of ourselves in the world around us. They direct the way we collectively make sense of our performance and relationships. They shape our individual gestures, habits, and (un)conscious reactions. Our embodied memories are foundations for our scanning mutual trust — through spoken words or with a handshake. Now, how do embodied memories emerge?

Neurologist A. Damasio1 describes how memories emerge from emotional interaction during reciprocal communication and mirror behavior. This process builds on sensory perception of face-to-face connection, body language, being close and touch.

2. How

do digitally networked memories work? Today, technology spectacularly extends our bodies beyond biological boundaries in time and space. We meet in multi-layered infrastructures, based on variou, merging forms of on — and offline communication. In these merging realities2, we meet each other in labyrinthic, fragmented realities. “New forms of intimacy, privacy, togetherness and loneliness emerge”, writes Sherry Turkle in her book ‘Alone Together’. In merging realities, we extend our physical memory through Google, Wikipedia and social

media. We store our memories in commercially contextualized databases. Acts of social interaction and identification are placed outside our bodies, into digital control systems and networks. Scanning, controlling and trusting each other (and ourselves) is partly performed by automated technologies. We meet and remember as ‘users’ and ‘participants’ via screens, smart objects and interfaces. So I ‘Like’ you on Facebook, but where is the ‘Hug’ button? Biometric scanning (such as Quantified Self) creates an even more distant intimacy with our own bodies. We measure our heart rate, sweat and brain activity — but how can we share a networked kiss? How will I remember the tension of coming close — and touching your lips?

3. How

E.E.G. KISS | De Brakke Grond (2015)

do networked technologies influence the trustfulness of our bodies as containers of memories to relate to? On the one hand, technology extends our memory space. Most of our life events are saved in databases. More and more memories are always present. On the other hand, memories are taken out of the interactive process Damasio describes. Instead of emotional interaction during reciprocal communication, we make memories appear in a technological process. Memories appear by click-

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ing around. By clicking, my memories can appear as anonymous memories. I can see your history, within a misleading context, for example within a prison context. I can learn about your prison history as if you are still in prison today. Digitally networked memories are always now.

4. In

the future, what will our emotional interaction with technologically, popping up, ‘always present’ memories be? And how will this influence our relationship with the world around us? In short: what happens with the ever present memory and our understanding of the world around us?

In previous works we compared the ‘ever present memory’ to the working of a post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). In PTSS, disturbing, painful life events that happened in the past seem to be ever happening again, for ever ‘now’. They seem to happen again in the present — but no longer within the right context. Someone suffering from PTSS is haunted by memories.

In ‘The body keeps it in mind’ (2005), our work in former Yugoslavia, we researched how war events forever color the streets of the city, for its inhabitants of today. In ‘TraumaTour’ (1999-2008)

we compared PTSS with feelings of safety and control experienced by our digitally ‘networking bodies’. In dynamic public city spaces worldwide we created spatial, screen based, dirsuptive networked orchestrations. We invited the audience to participate as ‘co-researchers’ in works called ‘Agora Phobia (digitalis)’ and ‘StalkShow’. We felt truly touched to see the audience exploring their confusion between their present bodies, memory and data.

What projects are we going to see in the future from you? And where do you see challenges in achieving these?

1. Currently we feel ‘the right to be forgotten’ shows a somewhat defensive attitude.

Of course we see the problematic moral implications in a democratic society, when we need to judge and balance between ‘privacy’ and ‘piracy’. The problematized “right to be forgotten” can concern the intention to become truly ‘invisible’.

To achieve this, going offline, can be the best strategy — although this will be increasingly difficult and eventually a luxury.

2. But

more often, “The right to be forgotten” concerns the wish to design one’s own visibility. Can we turn this defensive attitude around — and create radical, alternative techno-embodied realities?

In E.E.G. KISS we no longer protect our private data. Instead, we create with this data new rituals allowing for public intimacy and relational rituals. E.E.G. KISS offers a shared neuro-feedback kiss ritual in today’s merging realities. In this way, we aim to create a shared sensitive public space, response-ability for the power of synchronizing through touching, breathing, kissing, dancing, sharing presence.

Worldwide, we invite our audiences to this ongoing artistic research; and to participate in a communal, networked E.E.G. KISS. We are convinced that artists are 48

key in the research and design process for these new participatory ‘trust-systems’.

What are possible alternative environments that could be introduced in the future? How would these environments be linked? In what way would we manipulate them?

We research social systems in a mediated society; systems merging humans and technology. There will be a lot more seamless invisible as well as status expressing technologies developed in the near future. For us as artists it will be a challenge to deconstruct, visualize and rethink the implications of the use and design on and in our bodies. Instead of looking for prosthetic interfaces, we focus on alternative possibilities for mirror processes, brain interfaces and neurofeedback. How do archived data permeate our personal lives and behavior?

Current bio-feedback technologies (such as brain computer interfaces) allow us to create networked set ups, to artistically design and reflect on the communal, networked experience of social and biometric devices. It allows us to orchestrate public feedback-system rituals for data-reflection.

In E.E.G. KISS we ask: can I kiss you online? Can we transfer a kiss and its intimacy online? Can we measure a kiss and what kissers feel together? Can we trust our E.E.G. KISS? And in terms of ‘the right to be forgotten’: do we want to save our private kisses in a transparent database — to be used by others?

1. Damasio 2. Today, all “we enter a world of ‘merging realities’”, C. Nevejan and F. Brazier write in their ‘Participatory Systems Initiative’ statement (University for Technology Delft). They describe a complex of (social) relational systems of networked men and computers.

the body keeps it in mind karen lancel (lancel/maat) TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 15-17/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

‘I am part of the networks and the networks are part of me... I link, therefore I am.’ W. J. Mitchell, ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.

Our bodies incorporate memories The body can be seen as a container, or a carrier, of memory.

Embodied memories ground our individual and collective understanding of ourselves in the world around us. They direct the way we collectively make sense of our performance and relationships. They shape our individual gestures, habits, and (un)conscious reactions. Embodied memories are foundations for our scanning of mutual trust - through spoken words or with a handshake. Now, how do embodied memories emerge?

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In ‘Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain‘, A. Damasio describes how embodied memories emerge from emotional interaction during reciprocal communication and mirror behaviour. This process builds on sensory perception of face-toface connection, touch, body language and being close.

How do we embody our memories today? “We enter a world of ‘merging realities’”, C. Nevejan and F. Brazier write in their ‘Participatory Systems Initiative’ statement (University for Technology Delft). They describe a complex of (social) relational systems of networked men and computers. We meet in multi-layered infrastructures, based on various, merging forms of on- and offline communication. In these merging realities, our bodies are spectacularly extended beyond biological boundaries in time and space. However, media prevent us from touching. They are not designed for being close: our direct embodied interaction is disrupted and we meet each other in labyrinthic, fragmented realities.

This changes our experience of embodied memory. “New forms of intimacy, privacy, togetherness and loneliness emerge”, writes Sherry Turkle in her book ‘Alone Together’. In merging realities, we extend our physical memory by Google, Wikipedia and Social Media. We store our memories in commercial databases.

Acts of social interaction and identification are placed outside our bodies. Scanning, controlling and trusting each other (and ourselves) is partly performed by automated technologies. We meet and remember as ‘users’ and ‘participants’ via screens, smart objects and interfaces. So I ‘Like’ you on Facebook, but where is ‘Hug’ button? Biometric scanning (such as Quantified Self) creates an even more distant intimacy with our own bodies. We measure our heart rate, sweat and brain activity - but how can we share a networked kiss? How will I remember the tension of coming close - and touching your lips?

In this workshop we explore embodied memories in merging realities.

— Day 1. Presentation and discussion about the work of Lancel/ Maat; and about the role of embodied memories in merging realities. Lancel introduces an discusses a triangular model for

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future scenario’s and ritual recipe’s, to share embodied experience and memory in on- and off line communication. What role can embodied memory play in merging realities?

How can we design embodied, ‘networked rituals’ for touching, reciprocal memories?

— Day 2. Participants design alternative, inspiring, fictional and future scenario’s for embodied experience and memory in onand off line communication; in groups or individually.

— Day 3. Ideas and concepts developed on day 2 are translated for a presentation.

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pyramid of technology koert van mensvoort TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 24/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

Why do technologies so often seem only half-realized versions of the brilliant dreams we actually have? Isn’t our glimmering mobile phone merely a watered-down materialization of the dream of telepathic communication? And why actually aren’t we able to smell in the digital realm?

During this workshop, we are going to actively explore design in a highly speculative way. We will dream up scenarios that seem fantastic at first, but actually give clear directions to the development of future services and experiences, resulting in a more fulfilling technological environment in which our humanity is truly acknowledged. A central idea here will be the Pyramid of Technology, a conceptual model that explores how technology becomes nature in a series of seven successive steps. This Pyramid of Technology facilitates a discussion around a more inclusive understanding of technology, and serves both as a method for critical analysis as well as a speculative design thinking tool for innovative strategies.

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miya-ong project by minju moon, shawn park & cyanne van den houten The Pyramid of Technology, from out of the scifi lecture at Symposium Leeum this was the most fun workshop for me to do. I worked togethet with two Korean students from Kookmin University: Minju Moon and Shawn Park on this 1 day workshop. Invent a new sense as exstence of the human body.

Minju Moon, as a big lover of cats came up with the idea of the Miya-ong. A combination of Meow in Dutch and Korean, a pill that you give to your cat and 123, it’s

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able to talk with you. To promote this new product, we did a live performance where Minju acted as a cat and had dinner with Park, and i was the subtitle. Next to that, we made a promotion video (Stills of the video: Img.): where you can dive in the theory and see that Miya-ong is life changing.

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the human computer jeroen barendse A computer is a device (analog or digital) that computes, especially a programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information.Marshall McLuhan considered that “the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system,” Should we consider the computer an extension of our brains?

TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 25-27/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

Since the introduction of personal computers a bit more than 30 years ago, the computer has seeped through in all aspects of modern society. We now carry powerful computers in our pockets, while always being a part of an interlinked web of other computers. The latest development which we call the Internet of Things, makes this development even stronger. Everything is talking to everything, all the time. Except for obvious advantages, there is also need for a critical look at this. What happens to all the data that is gathered, who owns it, and who can use it?

For a computer, it does not matter if its “executing” calculations to make it possible for somebody to write a beautiful poem, calculate the route to Mars, or to play ‘Flappy Bird’, or engineer the next atomic bomb. There are no ethics involved. Even if it seems that a computer can have ‘human’ qualities (intelligence, love, lust, etc.), this is still “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). Computer programs that learn and adapt are part of the emerging field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, But, a computer will solve problems in exactly the way it is programmed to, without regard to efficiency, alternative solutions, possible shortcuts, or possible errors in the code.

