The field covered by the ArtScience programme is very broad and dynamic. In order to avoid repeating our current courses and topics in a fixed curriculum, we intentionally choose to focus on unknown territories in the research projects. Every year the ArtScience team chooses a number of topics that are explored in research projects and run over a period of six weeks, at least three days a week. Some research projects are collective projects with the emphasis on the production of art works and lead to a public presentation, outside the school walls. Other research projects focus less on the final result and more on the process of artistic investigation of the topic in question, producing artworks, prototypes and documentation in the form of papers and audiovisual registrations. In the research projects, students also learn to develop ideas collectively and become involved in the organizational aspects of preparing a public presentation.
Foddering the future
Space Science in the Arts
The Theatre Machine
White City White Canvas White Noise
Exploring the culinary underground of Veghel’s former fodder factory
Cocky Eek, Wietske Maas
The characteristic veevoeder fabriek (fodder factory) in Veghel is the specific site of this research group. This is a factory that processed animal fodder for livestock and has a magnificent 30 metre high feed processing tower (constructed in 1956) made especially to produce veekoeken (compound feed for animals). The animal feed processing machines are part of the industrial stage set in which ArtScience students will explore the obvious or obscure culinary future and past of Veghel with artists Wietske Maas and Cocky Eek.
Food does not only bring people around the table as a communal – and often very social – act, but it is also a necessary and often contested subject, allowing us to trace histories, individual and collective memories, urban and other cartographies, ownership, class and geo-political tensions. What we eat, how and where we eat and with whom are all are markers of social, political, economic, environmental and globalized conditions. In addition, food and culinary practices complicate distinctions between spheres of production and consumption.
We will set out on a collective endeavour to inhabit this former animal fodder processing plant (once one of the largest processors of animal feed in western Europe) to explore the future of the industrial food chain and dive into the food history of Veghel. Now, decades after its closure, the factory is in a period of limbo; between industrial animal feed production and, in the future, a site of (post) industrial human food production developed by the giant supermarket chain Jumbo.
During three weeks we will be hosted by de Compagnie to occupy the factory to make together a gesamt proposal that responds to some urgent questions art and the future politics of industrial food production:
– How could we use the factory as a site to think and enact possible scenarios for our future food supply? One way to do this could be, for example, in the form of food experiments
– Are all living species caught in the spinning machine of the global economy?
– Agricultural and Cultural industry: If these industrial ‘ruins’ are being re-inhabited by supermarket giant Jumbo, what is the role of culture and what are the grounds of cooperation between artists and cultural initiatives (such as de Compagnie) that are complicit in developing this new food-culture cluster?
To unpack as many tangents as possible we will listen, watch, read and discuss lectures, texts and films from different perspectives of an economist, activist, farmer, industrialist, geographer, artist as well as arranging discussions (dinners) with various local figures in Veghel who have been historically or presently involved with the CHV (CHV formerly stood for Cooperatieve Handels Vereniging now stands Cultuur Haven Veghel).
More background information:
The Factory
The development of composite cattle feed began around a century ago. Before then, farmers would feed their animals with press cakes. These cakes were given as concentrated feed: in summer as an addition to grass and in winter as an addition to hay. Even now on some small farms animals are still fed with the hard round cakes in stead of dry kibbles.
Press cakes (veekoeken)
Press cakes or oil cakes are the solids remaining after pressing plant material to extract the liquids. Common press cakes are made from flax seed (linseed), cottonseed, and sunflower seeds. The dry left-overs are then pressed into disks.
De Companie
Artgroup de Comapgnie is a cultural organization founded in 1994 and based in a post-industrial site in Veghel (Noord Brabant). Together with many volunteers they are very active in organizing exhibitions, lectures, concerts, manifestations, innovative and confronting art productions and festivals. They are a platform for known and unknown artists, musicians, and theater makers. Foddering the future is a collaboration with de Compagnie te Veghel.
Jumbo
Founded in 1921 and since its takeover of C1000 in 2011, Jumbo is the second largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands after Albert Heijn. The head office and distribution centre are situated in Veghel.
Locations: KABK in Den Haag and Veghel’s former fodder factory
note: at certain nights we will be staying over in Veghel.
Credits: 7 EC
Objective: a site specific, practical and theoretical, political and poetic endeavor into Food Art
Literature: To be announced
Examination: presentations, and attendance.
Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand, Bernard Foing, Edwin van der Heide
Space Science in the Arts offers you a dream ticket to the technical heart of ESA, the European Space Agency. Located in Noordwijk (25 kilometres from the Hague), the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) is the incubator of the European space effort – where most ESA projects are born and where they are guided through the various phases of development.
Our guide at ESTEC is Bernard Foing, Executive Director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG) and Principal Project Scientist for SMART-1, the first European mission to the Moon. He will introduce you to the main activities at ESTEC: scientific research, exploration, telecommunications, human spaceflight, satellite navigation and Earth observation.
