KABK Research People & Projects, 2018-2023

KABK Research in Art and Design

People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Introduction At The Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK), research comes in as many dimensions, textures and registers as there are variants of creative practice and questions to problematise.

Building from the sensibilities and techniques that define an individual’s art, design, or teaching practice, most inquiries are directed toward advancing that practice-discipline, to deepening a related discourse, to critically reflecting upon its histories, or to challenging its theories. Meanwhile other researchers offer the capacities and perspectives of their practice-discipline to collaborations with external partners, to address environmental urgencies, or to protest social injustices.

Between 2018 and 2023, 50 members of KABK faculty and staff conducted research projects in the con­ text of a Research Group, chaired either within the Design Lectorate or the Art Theory & Practice Lec­ tor­ate. In the following pages, you’ll meet 14 KABK researchers with whom it has been my great pleasure and honour to work alongside at some point during these six years.

In detailed interviews the researchers shared, with generosity and precision, reflections on their individu­al research trajectories, on the collective research experience, and recommendations for the improvement of KABK’s research environment more generally.

The resulting collection of edited interviews represents valuable data, therefore, not only for the purposes of the 2023 Sector Protocol for Quality Assurance in Research report (for which they were originally con­ ducted), but also for the KABK as it hones its research profile and strengthens its research infrastructure in the coming years.

Many thanks to everyone at KABK involved in doing, sharing, supporting, assessing, teaching and learning research. Here’s to the next six years of curiosity, criticality, imagination and transformation!

Dr. Alice Twemlow, Lector / Research Professor KABK Design Lectorate (Deep Futures)

Introduction

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Research Group Members, 2018 – 2023 Please note that the teaching and staff roles listed here are those the researchers held at the time they were in the Research Group. For current information about a researcher, visit the KABK website or the Lectorates' subsites at www.kabk.nl

KABK Lectorates Together, the lectorates at KABK aim to build a strong founda­ tion for research as it manifests in tutors’ and staff members’ practices, in students’ educational trajectories, and the genera­ tive exchange between them. The lectorates can form a link between bachelor’s, master’s and PhD levels of education and play a key role in embedding research definitions and ex­ emplars in a department culture as well as research skills in a curriculum. At KABK there are two lectorates: Design Lectorate This lectorate was initiated in 2017 with the appointment of Dr. Alice Twemlow. Aiming to nurture a robust research cul­ture within the KABK and via the channels that connect it to other academies, universities, and research communities, both locally and internationally, the Design Lectorate is cen­ tred on the research project ‘Design and the Deep Future’.

This project, situated at the intersection of environmental humanities, design history and practice-oriented research, is attentive to the ways in which design (its industry, values and processes) is complicit in climate catastrophe, planetary deg­radation and the loss of biodiversity. In addition to its inves­ti­gation into waste and trash, space debris, digital waste, plas­tics and microplastics, the Lectorate works with Research Group members to contribute to a repository of climate jus­tice imaginaries and to explore the significance of alternative timescales such as geological ‘deep’ time, indigenous knowl­ edge of time, plural worlds, as well as values and prac­tices in relation to repair, re-use, maintenance, care, and caretaking.

Each year the in-progress projects developed by Design Lec­­torate Research Group members are shared in conver­sa­tion with peers, students and international guests in the academywide event ‘Fault Lines: KABK Research Forum’ and further disseminated in a variety of formats such as ra­dio broadcasts, online platforms, publications and exhibitions.

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Art Theory & Practice Lectorate This lectorate was founded in 2007 by Dr. Janneke Wesseling, who headed it until her retirement in 2022. It aims to pro­ mote the innovative integration of theoretical and practicebased approaches in teaching at KABK, and to stimulate students and teachers to engage in research. In addition to the Research Groups, the Lectorate also organises symposia, workshops and lectures with various partners. A Research Group was convened by Wesseling in 2020, with the results published in a pamphlet, Bridging Distance: Artistic Research During a Pandemic.

Starting in 2022, the new ATP Lector, Dr. Anke Haarmann, initiated a Research Group titled ‘Politics of Knowledge’, which addresses the urgency of critical thinking, making and artistic research, and is based on the premise that artistic researchers at KABK need to ask questions regarding the con­nection between truth and power, politics and knowl­ edge, exclusion and inclusion, and address topics otherwise considered marginal.

KABK Research Groups Between 2018 and 2023, 50 members of KABK faculty and staff conducted research projects in the context of a Research Group, chaired either within the Design Lectorate or the Art Theory & Practice Lectorate.