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What if a computer program can have human qualities? What if computer memories (files, images, videos) can fade away, like human memories? What if an operating system would function like a human memory, how would files be stored and accessed?

I doubt if alphabetical ordering would make sense, but what would? And more important, what would it offer for new possibilities? How can this influence new user interfaces, new ways for humans to interact with machines? What if there would exist computers that can not only function by strings of ones and zeros as input (1/0), by black and white, but by all the shades of grey in-between?

new interface project by Derk Over, So-hee Kim

Design one of these possible futures and make clear how this will change our perception of computers, interface, its potential impact. Show how you can encounter this new system, how you can interact with it. The medium is free.

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dongdaemun design plaza rené boer TUTOR: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016 24/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

In February, Failed Architecture conducted a short but intensive research workshop (within the Open Set Seoul Sessions framework) on Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, designed by the controversial London-based architect Zaha Hadid.

Shortly after the workshop, Zaha Hadid passed away at the age of 65, leaving a remarkable legacy. Her building, and the discussions with the workshop participants, inspired Failed Architecture’s René Boer to write the following reflections on the ‘DDP’.

The curved shapes of exit number 1 of the Dongdaemun History and Culture Park underground station are an odd sight in Seoul’s straightforward transport system, and indeed lead to one of the oddest novelties in the South Korean capital. Passing through the glass doors of exit number 1, you suddenly emerge into the spacious world of Zaha Hadid. Curved, concrete surfaces create an attractive and well-maintained plaza a few meters below street level, characterised by a visual consistency that is rare in a city like Seoul. The irregular contours of the plaza and a large, concrete bridge direct your gaze towards a large structure of an undefined but exciting shape, which is entirely clad in metal plates. It’s the world’s ‘biggest atypical building’, according to one of the signs. So atypical in fact, that it’s hardly a building.

It’s indeed more of an ‘architectural landscape’, as Zaha Hadid described it, where the undulating shapes of the exterior and the surrounding public space easily merge into the structure’s irregular interiors. From any position in the surrounding landscape, it’s these architectural motions that lure you into the DDP’s main structure.

Receptionists will bow upon your appearance, after which a bright white corridor, that turns out to be a large, spiral staircase, entices the visitor to ascend into the building. At the top, it spits the visitors out again into the crisp, blue-sky afternoon of Seoul’s cold winter days, after which you descend on another curvy surface towards the park. Following the park’s landscaping, you pass through some irregularly shaped pavilions before being conducted back into the main structure.

At first, the DDP seems open and inviting, but the building immediately takes control. Its design is virtuoso but aggressive, leading and misleading its visitors. While Hadid claimed the building wants to ‘make people think’, it feels like a hamster wheel eliminating any opportunity for mindful wandering or independent thoughts. If the DDP hasn’t left you totally numbed, then it is most likely you will wonder about the possible purpose of this whimsical landscape. It’s supposedly a ‘design plaza’, according to its name, but it seems to predominantly consist of impressively designed in-between spaces. Sloping surfaces, empty interiors and curved staircases seem to outnumber spaces with a less transitional character, such as a small, mediocre design museum, some crowded gift shops and occasionally occupied event spaces. Overall, the DDP seems to be a highly instagramable spectacle, without much apparent rationale behind its existence.

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This architectural exercise was conducted at enormous cost. Hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds went into its realisation, and its maintenance costs are said to be exorbitant. While this money could have supported local architects or the city’s SMEs, it covered Hadid’s considerable fees and went straight into the pockets of construction companies affiliated with Samsung, the mega-corporation that already dominates the South Korean economy. Equally problematic is the DDP’s social impact. Its construction erased a highly symbolic sports complex, which was strongly tied to the city’s modern history and home to a large street vendor community. The displacement of the vendors to the outskirts of the city is probably only the beginning of the wider gentrification processes that the DDP is currently bringing about in Seoul’s Dongdaemun area. Although the complex contains two of the original stadium lights and exhibits on both the archaeological remains and the history of the area, the DDP’s architectural overdose has arguably crushed most of the subtle urban layering of the area.

In return for these financial and social setbacks, Seoul received a major landmark that became instantly famous across the country. While Korean language hashtags referring to the DDP on twitter and instagram have broken all records, the DDP still has to acquire international fame. Its local popularity is largely the result of the complex’s high quality public space and architectural features, which could either be interpreted as a refreshing improvement of standards in Dongdaemun or a total denial of the urban context. It does however entice numerous young Koreans in search of a funky place to meet and snap some pictures with their smartphones, but nowhere does it seem to transcend this role. As Jeong Hye Kim previously wrote on Failed Architecture, the DDP was built to brand Seoul as a ‘design-capital’, but without a sustained relationship with the city’s design community it remains an empty icon, or a branding tool at best.

Dongdaemun Design Plaza

Now it’s here, there is no way back. The expertise of Korean architects has been disavowed and the social dynamic and complex history of the Dongdaemun area has been ignored or turned into a museum. The city of Seoul has been saddled with an incredibly expensive foreign object that was futuristic in 2014, and maybe still in 2016, but probably not 20 years from now. As a toy or a brand, the novelty will wear off quite soon. The only hope for the DDP is probably a serious effort to program its superfluous spaces. Although the local authorities don’t feel like spending much more money on it, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza could, for example, become a real ‘design plaza’ by filling it with a proper institute for contemporary design practices with both local and global connections. Only in this way will Zaha Hadid’s future of 2014 be cherished in the years to come.

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seoul’s dongdaemun design plaza rené boer, with contribution of listen to the city & jeong hye kim During the Open Set Seoul Sessions, Failed Architecture hosted a workshop on the recently opened Dongdaemun Design Plaza, a major, centrally located landmark designed

by Zaha Hadid Architects. Dongdaemun Design Plaza, which replaced an aging but locally popular amateur stadium, is described as a ‘metonymic landscape’, consisting of curvy spaces ‘reminiscent of flowing water’ and ‘incorporating Korean tradition and the future of ever-changing design’. The complex features a variety of exhibitions spaces, futuristic retail stores, product showcase opportunities, multi-purpose convention halls, and more.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 24/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

In the past few years, Failed Architecture has often done workshops on buildings of at least a few decades old. In Seoul, it will for the first time delve into a brand-new building by a ‘starchitect’. To come to an in-depth understanding of the building itself, people’s perceptions and memories of the building, as well the social, economic and political context that led to the current building, the same Failed Architecture methodologies as in other cases will be applied. In this way, participants will be stimulated to develop their own perspectives on the past, present and future of Dongdaemun Design Plaza and its immediate surroundings.

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Materials of the workshop: gathering data and the process of visual analisys of the social, economical and informational situation around the subject of DDP.

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prepare yourself for future neighborhood life! jin jung & nathalie shin In this workshop, we want to explore different forms of gatherings of the future. We want to discuss how to navigate along different groups: from communities that satisfy personal and private needs to communities that are made in response to more aggressive and public needs; from meetings that exist and created momentarily to groups that are formed in an extended period of time and will continue to do so. We want to also look into the relationships between the future self and the people around the self, such as the relationship between oneself and the parents; the relationship between oneself and the children; as well as groups of different depth of relationships, such as school alumni, gae (private money lending groups), hobby groups, on-line groups, people gathered together for an ideology, and new forms of groups that will be necessary due to future social changes. We want to think about these groups from personal points of view, and we will design identities of communities, write welcoming messages, or introductions about the groups in various methods.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 20-22/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

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cement project by 5 participants A long distance relationship, that can continue and develop from different places. A community or social system. In conversation with 2 Korean students from the campus, Derk Over and Mirte van Duppen and I talked about the history of Korean culture, and the still touchable cultural heritage.

What happens if architercture from your childhood gets destroyed? Is there still sentiment to a city of the buildings change all the time, and do not remember the history and development of a city.

The government seems to take over the heritage and builds from a different system than the Korean society would like to see their traces of living and culture.

As underground fictive activist society we came up with Cement. A open social movement that steals complete buildings from the government. And replaces the old state on the new building.

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Cement preserves a building by 3d scanning. Cement prints the part of the building with a story connected to it (implement it in the architecture), and by midnight replaces and deconstructs the building again.

As a way of surviving en preserving the past to keep the future in control by the society. By having 3d models of the buildings, a online city gets shape with all the preserved buildings. A way of connecting the community, and make global heritage.

utopian education annelys de vet Interview by Jenna Kang (participant Open Set Seoul Sessions 2016) TUTOR: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016 20 - 22/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

From February 20-22, I participated in Annelys de Vet her workshop as part of Open Set Seoul. Annelys is a Belgiumbased Dutch designer who developed a participatory design method in order to realise her Subjective Atlases. As course director of the Design Department, she works at The Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.

On the first day of the workshop, students were given the assignment to visualise data about the Kookmin University campus. It was a version of Kookmin University Unmapping the World. After each student’s presentation, we talked about Utopian Education. On the second day, we discussed details about how to build an ‘idealistic school’ in the form of two teams. Lastly, two teams shared and presented a view of each school’s rules and subjects after which we wrapped up the workshop.

The workshop was related to the theme of Memories of the Future from Open Set Seoul Sessions this year. We started by questioning and doubting the status quo of the current education system after which we visualised our utopian education. A large number of students from Kookmin University and Sandberg Instituut took part in Open Set. It was easy to compare the educational systems of Korea and the Netherlands. I became more curious about Annelys’ way of working and her way of seeing the world. I interviewed her about her work and thinking.

Why did you choose to be part of Open Set this year with its theme of Memories of the Future?

I was invited to be a tutor in this context. I feel that my work and way of working, has strong connections with the theme of this Open Set session.

In my practice I find ways of mapping identity and using design in order to conduct a dialogue and visualise an identity, which is also about belonging and imagining different futures.

What were your initial thoughts on Unmapping the World?

In a former cartographic institution in Portugal, I witnessed an amazing collection of historical maps and realised how the European history of mapping coincides with 17th and 18th century colo66

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nial practices. I realised that this mapping practice actually equals Western Colonialism, in a sense that there is a Western way of thinking and mapping the world. There are so many ways of describing the world. What I saw there was the ultimate form of top-down mapping, and not a bottom-up way of mapping. I strive to think beyond traditional status quo within mapping practices.

Not to re-map things within the same methodology, but to re-think the methodology with which we map the world, and thus un-mapping. Unlearn what we know.

Why do you think you’ve had such a good response from people with the Subjective Atlases?

It’s not just a project, it’s a way of work-

Subjective atlas of Mexico (2011), Annelys de Vet

ing, a design methodology. In a way, I offer a model of working, based on the invitation of another cultural organisation. The local organisation invites other people to contribute. During a workshop we organise together, we investigate with the participants what identifies them and how to express that.

What values would you like to share and capture?

There is a lot of humour involved in the project, and the atlas itself. It is beyond ego, not about design as a style. It is really about design as a way to bridge the gap with the other. Design as a tool for intercultural dialogue.