Depending on the profile of your project, you can receive guidance from space scientists and engineers, access a wealth of data collected during various space missions, and invent your own way of fostering a collaboration with ESTEC. You will be further assisted by Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand and Edwin van der Heide in developing your final project for this course. Part of the classes will take place at ESTEC.
Since the earliest scientific preparations for extraterrestrial travel at the beginning of the 20th century, the exploration of outer space has become a quintessential framework of the human condition and its creative manifestations. Although the artistic pursuit of space science is sill in its infancy, an accelerated evolution is currently underway.
keywords: harsh habitats, sensory deprivation and psychological effects of space travel, overview effect, microgravity, immersive environments, origins of life, climate and space weather, astrobiology, robotics, remote and machine sensing, extraterrestrial physics, plasma crystallisation, Solar System, humans as extraterrestrial gardeners
Locations: The Hague and ESTEC, Noordwijk
Credits: 7 EC
Objective: exploring the potential of art in relation to (outer) space
Literature: To be announced
Examination: presentations, and attendance.
Kasper van der Horst, Katinka Marac
Stage is a place, but it is also a piece of machinery and has been for a long time. Like an omnipresent god, the crane like “Deus ex Machina” emerged on stage in the final moments of Greek tragedy to solve the moral problems caused by human mistakes. Much later in history, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk would never have been possible without the technological inventions in his Festspielhaus, and in recent years innovations in projections, light, sound and mechatronics have continued to influence the work of many theatre makers. Apart from a few exceptions however, the aim of this apparatus remained to establish a space for concentration on the actions of human performers and musicians.
The aim of this course is to produce a site-specific composition using the physical features and the technical possibillities of the space in combination with light-phenomena.
In this way the space itself becomes the subject. Imagine the space as an empty canvas, an empty room full of technical and theatrical possibilities that can transform scenographic space through electrical, material and mechanical means. We observe and analyse the space and use our discoveries to create multi-sensory scenes. Light, projection and sound phenomena will be deployed to give shape to special moments.
These moments – or scenes, will be considered as chapters in a public performance.
keywords : sculptural light, physical light, light phenomena, projection, light refraction, light dissection, light dispersion.
Credits: 7 ECT
Objective: To develop a sensitivity to the use of space, and to achieve an understanding of composing with light and projection.
Location: To be announced
Examination: Small research assignments, contributions to blog and/or wiki, presentation, attendance.
White City White Canvas White Noise
Robert Pravda, Taconis Stolk, Mirko Lasović
Lately, concepts like the Gesamtkunstwerk and the immersive artistic experience have been linked to technological developments in an effort to unify different artistic disciplines and media, as well as the senses.
An expanding part of contemporary media arts has the aim to achieve ‘total’ experiences, manipulating all the formats and materials at hand to immerse the audience completely. Multisensory subjects like synaesthesia, intermedia or installation art are explored, resulting in works that submerge the audience. Examples are found in (large scale) locative art projects, video games, virtual realities on the internet, special interfaces or custom designed environments, and the renewed hypes of 3d cinema and surround sound.
The term ‘immersion’ is used widely in art and entertainment nowadays, referring to multisensoriality, hyperreality or psychoactivity — but many examples merely stress the state-of-the-art of the technologies used. On the other hand, the upswing in immersive works unveils a renewed interest in the Sublime, the overwhelmingness of our surroundings as expressed by the Romantic era in the nineteenth century. Perhaps this is a counter movement to the over-cognitification of particulary the arts, which have been building upon conceptual theoretisation for a considerable time. Nevertheless, interesting about this new immersive art is that is does not focus solely on the natural, as in the nineteenth century, but rather creates hybrids of nature and cultural environments, accepting the fuzzy border between the two.
Through investigation of contemporary works and relevant pieces of the past we would like to examine perceptive experiences from a critical point of view. This project emphesises on the urban environment for immersive works. How is the city immersive? How does it function as our new nature? How does it relate to classic nature? How can we immerse in the twenty-first century? We are interested in perception and the sensory rather than the strictly technological or the theoretically metaphorical.
Belgrade, capital of Serbia, is a city with a turbulent past as well as an emerging contemporary culture. Being on the crossroads of many international conflicts throughout the centuries, suffering under the Yugoslav wars and NATO bombings during the nineties, Belgrade (the ‘White City’) is slowly beginning to reinvent itself. Starting over again, this opens a perspective on the city as a white canvas, white noise to be shaped into new surroundings.
Exploring Belgrade as a ‘white city’, with the Belgradians, to mould its ‘natural’ shapes into the urban immersive environment of this century, is the aim of this course. Topics like the relation between sound and space, conceptual perception, expanded and live cinema, and the nature of modernist space will be addressed.
The course will be a collaboration with the Faculty for Media and Communication of Singidunum University, Belgrade. Students of this faculty will also attend the Belgrade part of the course.
Locations: Two weeks at the Conservatoire in The Hague, then two to three weeks on location in Belgrade, Serbia
Credits: 7 EC
Objective: Exploring the aspects of Belgrade as a 21st century city and transforming these explorations into artistic projects
Literature: To be announced
Examination: presentations, and attendance