These researchers were supported with a temporary salary extension of 0,1 – 0,2 FTE (4-8 hours per week). Generally, participating tutors joined a Research Group for the duration of an academic year. In monthly meetings they discussed pro­gress and afterwards were expected to share their find­ ings and processes with the KABK community in the form of a presentation or publication as well as through their teach­ ing. New participants were invited to apply through an open call for proposals, were selected by a committee of peers, and given feedback from the lector, group members, as well as from invited students and colleagues and international guest critics.

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Design Lectorate Research Groups, Chaired by Prof. Dr. Alice Twemlow Design Lectorate Research Group 2018 Rachel Bacon tutor, BA Fine Arts [See pages 12 – 15 for a Q&A] ‘Undermining Value’ Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, drawing, graphite, landscape, fault lines, geotrauma, environmental injustice, ecofeminism, radical intimacy, open mines, fieldwork Eric Kluitenberg tutor, BA ArtScience and MA ArtScience Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, curator, and researcher on culture, media, and technology, based in Amsterdam.

‘Redesigning Affect Space’ Kluitenberg built on his conceptual model of ‘affect space’, whereby large groups of people, organised by the use of mobile technology, expe­ rience affective intensity in the phys­ ical context of urban public space.

He explored how designed interven­ tions might help to distribute agency more equitably among citizens, cor­ porations, civic organisations, author­ ities etc. operating in this space.

Key Terms and Concepts Documentation of protests, affect theory, technosensuousness, public space Niels Schrader co-head, BA Graphic Design and MA Non Linear Narrative [See pages 16 – 19 for a Q&A]

‘Digital Pollution’

Key Terms and Concepts Information design, digital debris, data storage, environmental damage, information overload, server farms, mapping, photography Rosa te Velde tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design Rosa te Velde teaches theory at KABK and is a freelance writer, researcher and educator at other institutions including the Sandberg Instituut and the Tropenmuseum.

‘Making Design Weird Again’

In this project, te Velde explored how fiction can be used as a strat­egy and research method to expose is­ sues of eurocentricity in the knowl­ edge production of design history and to create space for critique.

Key Terms and Concepts

Design history, material culture, books, eurocentricity, decoloniality, library, satire, speculative fiction Donald Weber co-head, MA Photography and Society Concerned with making visible the technological, spatial, legal and po­ lit­ical systems that shape our cur­ rent condition, for Donald Weber the role of a photographer is to present information in a convincing, precise, and accessible manner – qualities which are crucial for the pursuit of accountability.

‘Geographies of Power’ This project sought to understand how the photographic perspective of hyper-verticality is used by 21stcentury administrative power to sur­ veil and shape our perception of landscape and conflict, and how documentary photography might play a role in subverting this power dynamic.

Research Group Members, 2018-2023

Key Terms and Concepts Photography, information visualisation, satellite images, surveillance economy, radical verticality, Google Earth, scraping, infrastructures of power

Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Group 2018 Thomas Buxo tutor, BA Graphic Design Thomas Buxo, a graphic designer based in Amsterdam, works in the fields of art, design and architec­ ture, with a practice that spans print and creative coding.

‘Headless Design’ Buxo developed a pedagogical par­ adigm through which to resist the limitations of proprietary software suites and to reclaim an intimate re­ lationship with the tools of making, with a particular focus on encourag­ ing a deeper acquaintance with the Unix shell, a.k.a. the ‘headless’ com­ mand line.

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, digital humanities, code literacy, Unix philosophy, command line, free and open-source software Thomas Vailly tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design Thoma Vailly is a researcher, adviser and teacher in the field of materials for design, focusing on emerging (bio) materials, processes, and (circular) systems. His expertise includes cir­ cular, bio-based, biodegradable ma­ terials for products, packaging, vehi­ cles, and architecture.

‘Material Narratives’ Vailly prototyped a biopolymer lab for use at KABK, where students can access and share recipes, con­ sult a materials library, and conduct

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their own biopolymer experiments.

Key Terms and Concepts Industrial design, biopolymers, material science, agricultural waste, animal by-products, kitchen-as-lab, sunflower stalks ​Dienand Christe instructor, 3D Lab

Key Terms and Concepts Photography, artistic research, archive, ‘the other’, decolonising, collective making, correspondence Lauren Alexander tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Non Linear Narrative [See pages 20 – 23 for a Q&A]

‘Re-reading Archival Narratives’

Based in Rotterdam, Dienand Christe designs furniture, interiors and products.

‘Gamification as Tool in Design Education’ Christe developed a team-based struc­tural building game, in which social dynamics play a key role, for use in design and architecture edu­ cation.