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Would you be happy if someone else used your methodology of the Subjective Atlas?

Yes. I like to see design as a virus, in a positive way. As something that can spread itself. Of course I assume I will be informed or asked, and that things will be done with respect if someone uses my methodology. I see possibilities of people copying it, but they should also find out their own angle, or their own context, or look me up in order to collaborate.

From your interview with Kristian Mandma in the Subjective Atlas of the EU, comes the notion that design is like storytelling. Could you

Subjective atlas of Hungary (2011), Annelys de Vet

tell me more?

Design is storytelling. What’s interesting in thinking about storytelling is that a story is a more relational thing than a design is per se. A story relates things.

There’s a storyline. There’s a beginning.

There’s an end. There’s a meaning.

There’s a context. If you think about a design as a story, you are triggered to think about it in a more contextual and relational form. If you think more about the layout, typeface, structure, you are thinking of design more as a form, or as a way of structuring information. If you think about design as storytelling, there’s another way of making decisions within the design. In relation to the 68

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Subjective Atlas, even though the book is a product of a process, ‘It’s a tool or strategy in order to have this dialogue regarding identity, to share this with others and come together, a way of giving room to this discussion. More than this book being the best design book, it’s a tool within this structure.’

Personally I got to know your name first through Droog Design, can you talk about your products for Droog Design?

For Everything There is Season (Tea Towel Series) You can consider the tea towel series a bit as a Subjective Atlas in a way of think-

ing and seeing. The set forms a calendar of twelve months. Every tea towel is for one month. It captures a series of words. It maps certain phenomena with words that relate to cultural, natural and geographical aspects of each month. For instance, we have a saying in Dutch: “April doet wat hij wil”, meaning “April does whatever it wants” which refers to the unpredictable weather conditions this month. So in April, we can have freezing cold and stormy weather, while the next day can be a summer day and hot. So I made an overview of words to describe the weather conditions that we can have in April. One can consider it as poetry in the house. Altogether the 12 tea towels narrate about Dutch culture.

My Cup of Thought What happens often while you drink coffee — is that your philosophical thoughts about the world, environment and politics develop. While drinking coffee, you are usually with others and talk about these thoughts. The cup and saucer is a set of words, such as ‘The illusion of doubts’. If you turn around the saucer, it becomes ‘The illusion of politics’. All the words in the cup relate to democracy and the masses (How mass opinion is being shaped) The combination of words becomes a philosophical statement. They are serious, and yet light-hearted, triggering your thoughts while sipping coffee.

Regarding your thoughts on education, why did you want students to imagine Utopian Education in the workshop?

Initially my idea was a bit different about the workshop, but on the first night and day, we had so many conversations about education — both in Korea and in the Netherlands. My first question during the workshop was to map the students’ environment, but I

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felt that what the students brought back wasn’t so imaginative, it didn’t trigger or open up thinking. There was not enough abstraction, fantasy and passion included. So I decided to reformulate my question to let the students imagine their education with more passion. The moment when I asked students about what would be the utopian form of their education, immediately I heard enthusiasm and vulnerability in the voices, and fantasy. I realised that that was the right question, which was actually inspired by a quote from Oscar Wilde, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.

Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

The university is already there, but not the utopian version. And that is what we mapped during our workshop.

Can you talk more about education at The Sandberg Instituut?

My ideal form of education is education without tutors. Students form the education. They do what they feel is important to do. But if there are no tutors or institute, this won’t take place. Even though it is my utopia, at the same time I accept the fact that in order to achieve this, we need tutors and institutes. What I do as department head is figuring out the right balance, where students feel super motivated to initiate and tutors are there to guide them in this self directed process. We as a team support them in their initiatives. Students have to realise that they are studying for themselves, and not to conform to the institute, or to please the tutors. They have to define what they want to learn. In that sense we do not offer a program, we offer possibilities, and it’s up to the students to build their

own program with it. They define their own urgencies and curiosities — which is in the end the most difficult part.

This methodology confronts students with themselves, they can’t lose or hide themselves behind a program. We educate agenda-makers, and not agenda-followers. We educate them for a self-initiated design practice in which they make individual decisions and collaborate strongly. As a school we give them opportunity to grow in this kind of role.

As a graphic designer, you used to do client-based work. Why did you stop doing this?

In a way, it’s unclear where client-based projects stop and end, but what is important for my practice is to be involved in the full process of a project. I cannot just give form to other people’s information. Additionally I don’t think in terms of a client and a designer. I think in terms of partners in crime. You have different positions and talents, and those are the conditions to collaborate.

Everyone has a different role, but a shared responsibility. I choose to work in those kinds of constructions. I am interested in creating content, relating

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content, and seeing this in a bigger context.

Do you feel a responsibility to contribute to something bigger than yourself?

Yes. Absolutely. I hope all the students also feel the same thing. As a designer you have to realise that what you make is part of a discourse, it has an effect and affect. It’s part of a dynamic and often a system. As a designer, you have to realise which system or ideology you are serving — and if this is what you are willing to do. I do often hear designers say, “oh, I have so much freedom in this assignment”, and of course that is nice, but if you ask further, “who is this client?”, “what does this client stand for?”, and “do you as a person, want to contribute to this kind of mentality?”, then they might reject the freedom they were offered, and see it in a whole different light. Sometimes they want to stick too much to this creative freedom and creative possibilities, and they don’t think of the fact that it’s serving a certain capitalistic or neoliberal system, that they do not want to be part of. Designers need to think on a relational and contextual level, far beyond form and style.

unmapping the world annelys de vet This workshop will be an exploration into the field of reactive map making practices. It aims to counterpose the apparent neutrality of professional cartography through contemporary engaged local mapping projects. In this workshop, ways of mapping will be used to resist the authority of state, to question ruling power structures and to expose the propensity of maps to simplify our world. The act of unmapping will be presented as a poetic form of resistance. (During the course of the workshop participants will work in small teams on contemporary mapping methods, to map their perception of the direct environment.)

TUTORS: OPEN SET SEOUL SESSIONS 2016, 20 - 22/02 LOCATION: KOOKMIN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL

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Open Set program 2016 I. Seoul Sessions

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the future of memory From: Memory in the Twenty-First Century (edited by Sebastian Groes*) Palgrave Macmillan (2016) pp. 1355 — 636 *TUTOR: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 24 - 26/07 LOCATION: TENT / CBK ROTTERDAM

Ten Characteristics of Memory in the Twenty-First Century It is helpful to set out a list of numbered developments that chronicle the changing state of memory in the early twenty-first century.

1. The role of the human mind in memory is increasingly marginalised. With the ferocious power of the digital, technologies and machines are increasingly taking over cognitive and memory functions and storage, making memory an increasingly non-biological process. New forms of cognitive technology make the brain a porous, permeable container that mediates and navigates between the mind and the world. The early twenty-first century is characterised by a nomadism of mind and memory. Cognition and memory are not dependent solely on neural activity but are dynamic processes in which the mind interacts with external forces beyond the subjective self. Although in the anthropocentric model of embedded cognition the human being still features at the centre of thinking and memory processes, in models of extended cognition the human biological unit is a subservient part of a dynamic self-organising whole. The power of humans has become more complex and ambivalent because ‘the underlying issues involve the very complex dynamics and human agency in both its conscious and unconscious manifestations’.1 Through instant, repeated and shared retrieval processes, memories are increasingly dynamic and protean, but also migratory and distributed across platforms, media and technologies, and other people’s minds.

2. Memory is increasingly a collectively shared networking activity between humans and machines resulting in transactive assemblages with a democratic potential. In a digital context, memory that is based on cognitive interdependence has intensified exponentially.2 Both memory storage and memory processes tend to involve more than one creator and/or user, who assemble what has been called ‘networked memory’.3 While the state and conglomerates such as media and ITC giants attempt to wield power through digital technology, traditionally powerless individuals and bodies of people are able to create independent zones for themselves for the reinterpreting and rewriting of knowledge and memory.4 This development has a democratic potential and allows us to challenge hierarchically structured authority and other privileged social constellations, and explore the potential of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ or the ‘group mind’.

3. Memory is an intersubjective process. The location of memory is changing, taking place not strictly in the brain, but acting through dynamic cognitive processes within the intersection of the mediating spaces where the mind and external tools and machines connect in cognitive loops and circuits. Memory processes also take place between individual subjects, who, with the help of the ubiquitous presence of technologies, engage in ‘transactive memory’.5 Memory requires an intersubjective, transhuman point of view.

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4. ‘Global Memory’ has matured. New technologies have caused memory storage and processes to become a world-spanning practice; the global reach of the corporations and the internet have created a super-organism made up of all human minds bound together by something like a biological version of the internet. This process started around 1900, and matured in the twentieth century with the strong effects of the advancement of new technologies on cultural production.6 With more awareness of climate change at the start of the twenty-first century, there is also a renewed awareness of the earth as a global notebook that contains memory traces of mankind’s presence written into the geological strata.

5. Memory is an increasingly mediated process of fictionalisation which undermines the possibility of authentic, original remembering. Postmodernism taught us that thinking and perception are constructed and narrated, and argued that in the post-war world we tend to (prefer to) live life at the level of representation. Our heavily mediated perception fictionalises memory, and external forces beyond the subjective self shape, edit and manipulate memory. Despite the waning of postmodern theory and a renewed desire for authenticity, memory is more than ever a process of representation.

6. Memory is increasingly conditional, mutable and open-ended. In the digital age, much of memory is taken over by technology and programs outside the human body, so that outside forces are shaping our memories. This open-endedness of memory is increased by the knowledge that, because technology makes memories easily retrievable, we are enabled to revisit and reinterpret past autobiographical memory. Other people share in the construction of our memories, both now and at a later date, and this makes memories less fixed and absolute, and more relative and mutable. Memory work in the twenty-first century is never finished, and always provisional.

Lesion (2010), Andrew Carnie

7. Memory is forward looking. There is a renewed emphasis on the fact that memory evolved for planning purposes, and that it has a great role in shaping our imagination and prediction of the future. Memory has a profound role in making decisions, navigating space and plotting the world ahead. The possibility of the extinction of mankind due to climate change asks us to imagine our present lives as future memories.

8. Memory has acquired new, complex temporalities. We are seeing new, posthuman machine times that displace traditional organic notions of history and time. With the ability to instantly retrieve memories and information through digital technologies, the gap between the present retrieval moment and past memories is a closed circuit.

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Conceptions of death have become increasingly complex: even though we may experience biological death, we may continue to dwell in cyber space as digital memories. The Anthropocene asks us to imagine our present as memories in a future where everything is already dead. These are new, posthuman mortalisms that shape twenty-first century subjectivities.

9. The unconscious has a major role to play in memory. We are seeing a return to an investigation of the role of non-conscious processes in memory. Research has shown that for half of our ‘conscious’ lives we are engaged in some kind of mind-wandering. In fact, a recent study even suggested that daydreaming is the default state of our brain, and that those parts of the brain are overridden by other parts when we need to focus on a particular task.7 Hayles notes that recent research has suggested that the unconscious ‘plays a much larger role than had previously been thought in determining goals, setting priorities, and other activities normally associated with consciousness. The “new unconsciousness”, as it is called, responds in flexible and sophisticated ways to the environment while remaining inaccessible to consciousness, a conclusion supported by a wealth of experimental and empirical evidence’.8 The web and social media such as Twitter, which are algorithmically generated and mined, have become a new collective unconsciousness of our culture.

10. Memory has accrued a plurality of new, often anti-anthropocentric perspectives.

New studies into memory require new posthuman forms of vision and imagination.9 Climatic memory demands a geological perspective. Neuroscience has introduced a molecular, neural vision which in art has generated a cellular, synaptic imagination. ‘Big Data’ and algorithmic patterning require an ‘empty’, mathematical perspective. These perspectives continue to displace humans at the centre of critical thinking.

Twenty-first century ethics of mind and memory In light of this list of changing characteristics of memory there are some new, urgent questions that arise: What should we do with our memory? What is memory for, in twenty-first century contexts? How can we make memory more useful, and perhaps in different ways? Must we take better care of our mind and memory, or ensure that we reduce the impact of these contexts on our human minds? How, and to what extent, can we let our cognitive abilities evolve in beneficial ways? Should we be afraid of the evolution of the human mind that’s to come?

Such questions evoke new debates about the bioethics and the biopolitics surrounding these rapid changes in memory. They include the right to privacy in the digital age, and, more contentiously, the right to be forgotten through some kind of digital switch-off after we die biologically. There is also a fascinating debate about the ethics of human enhancement, which Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu explore in Human Enhancement (2008). In The Second Machine Age (2014), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew MacAfee explore how machines will take over various human professions in the next century, greatly altering the shape of society, but also the values and forms of recognition.

To discuss the ethical issues regarding memory fully would require another book.

Yet, let us make a start by calling for a new ethical agenda that sets the agenda for 76

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the new critical thinking about, and protection of, the human mind. Our humanity exists in a shared duty of care towards our cognition, in which memory features centrally. In society there exists a strong awareness of the lived effects that new and rapidly changing contexts have on cognition and memory, which can be used to establish a new competency of mind and memory. We need a reconsideration of pedagogic strategies within a new form of education and society that should teach all of us about the precarious nature of the human mind, and the contexts and influences that shape it and govern our everyday lives as citizens in liberal democracies.

This new competency generates a new ethical and political awareness about human power and freedom, which can be laid down in a flexible, open-ended body of rules that safeguards our psychobiological life. These ethics should form a body of codes that enriches our lives, and reaffirms our basic civil liberties. We should have more ownership and control over our brain, mind, memory and behaviour. Just as physicians take the Hippocratic Oath, these ethics should be enshrined in universal law and be integrated into business models and in capitalist production.

Fantasies of stopping scientific, technological progress and the digital revolution are useless, and enslave us to a nostalgic, potentially regressive rhetoric. We should establish an ethical debate about how technology can be used in a beneficial manner. We can re-direct the harmful impact of technology on the human mind by finding new ways to protect and nurture the workings of the mind and memory, through software such as internet blocker Freedom, but also, more importantly, through ethical debates in the public realm. In liberal democracies, the government must aim to close the current gap between rapid developments and their often slow responses through the creation of independent bodies whose advisory reports are swiftly implemented. New technologies can be employed to, wherever possible, create contexts in which we are able to use and explore our human cognitive abilities and functions to the fullest. Those same technologies can also be used to commit our society to improving the lives of people whose cognition is somehow impaired.

As an example, Ineke van der Ham showed how we can use GPS technology to help, for instance, stroke patients.

Discussions by Heather Yeung, Peter Childs and Martijn Meeter have foregrounded the importance of the ethics of memory, and remembering, whilst Nick Carr, Adriaan van der Weel and Sebastian Groes showed the ethical implications of reading. Such ethical considerations show the continued value of the Humanities, which is the pre-eminent field in developing the intellectual frameworks to offer a proper duty of care to the human mind. The Humanities will thus continue to be able to offer its traditional social functions, which includes enabling frameworks for empathy and morality, facilitating an ethical responsibility, and for critical thinking and reading. This ability to unite disparate forms of thought as well as its ability to think critically offers new opportunities for a seriously marginalised Humanities. But after the dismantling of the authority of the Humanities at an institutional level, we can no longer return to a naïve, archaic form of Humanism. The idea that, in Robert Hampson’s words, ‘humanities research has an important custodial role in relation to cultural assets’ no longer seems to be enough.10 The Humanities can be the middle ground where our increasingly uncertain, chaotic world, and the fragmentation of our pluralizing knowledge, norms and value 77

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systems might be restored to some sort of unity. However, this middle ground is constantly shifting and we need a more mutable, flexible model; the Humanities’ practices are to be reconsidered in order to adapt to new, contemporary demands on society and the human mind. The challenge of its authority should be viewed as an opportunity for reinvigorating responses; the Humanities are not sacred, but could benefit from a critical, anti-monumental spirit, which will take them into the twenty-first century with new confidence, and new objectives. This book embodies and enacts a new idea of a dialogue between the Humanities and the Sciences, in the spirit of E. M. Forster: Only Adapt. This book is symbol of a new, ferocious intellectual energy, and has shown the power of cross-disciplinary dialogue through the creation of a space where thinkers and critics can interact with one another as active citizens. Its dynamism invites a new embodied cognition, a thinking-with-the-body that can incorporate numerous disciplines, including neuroscience. Memory in the twenty-first Century celebrates play, curiosity, creative-critical exploration, serendipity and imagination. We can make it new, again.

Critical reading and thinking have a privileged position in understanding contemporary forms of thinking about memory because reading comes closest to understanding and analysing, in Paul Ricœur’s words, ‘the virtual experience of being-in-theworld proposed by the text’.11 We must reconsider reading as a form of simulation that allows us to critically navigate, anticipate and understand modern virtual experiences. This skill is political and ethical, and indispensable, and if we reconsider literacy in the digital age, we may take the human into the next century in new, creative-critical ways. We must reintroduce Homo Ludens, ‘Playing (Wo)man’. Play is an immersive, creative power that draws on, and generates, spaces that often fall outside the power of the state and capitalist enterprise. As Jussi Parikka states: ‘Play is important when understood as part of didactics — the hands-on approach that allows us to try, to have tactile contact with, to touch and open media and hence, paradoxically, to work in quite the opposite manner to the cool distance-taking mechanic methodology’.12 We must play in order to adapt to the digital, and the digital offers plenty of opportunities for play, if approached with an awareness of the mode of production from which it emerges and a conscious knowledge of the rules of representation that it is founded on. Paul Bloom states that ‘[i]magination changes everything. It evolved for planning the future and reasoning about other minds, but now that we have it, it is a main source of pleasure. We partake in experiences that are better than real ones. We can delight in the minds that create imaginary worlds’.13 However, we could use imagination for not just pleasure, but also for a serious purpose: it is the novel, hopefully in new, exciting forms, that is able to provide the deep imaginary space that enables a complex thought.

As Adriaan van der Weel, Michael Burke, Sebastian Groes and Mark Currie have argued, the novel has a vital role to play in the ethics of memory because the world of the text problematises our relationship to the world beyond the subjective self, acting as a space of simulation where we rehearse multiple interpretations, part of an ongoing, unfinished process that questions memory and identity in our contemporary culture. If memory operates and acts in the same way as predictive simulation, we should use the dynamism and mutability of memory so that we can reorder and reinterpret the past with a view to forcing a major reconsideration of the world to come.

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We should, then, not fear the future, but accept the current indeterminacy and uncertainties with a spirit of openness and plasticity that posits the increasingly conditional and relational nature of life in the twenty-first century as a form of control, rather than viewing it as a disempowering development. The plurality of futures embedded with our reconsideration of memory allows us to reject the cynical idea that our old world cannot be changed through ideas. Let us reject the rigid anticipated expectations of future anterior tense that dominates our twenty-first century lives, and embrace the possibilities of the unbidden. The world is changing, and if it is losing particular values and ways of life, this might not be such a bad thing after all.

Our changing memory shows us how to adapt to the new contexts that are reshaping our lives: we must embrace mutability, plasticity and be prepared to live in an open-ended manner if we want to survive. How fast the ecology of life is changing can be demonstrated by looking at Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), which is partly founded on neuro-scientific knowledge of the memories of black cab drivers.

In his satirical novel it is our carbon-based way of life that is criticised, through the imagined flooding of England. Glow (2014), an equally psychotropic, neuro-literary work by young novelist Ned Beauman suggests how the world is changing when the protagonist Raf points to the new mindful consciousness of a new generation: Raf has always envied couriers for the MRI scan they take of their city, front tyres like toroid dog noses, a dead leaf’s difference in the height of a familiar kerb felt somewhere in the sinews when Raf himself probably wouldn’t even notice an extra few inches; and because, like pirate radio, they were supposed to get squashed under the internet, but didn’t; and because he once saw a game of bike polo and it looked like a lot of fun.14 The world is changing, and humans are changing with it, rapidly and maybe irrevocably. If we want to continue allowing future generations to remain human, we should accept and embrace this continuity in change. Memory allows us not only to find mental anchors in the past, and thus create an (imagined) sense of stability and coherence, but also to forge connections between the past, present and future.

Memory is what makes us human to begin with; therefore, our new understanding of memory considered in this book gives us fresh insights into how we will be able to keep us human — albeit of a different sort — in the next century. Memory is vital for imagining new ways of being human whilst navigating the radical changes and possible futures of the world that lies ahead.

1. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94.

2. See Daniel M. Wegner, Toni Giuliano and Paula T. Hertel, ‘Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships’, in Compatible and Incompatible Relationships, ed. W. J. Ickes (New York: Springer, 1985), 253 — 276.

3. Andrew Hoskins, ‘Digital Network Memory’, in Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics

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of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Errl and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 91 — 108.

4. Ananda Mitra notes: ‘Those who have the power to create voices in the discursive space of the Internet could also be the ones who produce memory narratives of the digital age.

This is a particularly curious position since the technology is problematizing power in the virtual. While the conglomerates such as media giants are attempting to wield power on the Internet, the traditionally powerless

individuals are able to carve out a discursive zone for themselves too’. ‘Digital Memory’, Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society, 3(1) (2005), 5.

5. Wegner, Giuliano and Hertel, ‘Cognitive Interdependence’.

6. Wolfgang Ernst notes: Wolfgang Ernst: ‘In contrast to two thousand years of basically written history, the advent of the audiovisual recording media had led to a genuinely multimedia “global memory” projects […] which turned the archive into a discrete matrix of life itself’. Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 125.

7. See Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works (London: Vintage, 2008), 197 — 201, who points to Malia F. Mason, ‘Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought’, Science 15(393) (2007), DOI: 10.1126/ 8. Hayles, How We Think, 94.

9. Eric Kandel notes: ‘Thus we gain from the new science of mind not only new insights into ourselves — how we perceive, learn, remember, feel, and act — but also a new perspective of ourselves in the context of biological evolution. It makes us appreciate that the human mind evolved from molecules used by our lowly ancestors and that the extraordinary conservation of the molecular mechanisms that regulate life’s various processes also applies to our mental life’. Kandel, In Search of Memory, xiii.

10. Robert Hampson, ‘Custodian and Active Citizens’, in The Public Value of the Humanities, ed. Jonathan Bate (London and New York:

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Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 69.

11. Paul Ricoeur, Time a and Narrative, Volume 2, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 100.

12. Jussi Parikka, ‘Archival Media Theory’, in Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1 — 36; 14.

13. Bloom, How Pleasure Works, Loc. 3219.

Ned Beauman, Glow (London: Sceptre, 2014), Loc. 404.

14. Ned Beauman, Glow (London: Sceptre, 2014), Loc. 404.

let’s go camping! prospective memory and design dr. sebastian groes & maki suzuki (åbäke) Our contemporary period is characterised by a multiplicity of revolutions that together are radically reshaping the context of our thinking about what it means to be a human being. Globalisation, overpopulation, climate change, geopolitical shifts and ruptures after 9/11, an ageing population, ongoing scientific breakthroughs, AI and human enhancement, the dominance of the internet, and the presence of new technologies and social media in our lives are just a few examples of developments that are having a major impact upon the understanding of ourselves and the world. Climate change poses urgent questions about the weight of mankind’s collective carbon footprint on the earth, but also puts forward new temporal complexities and paradoxes. The human mind is once again a contested site where major power struggles play themselves out. Humanist writers suggest that we have lost or forgotten something, confronting us with the possibility that we are losing a kind of shared essence. The contemporary incarnation of the human soul, memory, seems to be under attack and many critics fear that we are losing ourselves — we seem to turn into algorithmic remixes or feel as if we are reduced to informational streams.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL 24 - 26/07 LOCATION: TENT / CBK ROTTERDAM

Background.

But: our time is also an exciting time that poses new intellectual challenges. The relationship between memory and the future in particular is becoming more complex and paradoxical. During this talk we will talk about prospective memory processing, simulation and memory, the role of ‘self-defining’ memories in the shaping of our identity, the role of technology and archiving in 81

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the preservation of ourselves, the idea of the ‘post-self’, which is the digital identity that remains behind after we physically die, and the role of guessing and prediction in the shaping of memory. Memory is always future-oriented. We’ll also turn to the impact of climate change on memory and the future: we’ll talk about apocalyptic fictions, and our growing awareness that our present is a future memory, and the anticipation of retrospection.

How does this affect intellectual frameworks? How does it impact design practice? How can we use this complex temporal connections for innovation? We’ll try to answer such questions by means of a playful discussion that will act as a psychogeography of the participants.

In order to demonstrate how different contexts shape the relationship between memory and design, participants will be involved in slightly different tasks that centre on designing a tent for a camping trip. The temporal and spatial context of the task will be revealed at the workshop. The tent will be treated as a metaphorical space: a space of leisure, a temporary home, a tool for taking refuge from everyday existence, a place where nature and civilisation merge in a liminal space. Numerous questions about the design of the tent — its function and form — will be addressed: what should it look like, and why? What should it contain? How does it work? What is it for? What is the role of functionality important for memory, and to what extent does a strong aesthetic contribute to the shaping of experience?

The tent will be embedded within a story of a camping trip in order to explore the relationship between object and narrative.

Further details will be released at the workshop.

Workshop.

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sonic solid entity selwa abd, xandra va der eijk, pallavi gupta, jihye seo ‘Sonic Solid Entity’ is an ephemeral sound installation/performance which consisted of representing the concept of a tent in the form of a sonic solid entity.

Conceptually, the sound of the specific milieu which corresponds to an array of vibrations will create this ‘entity’, a matter that will provide shelter.

Our performance/sonic installation consisted of placing a portable field recorder machine in a spot within Witte de With, that we found interesting because of nice acoustical properties.

We then invited the public to simply put the headphones on and to listen to their surrounding. Through a process of feedback loop coming from the headphones, the listener enters this new realm of

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sounds in which time is vanished. In one hand, he’s confronted to the sounds that he normally would hear but also to the very specific sounds coming from the recorder.

In fact, by putting on the headphones connected to the recorder, one can listen to very distinct sounds that usually are hard to listen because of our inability to process them. The recorder then pushes the listener to practice a deep listening that will make him more aware of his surrounding.

As a meditative process, through this act of deep listening, the listener is able to penetrate another sonic realm detached from reality. Thus, sound as a matter becomes the tent.

a day in the life in flondon lori dersak, erica volpini & nadine rotem-stibbe Woke up, fell out of tent Dragged a snorkle across my head Made the tube in seconds flat And looking up I noticed I was wet Oh boy

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The 2018 revolution following Brexit led to a four year civil war, cut short by the big London flood. It seemed like the flood would never end and this forced the survivors to devise a whole new infrastructure for the city. Still, they wanted to retain the old and distinguished characteristics of London, to preserve its culture and commemorate its history. The city’s biggest monuments were kept underwater with actual tubes running between them for open access. Hi-tech waterproof tent-boats were developed for the above water population. Today, in 2028 having overcome the immense difficulties our population faced, we present to you with great pride the new city of Flondon.

portable village llewellyn hensley & jonathan castro PORTABLE VILLAGE INDIVIDUAL FAMILY/HOUSE SHARE COMMUNITY TENT AS BOTH HOME + VEHICLE FOCUSED ON DEVELOPMENT OF SHAPE, MOVEMENT, TEXTURE + GROUPING

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just in tent laura ettedgui, centaine lim, mary yang & ying yi What would a tent of the future for Japan look like? And how is memory linked to its functionality and form? “Just In Tent� is a drone-operated, safety tent intended for use during natural disasters. Many times, however, even when objects or spaces are designed for specific purposes, an audience may modify, customize, re-purpose, and even misuse the product. The participants in this group were interested in investigating the potential narratives of a designed object when it is distributed into the hands of the consumer.

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20 years mbcbftw olia lialina From: Interview | Olia Lialina, 20 years MBCBFTW

by Nadine Roestenburg (researcher at Institute of Network Cultures) TUTOR: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL 28/07

LOCATION: V2 INSTITUTE FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA

Twenty years ago, my father came back home from work and brought our first computer into our living room. It was a big beige box with a flickering screen on which we could type and paint. Around the same year, in 1996, the Russian net.art pioneer Olia Lialina created My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (MBCBFTW), an interactive web narrative that tells the fictional story of a couple trying to talk to each other after the war. The launch of Netscape 3, which made it possible to split the browser into independently controllable frames, inspired Lialina to explore the boundaries of the browser and create an ambivalent dialogue.

MBCBFTW has become an icon in the history of internet art, and has inspired international artists and non artists to create their own interpretations. Lialina has been collecting all these interpretations (unfortunately some have been lost) in the Last Real Net Art Museum, an online museum that is at the same time a critique of the first internet art exhibitions organized by museums.

My Burger Came Back from the War, Guthrie Lonergan (2012)

In the retrospective exhibition at MU, thirteen of these interpretations are on show, ranging from an interactive burger story, to a t-shirt, to works that tell real traumatic stories. For the occasion, MU has also commissioned two new works by Foundland and Constant Dullaart, presented as homages to Lialina’s iconic work. Together with a completely emulated version of MBCBFW on good, old-fashioned PC towers running Windows, this exhibition is a tribute to the World Wide Web and presents

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a new approach to keeping history alive. The day before the opening, I asked Olia Lialina some questions about the exhibition and her practice.

You have been collecting, preserving and monumentalizing web culture from the 90s for quite some time now. What made you start this?

I started collecting web pages when I started to teach students. I wanted to explain and compare things that were happening on the web to things that happened before but I couldn’t find the old web pages. In 1999 I became aware that the people who were online weren’t aware of their own history.

From an aesthetical point of view, the star backgrounds of old homepages caused the urge to preserve web culture.

When I realized that the pages with star backgrounds were disappearing, I started to collect them so that I could show them to the students. But it’s not just about a teacher who can’t find old web pages, it is about the history that we will not be able to remember.

Furthermore, there is no respect for what unprofessional designers made before professionals came. That’s why I started to protect and monumentalize their productions.

How did you see web culture and its aesthetics change through the years?

Web culture has been changing all the time. When you search for ‘design trends’ or ‘top 10 design trends’ in a specific year, you will find lots of articles that describe these trends. But these trends were always related to graphic design, for example typography or color combinations, and rarely to structure or layout. And of course, everything that was not made by design professionals was ignored. That’s why I started to make my own timeline. This timeline starts with the style that I call ‘Prof.Dr’.

Starting in 1993, the earliest examples are very simple webpages by academics, 88

in default styles: the links are blue, the visited links purple, the active links red, and you browse from top to bottom. I call it ‘Prof.Dr’ because when I started this in approximately 2006 it was the best search request to type in Google to find old pages, since the very first pages on the internet were built at universities. Up till now, I still don’t have a better search term. Because of all my writings about this code word, the term has sort of popularized and established as a name for this style and time.

The main ideological change is that you don’t make your own webpage anymore; it is made for you by a service that provides you with a template. This crucial change also affects aesthetics, which become more organized and corporate. Only for a very short time, about five years, people felt the responsibility to build cyberspace themselves.

That is why these aesthetics, the star backgrounds and under construction signs, have become a symbol of selfmade cyberspace. One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is the documentation of this self-made cyberspace with star backgrounds, animated gifs and MIDI background sounds. This ‘Geocities 1996’ style is a symbol of the blast of colors, animations and bright and loud productions of the time when everybody was welcoming everyone to their pages and making their own corners of cyberspace.

In an interview with Josephine Bosma from 1997 you said that you didn’t like the discussion about the definition of net.art. What do you think about this today?

I still think that back then, the works of artists should have been discussed in more detail. Not just as a whole,

Baby Come Home (2016) | Foundland, Boudewijn Bollmann

as if it was a movement. It was not a movement. All these years it was always about the terminology. Talking about the terms, discussing them, protecting them. Looking back, twenty years later, I know I’ve spent quite a lot of time explaining the meaning of the words, or rejecting some. But I don’t regret it because all these discussions made the medium we are working with visible, which is the most important thing for net art.

This exhibition is simultaneously being showed at HeK in Basel. Next to this, your work is also on show in the Electronic Superhighway exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London. This indicates that there is a high interest in exhibiting internet art. Can you describe how the interest in internet art, from an institutional and public level, has changed?

In my memory, it’s already the third attempt of contemporary art trying to embrace new media art. Still one can say that, for all the great intentions, there is no respect or understanding of net art. It’s important to keep the places that are specialized in new media art, although I don’t like the term new media art. Places like MU, HeK, really try to go into the details. They put a lot of effort in working with the right browsers and finding the right equipment to show the online projects in all their glory. They invest their energy in thoughts about the exhibition, and do not just make the works easily accessible to the public. In a recent article about Electronic Superhighway the journalist says that the exhibition ‘…ticked all the boxes in terms of canonic name-dropping, yet it felt rushed and cluttered, and seemingly conducted so as to get this kind of art “out of the way”, to move on to something else, and quickly send these works back to the specialist archives.’

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New media art is getting popular for a third, short period of time. New Aesthetics and post-internet art have made it more common to show the works in real spaces, which contributes to an increase in interest. I don’t know for how long it will stay this time, but every time the wave of popularity brings something new. For this third wave it’s the increase of interest from the galleries who are supporting media artists.

For this exhibition you slowed down the internet connection and used old PCs from the 90s. Is it only about preserving the past or giving access to the memories of the past?

Or do you also look back on those years with feelings of nostalgia?

I’m not nostalgic, I think I’m quite futuristic, because I still believe in a future where people are making the web themselves. If we want to show the online works in an offline space, we have to make the effort to show the works the original way, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It’s much more fun to look at the works on an authentic computer with the authentic connection, inside the original Netscape browser. When I was making the exhibition I couldn’t believe how beautiful the Netscape browser is.

You can’t avoid the feeling of nostalgia, but there will also be people seeing it for the first time in their lives. And concerning 28,8 kbps connection, believe me, it’s a very special feeling to click on something that isn’t there immediately.

MBCBFTW is one of the early works that is often mentioned in the history of net art, and it has been appropriated and remixed numerous times. What has made this particular work so influential?

I am proud that people have been appropriating and remixing the work. I think it happened because MBCBFTW has a recognizable structure. Some works in the show are cold and formalistic, they translate the work into newer functions of the net, such as a blog, twitter, flash, or an animated gif banner. Other artists used the structure of MBCBFTW to tell their real stories.

Freya Birren’s story is about her relationship with her boyfriend who came back from Iraq. And one of the new works, by Foundland, is about mothers who realize that their sons left to join ISIS. The structure seems capable of expressing difficult conversations. It’s also about not knowing whether you are watching a monologue or a dialogue.

In your article Not Art&Tech from November 2015, you write that the computer of the future should be visible, and that this is the main topic on your agenda for media theory. Can you shortly describe what you mean by this, and why it is so important?

This is an allusion to the famous phrase “The computer of the future should be invisible!” by Don Norman. Everybody is repeating his words, and designing according to what he said. It was his idea that interfaces should vanish and that there would be no awareness of computers. The only thing left is you and the task you have to do. This is sort of accepted by everybody as if it’s beneficial. But I think an effort should be made to introduce some other design paradigms where the emphasis is on the visibility of the computer. When you want computers to be invisible, you 90

can’t demand an understanding of how computers work, or awareness and media competency.

If you could travel through time would you go backwards to the 90s or forward to the future? Or any other time?

You can’t imagine how often I think of where I would go if I only had one choice. I then think of the Middle Ages, or sometimes of the beginning of the 19th century, to meet all the famous Russian poets like Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Time traveling occupies my mind. I wouldn’t go to the 90s, with all the research and preservation I have done, I have made enough contribution to building this time machine. Therefore, nobody has to go back to the 90s to still enjoy it.

In the same interview with Josephine Bosma from 1997 you say that Alexei Shulgin introduced you to the internet. Your first impressions, such as work by Jodi and the nettime mailinglists, were not commercial but related to internet art.

Today, this is quite impossible, since the internet is integrated much more into daily lives. Imagine that you are today’s Alexei Shulgin and you had to introduce me to the internet. What would you show me?

First of all, I would try to keep you away from Facebook. I would show my favorite place of today: blingee.com.

Concerning internet art, I’m a big fan of Jan Robert Leegte, his work is very interesting in understanding the structure of the web. I would also show the work of artists like Evan Roth and Cory Arcangel, and the work of my students.

For the history of everything, I would show the works of Helene Dams, for instance I Can Has History?, the family tree of lol cats, this gives a good overview of what happened over the years.

Baby Come Home (2016) | Foundland, Boudewijn Bollmann

But I think I would give a different answer every month. As of February 2016: Random Darnknet Shopper, and all other projects by !Mediengruppe Bitnik; the amazing precious time machine into web history, oldweb.today to recognize the volume of the connected world; all the projects of the last twenty-two years made by Tale of Tales; and the newest project by my student Simon Baer, Cannot Sleep with Snoring Husband, recommended for everyone who thinks that you can’t cry looking at net.art.

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1. Josephine Bosma, Olia Lialina interview Ljubljana, 5 August 1997, nettime 2. Olia Lialina, Not Art&Tech: On the role of Media Theory at Universities of Applied Art, Technology and Art and Technology, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, November 2015 3. Olia Lialina, Prof. Dr. Style: Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993 (Vernacular Web 3), July 2010 4. Don Norman, ‘Why Interfaces Don’t Work’, in: Brenda Laurel (Ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990: 218) 5. Jeppe Ugelvig, Taking a ride on the Electronic Superhighway, i-D, 5 February, 2016

diving into one terabyte of kilobyte age archive olia lialina The web is 27 or 23 years old now (depends from which event you start counting).

28/07 LOCATION: Throughout these years, it has transformed V2 INSTITUTE FOR THE from a new medium to new media in the UNSTABLE MEDIA very best sense of the word – it continues to evolve. Its “stupidity”, its neutrality, which lies at the core of internet architecture, allows it to continue to grow but without ever really growing old or mature. Dealing with an eternally young medium means that we always have to deal with something new – technically as well as ideologically and aesthetically. It means that the death of web pages, users or services is seen as a natural process. And it makes no sense to speak of a project reaching middle age, because age has no value here. Getting old is something that you don’t do on the net.

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Several examples of the materials from the Archive, gathered by the participants during the workshop.

The 1TB of KB age archive provides us with the experience of getting old. Coming into contact with aged pages is an important lesson that defies the impression that on the net, everything always happens in the present.

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digging and redevelopment joanna van der zanden Interview by Noortje van Eekelen TUTOR: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 28/07 LOCATION: TENT / CBK, ROTTERDAM

The exploration of cultural formats where the audience gets involved in the curatorial process of research, questioning, and making, feeds the curiousity of independent curator and creative director Joanna van der Zanden (NL), who focuses on cross-disciplinary (social) design projects. Until January 2010 she was artistic director of Platform21, the incubator of a new design centre in Amsterdam. For 2011 and 2013 Van der Zanden was appointed artistic director of the Rotterdam Design Prize, a bi-annual Dutch design award that aims to stimulate debate on the role of design in a cultural and social context. We are interested in her perspective on Open Set’s current theme Memories of the Future and the way she approaches the phenomenon from her own experience and enthusiasm for the cultural field.

In your practice you emphasise a social (and sustainable) perspective, related to your work as a curator.

If designers are to employ memories into their creation of possible futures, how should we involve an audience?

Whether by an audience you mean the visitors of a show, or the end users of a product, in both cases a way to get them involved is to create open-ended products. Products that can be adjusted, repaired, hacked, finished off etc.

Another way is to make use of specific local skills and to offer your designers’ qualities more in a co-creative way (which is often referred to as being a social designer).

Looking at the role of the curator, in what way can curatorship go through interesting developments in relation to retention and memory?

Are there developments possible in the presentation, representation, storage or experience of successful artist work?

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There are many. And to start with, first of all, the curator should allow the opinion of others as well: step outside of its own expert and historically correct vision and create more open platforms. The institutional frame of a museum often doesn’t help, but even with small changes within a classical exhibition setting one could find new ways. For instance, the current show at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam about the Amsterdam school missed, in my opinion, the chance to make it more contemporary. Many of the items on show are from private collections. They have these interior items in their own houses, sometimes inherited. Why not involve the views and stories of these collectors? Why not show photographs of how these items function in their homes, how they relate to more contemporary design products. What do these products mean to their owners?

The show was only set up because it is 100 years ago. This is a typical ‘let us remember’ something excuse. But what is its meaning at the moment? What is

it doesn’t always need to be educational. For example, looking at a porcelain cup of tea and at the same time viewing a photograph of the English landscape that was changed by the mining industry.

Another way, which I am working on right now, is to actually reconsider proposals from an earlier generation.

Many of the societal and environmental

Social Design Biennale Utrecht (2012) | Schuurtjes. Temporary work/research space to investigate possible possibilities of the shed for informal meetings and economic exchange. (co-curated with Arne Hendriks)

Reinventing Happiness (2014) | Geregisseerd Geluk. Theatre set within exhibition space. Visitors could audition for a Happy play on depression. (Jeanne van Heeswijk & Paul de Bruyne)

its urgency? I have heard many times visitors of the exhibition say: how ugly!

I find this really interesting. What is exactly ugly about it? What does it say about us, in the here and now? Was it perceived as ugly back in time also?

I often wonder in what way we could add new perspectives to historical artifacts. Extra layers? On the process, fabrication and materials, for instance?

This could be done very suggestively,

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Bosch Geluk (2016) | Staat van Geluk. Solo circus act performance within exhibition (Mees Borgman)

Reinventing Happiness (2014) | Happy Together. Visitors could choose one of the DVDs selected and recommended by employees of the Stedelijk Museum ‚s-Hertogenbosch and watch it.

Bosch Geluk (2015) | Academie voor Beeldvorming making use of the flexible white cube space within the exhibition as an artist studio.

ideas we are focused on right now have a connection with what was presented in the past, like in the seventies. Some of these artists, architects and designers are still alive. And why not get their ideas out of the drawer and together with the artists reconsider them, discuss and repurpose them. I love the idea of a living classroom in the museum. To use the muse

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1. Daniel Kahneman, The Riddle of experience vs memory, 2010 | TED 2. Milton Glaser, On the fear of failure, 2011 | Vimeo

one day collection for a future project joanna van der zanden TUTOR: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 28/07 LOCATION: TENT / CBK, ROTTERDAM

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In this workshop the participants will be challenged to play with different ideas of collecting and presenting. We will make use of ‘one day collections’ put together by the participants and imagine their presence and meaning 50 years from now.

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Collection by Nadine Rotem-Stibbe

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Two small exercises during the workshop

close encounters of the third kind. decoding information for future communication bruno setola, rejane dal bello, liza enebeis We live in the here and Now with memories of the Past and fantasies of the Future. Our role as design communicators is to give shape to this future. We make the future tangible using the tools we have in the present with references to past experiences.

What if the future we have to create is not ours? What language do we use to communicate? Can we detach ourselves from our cultural and aesthetic backgrounds? And is this the ultimate goal of a designer?

A designer as probe and beacon of the future unknown.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 29 - 31/07 LOCATION: STUDIO DUMBAR / WORM

Background.

Workshop.

We have been contacted by an alien nation.

We have received several messages in the last few days.

It is urgent that we decode these messages before their arrival.

Estimated landing Sunday 31 July 14.00.

You have been selected out of hundreds of applicants because you are the best communication artists worldwide.

You will work in groups of two and your role is to interpret this alien language with whatever tools you think are appropriate to mediate your message back to them.

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sense economy gayane van yerkanyan, mary yang Participants in this workshop were contacted by an alien nation and given two images to decode in order to respond to the aliens upon their arrival. This group received from the aliens an image of a hand with seven fingers and the word “gut.� The message interpretted: our hands are our gut senses and the aliens want to reveal more possible senses within us. By combining the current five senses humans already have, new combinations of synesthesia are possible. To mediate the message to the rest of the humans, the group performed a ritual demonstrating how to unlock these possible senses. The combination of performance, sound, monologue, and engagement created a live experience for the audience to imagine what the future has in store for us.

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Two images from the project by Jonathan Castro and Cristina Noguer

a sense of what’s to come susana camara leret & mike thompson | thought collider Interview by Noortje van Eekelen TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 01/08

LOCATION: V2 INSTITUTE FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA

Mike Thompson and Susana Cámara Leret focus on the exploration of the meanings and values that can be derived from alternative ways of experiencing built and mediated environments, motivated by emerging technologies.

Through their experimental, critical, art and design research practice ‘Thought Collider’ they work on self-initiated projects and they develop consultancy work for industry and academia to activate novel insights and innovation. Our conversation covers their artistic approach and the relationship to the theme of this year's Open Set. You could say that we’re interested in exploring alternatives to a given context, or what could be, by opening ourselves up to the uncertainty this creates. In this sense, we see our ongoing projects as their own worlds within which various questions and sub-explorations take place. Often these are interrelated. These micro-narratives allow us to

In The Institute for The Design of Tropical Disease, the designers appropriate tropical disease as a medium for art and design to address the complex relationships that stimulate disease transmission. (photograph by Gyalpo Batstra)

I have quite a complete first impression of your work and background. Could you explain yourself a bit further? What is the ‘urgency’ of ‘Thought Collider’ at this very moment?

Our interest lies in exploring other ways of relating with our (built) environment, beyond the problem/solution paradigm.

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The Data and Ethics Working Group probe the processes and authoritative gestures that legitimise the collection of personal information and how informed consent is attained and defined. (photograph by Thought Collider)

remain focused, while zooming-out to consider the wider implications of reshaping existing systems and technologies.

In our most recent project, The Institute for The Design of Tropical Disease (IDTD), we attempt to shift the dialogue surrounding Tropical Disease from the pragmatic to the imaginative, acknowledging the manifold, intertwined factors that stimulate the spread of Tropical Diseases such as Malaria, Zika and Dengue. As witnessed recently with the hysteria surrounding the Zika virus, the vast resources targeted towards the eradication of insects largely underestimates the complexities surrounding vector-borne diseases.

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tion and policy might play. This, as is the case with much of our most recent work, implies a blend of lab based “in-vitro” and public “in-vivo” research to break through traditional domains of knowledge production.

Do you consider design and art as good mediums to be critical? What does it mean to be critical as an artist? What are you responding to?

Some form of political correctness in design? Or its seriousness?

Art and design offer other relational ways of understanding reality, for example, and particularly in the case of our work, as an alternative and compliment to classic scientific discourse. In that respect, we are responding to the processes that led to the production of information and ‘knowledge’ and its materialisation in everyday contexts.

Therefore the “critical” aspect is more a matter of difference rather than of acceptance of set norms and structures.

This in some manner explains the ex-

You are both members of The Data & Ethics Working Group. What do you aim to achieve with the group?

What is the ethical perspective of this group of researchers on the phenomenon of memory and data?

We do not intend to adopt a specific perspective on the handling and distribution of personal data, rather to publicly explore the boundaries of what can be considered acceptable or desirable to society at large. The group’s work responds to implicit behaviours and exchanges which result from the ubiquitousness of current data-driven systems.

The format of the collective is intrinsic to the nature of the work, as an international network that comes together to develop art-led experiments in response to a concrete context/theme. To

date, we have posed questions such as: how is informed consent obtained and achieved when your body has become a platform for the exploitation of biodata.

How can people understand the value of their body’s information and actively engage in this exchange which we are exposed to regularly within everyday systems and services? Through public research acts and interventions our aim is to transform mundane acts of data exchange into performative acts, enabling participants to reflect upon their roles and rights within the information economy.

As a society we have experienced over the last few years numerous examples of the effects of digital memories on our social fabric. If we were to move towards a more biobased future, which of our current problems might resolve themselves?

First of all, the digital need not be detached from the biological, for example the binary system allows us to understand the carbon-based (life) system.

Perhaps we can explore other frameworks that allow us to embrace the grey spaces in-between. So in this sense, we’ll hopefully think of kinship and the relationships that we are developing with other organisms and systems. One of the studio’s aims is to investigate the shift from a human-centered approach, to embrace interrelatedness and the ecological mind. Moving away from this linear, cause & effect modus has many implications, for example within healthcare systems and services. This socalled shift towards a bio-based future could allow a different understanding of health and disease, as processes that lead to balance or imbalance within a system consist of ongoing exchanges between human and non-humanactors.

Others (for instance Vilém Flusser) have previously argued that biosci-

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The Rhythm of Life offers participants the possibility to listen in on the electro-chemical messages transmitted by their bodies — in exchange for donating their personal biodata to scientific research (photograph by Gert Jan van Rooij)

periential focus of our work. We do not aim to merely speculate on technology, but to ‘explore things possible’ through a more open enquiry. This implies moving beyond the reductionist ‘right or wrong’ way of doing, towards an ongoing process of reflective enquiry, stimulated by creative, hands-on experimentation and experience with materials and technology.

Rain Rain Go Away! Exploring the natural processes producing environmental odours that communicate rainfall to mosquitoes (photograph by Gert Jan van Rooij)

ence can play a leading role in challenging nature, and introduce new relationships between humans and nature. Do you see yourselves as part of this challenge?

We certainly need to reconsider the way we relate to other non-human organisms. In fact, more and more we are seeing the need to question what it means to be human when, biologically speaking, our bodies are hosts to so

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many organisms that influence how we eat, smell, think, feel, etc. We cannot simply detach ourselves from ’nature’.

One of the starting points of IDTD was that we noted the eradication of mosquitoes as vectors as a core strategy in disease prevention, and yet this approach largely ignores other critical societal, economical, political and environmental factors that are known drivers of disease transmission. The life sciences

play a role in exploring alternatives, but we are also interested in other ways of understanding life processes, for example within traditional indigenous knowledge systems, and particularly in their understanding of their local habitat and promotion of other means of co-existing with other non-human lifeforms. An example is traditional plant knowledge from communities in the Colombian Amazon. Their holistic understanding of the environment highlights other values such as cohabitation, as a basis for these relations, which could also challenge bioscience. We also touched upon this when developing Aqua Vita some years back, as we attempted to merge biochemical data with experiential data based on physical symptoms and emotions to map the evolution of the human body over time. It was not so much the daily collection of biological fluids for analysis that struck us, but rather the way in which the acts of collecting and reflecting on this data made us conscious of the daily changes within our bodies and the interrelated factors that influence these transformations.

What kind of future scenarios can you see emerging, based on the developments and the role of memory and the future? What are possible alternative environments that could be introduced in the future?

Perhaps we should first ask what is memory when the capacity to store is so vast? How will this influence the way we relate to others and our surroundings? We are moving towards a time where the perceived distance between the micro and the macro will seemingly vanish, meaning that we will interact across scales in a manner that will profoundly alter the way in which we understand our bodies, the bodies of others and our relationship with the environment. Memory is multimodal, so in this respect we are very interested 110

in the role sensory technologies can play as experience-driven systems that could promote more embodied experiences as opposed to a fragmenting of the senses. For example we’re exploring smell-memory, as a means to retrieve episodes from the past in a present context, by using the associative power of smells. The exposure to a given smell can trigger vivid recollections of places, people, colours, sounds linked to a past experience. Therefore molecular reconfigurations experienced in a present context could offer windows into individual past histories which also relate to collective identities. The future is therefore rooted in the present through these sensory experiences and via the acknowledgement of a shared past.

What projects are we going to see in the future from you? And where do you see the challenges in achieving them?

We don’t see a specific end to the projects that we create, as they are envisaged as long-term investigations. Some of our upcoming activities will be a direct continuation of existing work, others more sub-plots or spin-offs that emerge from on-going explorations.

In the short term, within IDTD, we plan on further refining Rain Rain Go Away!, a hybrid research artifact we recently developed to explore the olfactory conditions that communicate incoming rainfall to insects. We’re experimenting with specific molecules in collaboration with the Laboratory of Entomology at Wageningen University by considering environmental triggers as attractants and/or repellents. There are additionally further lab investigations and field trips planned, moving into other corners within the realm of Tropical Disease that we have yet to examine, such as looking into the architecture of insect breeding grounds.

FATBERG is a critical design research project by Mike Thompson & Arne Hendriks, focused on the construction of a floating island of fat — the FATBERG (photograph by Hanneke Wetzer)

Aside from this, Mike and Arne Hendriks are currently in the process of designing and constructing a production facility and visitors centre for FATBERG at NDSM in Amsterdam Noord. From Summer 2016, the plan is to not only scale up the production of the island but also to develop a public programme and community of FATBERG builders to explore society’s relationship with fat. They hope to be ready to cast the island into open water in the IJ in 2017.

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Given the scope of these projects, the challenge therefore lies in juggling these manifold and overlapping themes.

This explains why we think of IDTD and FATBERG as platforms in their own right, as opposed to isolated projects. This way we create the necessary space to slowly build insights, while generating networks of knowledge and expertise that allow us to embed our work within society.

a sense of what’s to come mike thompson, susana cámara leret & alexandre motta TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 01/08

LOCATION: V2 INSTITUTE FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA

In the workshop A Sense of What’s to Come, we will explore how sensory experiences with smell, light and sound enable and distort access to deep-rooted memories, forming alternative realities that empower a direct experience of possible futures.

Memory is fluid, morphing and evolving through time, manifesting and interpreted in the moment and context in which it is experienced. Considering [bio-chemical] life (e.g. DNA) as a form of encoded memory, we can explore its future manifold forms.

Thought of in this manner, through its mutations and re-enactments, memory forms the future. Considering the multimodal nature of memory, how might we archive it for future access?

Sensory materials and technologies play a crucial role as experience-driven systems, promoting embodied experiences as opposed to a fragmenting of the senses. For example, our olfactory system is intrinsically linked to the limbic system, the region of the brain operating memory and emotions, meaning that when we smell something, our emotional response precedes our understanding of the scent. Similarly, soundwaves are absorbed through the whole body, having a direct impact on tissues, cells and emotional response through differing vibrational frequencies.

Experimenting with the sensorial via a series of hands-on material experiments, A Sense of What’s to Come will address varying systems enabling embodied experiences of memories, and what this might mean for our understanding of the past, present and future, discussing themes such as:

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• In what manner do storage / encapsulation media and the hierarchy of, and access to, information distort our recollection of memories?

• How might memories be shared and collectively re-enacted?

• How can such exchange inform collective futures based on difference and cooperation?

The workshop is developed and will be led by design the duo Thought Collider and Dr. Alexandre Motta (researcher specialized in the field of immunology).

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Hands Rituals project by Xandra van der Eijk

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where it as if bik van der pol TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL 02/08 LOCATION: WITTE DE WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

What is hidden, forgotten, cast away, or overlooked in the day-to-day operations of a cultural institution? How does one make tangible the container of knowledge that envelops the factual succession of exhibitions and publications? Can artists become active and responsible co-creators of institutions, their politics, and representations?

This workshop is connected to the recent project Where It As If by the artist duo Bik Van der Pol at Witte de With Center, which addressed the archive of the institution which accrued over the past 25 years. The project highlights what might otherwise become lost in both the history of the institution as well as the history of art in the city of Rotterdam. Paying close attention to the socio-economic and political context in which the institution was created, and departing from the belief that cultural institutions and their legacies are as much made up of stories, ephemeral objects, and subtle traces, Bik Van der Pol’s process can be likened to a long term forensic investigation that examines, tests and actively exposes that which lies concealed in the folds of history.

In Bik Van der Pol’s words, “To resist memory loss and to avoid falling into the trap of repetition, conservatism or even fundamentalism, people’s activities (which after all make and determine history) must first be consumed and digested. In this way, progression and change can truly be generated and made possible.”

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web-to-print-to-street paul soulellis The network’s relationship to memory is changing. Our need to document and record everything has given way to more ephemeral modalities. Let’s acknowledge Snapchat, the Instagram feed and text messaging as legitimate spaces for artistic practice, but how do we bring these new archives into the future? We’ll begin this workshop in the studio with a web-based dérive, wandering through public collections, archives, hard drives and feeds. Then we’ll move into the city, looking for moments to materialize the poetic network in the street. Soulellis will guide the participants through an array of experimental publishing approaches, using public space and the people of Rotterdam as our audience.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL 03/08 LOCATION: V2_INSTITUTE

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infection selwa abd Public intervention which consists of ‘infecting’ surfaces with an url.

The url becomes the agent that allows the materialization of virtual content in a physical space.

For this project, I decided to materialize a sonic playlist containing mixes that artists contributed for an independent music platform I run, by anonymously spreading its url in a record store. The immaterial sonic content finds then a new existence.

Once I arrived at the record store, I took a photograph of three records that I wanted to infect.

Then, I printed those photographs. For this experiment, the only place that was

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close enough to the store and had a printer, was the information desk at the central station. As the wifi connection was very slow, the only way to publish those taken photographs were through instagram.

After publishing those photographs on instagram, I took a screenshot of them from my computer. As soon as I got my photograph, I made sure to delete it on instagram, thus no traces were left.

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Take a Smile project by Y.Y. Kwok

greatest hit na kim What’s your favorite song up until now? Everyone has one, even if you are not a heavy LOCATION: listener. One’s beloved songs are easily V2 INSTITUTE FOR THE changed according to age, mood and situUNSTABLE MEDIA ations. This means music is a familiar container that carries personal experiences and memories. You may notice that often a single song becomes associated with a specific image from the past. In this workshop we will make a compilation of your favorite songs. The criteria for selection is determined by your chosen context. You might have tons of songs in your daily playlist, but if you need to make one list with your favorite songs, what would be your theme or story that structures this selection? And can you visualize this compilation in one image?

This process can be compared to a method for designing an album sleeve.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 02/08

But as you know, the conditions in which we encounter music have changed rapidly due to the development of technology.

From LPs to soundcloud, your way of listening has been altered and the associated experiences are various. The final output need not to be a form of design for a specific medium, rather you can suggest a suitable medium that compiles these songs and transfers into an image. At the end of the day, some of you will be DJs introducing your Greatest Hits. After the workshop, the list and image will be bound together into a documentation book.

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from cabin to castle to capsule: the end of design YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS 03/08 LOCATION: WITTE DE Open Set Workshop, Rotterdam, August 3, 2016 WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

From Cabin to Castle to Capsule: the End of Design We live in an object-oriented, consumer-driven world, where big is beautiful, if not badass, and more is not enough. Small may be beautiful, too, but needs critical mass -- not just a big price tag. We're surrounded by much body fat and stuff, hoarding everything but the immaterial -- sorry, you can do that, too. Certain people in the know say that our conspicuous consumption, our logo-laden lifestyle, is the end of history. To shop until we drop. Curtain. But you know that. What you may not know is that humankind's shopping spree from cave to McMansion is the history of the end of design. Although we may be fulfilling our civic duty by buying things, in the process we're making a mess of the planet. It's time to downsize, or else. And some are. We see it all around us. More and more people are, for lack of upward mobility or as a spiritual or intellectual exercise in denial, living in tiny, often transient spaces with few belongings and little notice for design: the poor, the homeless, the incarcerated, the elderly, retirees, refugees, soldiers, boarders, squatters, artists in residence, minimalists, clerics, space-station astronauts, campers, nomads, long-haul truck drivers, orphans, Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, Jack Reacher, philosophers, bohemians, Japanese . . . They are, unbeknown to many of themselves, design visionaries. What can designers contribute to this growing albeit mostly unwilling progressive movement? What can they contribute in a world where all of us, in order to survive, must radically reduce our footprint?

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Manifesto by Jonathan Castro

Graphic Design lies not in its uniqueness, originality or authenticity, but in its ideological dimension, educational, informational or political interest

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staging the message. strategy, method and language use rick poynor & els kuijpers workshop intends to offer participants theoretical and practical tools for an editorial approach of visual production. It concentrates on the diversity of means of the critical ‘journalistic’ tradition in media that works in the tension between realistic imitation and self-conscious artifice, i.e. between representation and presentation.

In reaction to the virtual realism of the spectacle dominating mainstream media, which prevents a meaningful use of word and image, the workshop deals with textual, visual and other practices that further more complex and argumentative forms of communication and foregrounds the constructed nature of messages in order to solicit the active interpretation of the viewer/reader. That is why the emphasis is on the potentialities and richness of the ‘reflexive’ or ‘dialogic method’, trying to recuperate the specificity of its projective and emancipatory practice.

TUTORS: OPEN SET SUMMER SCHOOL, 04 - 06/08 LOCATION: WITTE DE WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Background & workshop. The

Taking the social workings of the message as a starting point the workshop focuses on the editing and making process, introducing a method which structures the collecting and editing of information in a way that lays the foundation for the staging, the mise-en-scene of fact and vision to the multiple sensory tracks of the visual.

Create a visual essay in any media - print, electronic or spatial - on a subject in the above mentioned field. Please present at the first session of the workshop your subject and point of view on it and bring visual documentation.

Assignmen.

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samsung and the future of art laura ettedgui, llewellyn hensley, yehwan song & mary yang During this workshop, participants were challenged to present complex and argumentative forms of visual communication to encourage the active interpretation of the viewer. This visual essay argues that corporate partnerships with cultural institutions will allow for the continued collection and preservation of our cultural history. The dialogue begins by establishing the historical lineage of art patronage by the Medici family in parallel with the present

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day form of art patronage demonstrated by the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. Ultimately, the visual message stresses the positive effect corporations can have on the art world by providing a visible platform and stable repository for the future of art and culture.

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Wonam Portrait – a visual essay, group project by Asmae Eassaissi, Clara Weinreich, Y.Y. Kwok and Jihye Seo

Verantwoording

Open Set Summer School

2016

wij beeldmanipulaties die alle gekozen afbeeldingen vervormd en vloeiend aan elkaar verbond. Het geheel presenteerden wij digitaal, als een tijdslijn waar men zelf doorheen kon scrollen.

Twee gedeelten uit het visueel narratief Workshop Rick Poynor & Els Kuijpers

Visual essay on the statement The collaboration between arts and sciences will save the world – a group project by Xandra van der Eijk, Cristina Noguer and Pallavi Gupta

Ervaring Persoonlijk vond ik dit de minst interessante workshop. Ik heb veel ervaring met beeldregie, waardoor het storytelling principe voor mij niet vernieuwend was.

Ook de inleidende lezing was voor mij als Nederlander bekende kost. Ik denk dat het contrast met de workshop van Young Hae Chang Heavy Industrie de dag ervoor voor mij groot was, waardoor ik me niet helemaal open kon stellen voor deze workshop — mijn hoofd zat nog vol met grootse en hervormende gedachten.

Desondanks heb ik veel plezier gehad met mijn teamgenoten en was het maken van de afbeeldingen met de Iphone weer een nieuwe en spannende manier om beeld te maken. Ik was blij met het resultaat en onze presentatie en kon de input van Rick Poynor in het bijzonder waarderen. Ook vond ik het fijn dat ik met mijn teamgenoten wel gekozen heb voor een vertaling naar een ander medium, dat bracht voor mij de spanning terug in de workshop.

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Studio Xandra van der Eijk

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Open Set Program 2016 Memories of the Future Noortje van Eekelen | editor Lori Dersarkissian | design assistant Petr van Blokland, Max Bruinsma, RenÊ Boer, Theo Deutinger & Stefanos Filippas, Noortje van Eekelen, Sebastian Groes, Jenna Kang, Patty Jansen, Nadine Roestenburg, participants of Open Set Seoul Sessions and Summer School 2016 | texts & images Online Reader www.openset.nl/reader All rights reserved. Š the authors, Open Set, Rotterdam, 2016

Open Set team Irina Shapiro | initiator and artistic director Susana Pedrosa | production manager Adrien Borderie | graphic designer Lori Dersarkissian | intern production & communication Open Set foundation, board Max Bruinsma (chairman) Joanna van der Zanden Vlad Butucariu Open Set 2016 is made possible by the support of Creative Industries Fund NL, Kunstblock Rotterdam and many other partners and sponsors