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, media art, video, archival records, displacement, migrancy, archives, interviewing, counter-archiving, storytelling Lyndsey Housden tutor, BA Interactive Media Design [See pages 24 – 27 for a Q&A] ‘360º’

Key Terms and Concepts 3D modelling, social design, spaghetti, gamification, simulation, collaboration

Design Lectorate Research Group 2019

Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, interactive media, embodied knowledge, dance, soft robotic matter, movement-based experimentation, computer-human interaction, not (yet) knowing

Dr. Andrea Stultiens tutor, MA Photography and Society

Ruben Pater tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Non Linear Narrative

Andrea Stultiens is a photographer and researcher, curator and teacher who explores photographic imagery in complex and potentially problem­ atic post-colonial settings, and with a focus on photographs made on the African continent. She holds a PhD from PhDArts, Leiden University.

As a visual reporter, Ruben Pater com­bines graphic design and jour­ nalism to tell ‘untold stories’ about complex geopolitical topics. He tries to influence public opinion by surfac­ ing stories that normally remain un­ derexposed because they are sensi­ tive or unprofitable.

‘PJU’s Africas: To be Continued’ Using the method of ‘collective mak­ ing’ Stultiens developed a new set of encounters and correspondences with which to activate a collection of photographs and films produced by the Dutch chemist and amateur anthropologist Dr. Paul Julien during his travels on the African Continent.

‘The Spectre of Speculative Design’ Pater evaluated the ethical and hu­ manitarian claims of speculative and critical design outputs with par­ticu­ lar attention to their production, fund­ ing, education, surrounding net­works and supporting institutes. This inquiry was situated in the con­text of ‘cogni­ tive capitalism’, where capital is cre­­ ated through the imag­ining of future markets and business models.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, journalism, theory, outputs of critical design practice, speculative design, cognitive capitalism, speculative fiction Noa Marthe Prins tutor, BA Graphic Design, Preparatory Courses and ACPA Practicum Artium Noa Marthe Prins is a performance artist and writer based in Amster­ dam. Drawing from tactics of resis­ tance theatre and comedy, she ex­ plores the relations between ex­ploit­ative productivity and the performa­ tivity of work. Manifested as what she calls ‘white-cube-theatre’ or ‘se­ rious satire’, Prins proposes a radical rethinking of the totalisation of work under neoliberal capitalism.

‘Moving Membranes’ Prins mediated her research into the visual rhetorics of Frontex (the governing agency responsible for the management of border control in the Schengen area) through a se­ ries of lecture performances based on the idea that images become an­a­logues to membranes, through which constructs of ‘factual neu­tral­ ity’ and ‘creative expression’ are on the move.

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, performance, border security, surveillance imagery, operational images, speculative fiction

Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Group 2019 Daan Brinkman tutor, Preparatory Courses Using a variety of audio and visual media to create experiences, Daan Brinkmann exhibits his work in ven­ ues ranging from museums and sci­ ence fairs to public space and tech­ no parties.

‘Thinking by Modelling’ Brinkman investigated the underex­ ploited potential of the principles of parametric design (as opposed to its aesthetics) for deployment in auto­ mated parameter-based draw­ing, as part of the conceptual stage of the design process.

Key Terms and Concepts Art science, 3D modelling, algorithms, parametric design, automation, prototyping, generative design Niels Vis tutor, Preparatory Courses Niels Vis works with Merel van ’t Hullenaar on projects that focus on contradictions between the human experience of time and its scientific definitions as well as on different forms of ‘survival’ encountered in artworks, focusing on the material and immaterial aspects of how ideas live on. ‘ THE other ACADEMY’ Van ‘t Hullenaar and Vis initiated an experimental space, known as ‘the other Academy (ToA)’, to be shared with art students as a parallel reality, an undefined space, a multi-dimen­ sional potential. They developed the ToA framework by working collec­ tively with students and tutors to explore a set of research questions.

Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, immaterial material, art and design education, social design, artificial consciousness, embodied knowledge, speculative fiction Michiel Pijpe tutor, BA ArtScience and MA ArtScience Michiel Pijpe specialises in visual art performances including the development of ideas for scenog­ raphy and lighting setups for the­ atre and opera productions.

‘Alternative Images for Scientific Culture’ In this research project, Pijpe de­ veloped a tool to help students ex­ plore the ambiguity between artis­ tic and scientific representation, and to convey conceptual knowl­ edge about the organisation and representation of scientific images through proposing and creating an ‘alternative scientific image’.

Key Terms and Concepts Visual literacy, speculative fiction, visual analysis, scientific images Carly Rose Bedford tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design Carly Rose Bedford is a multidisci­ plin­ary artist engaged in a long-term research project into met­hods for institutional critique that considers ways to engage pow­er struc­tures within institu­tions through a pro­ cess of peda­gogi­cal exchange, posi­tioning, workshops and exhibition making.

Gabriel .A. Maher tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design With a practice established in inte­ rior architecture and social design, Gabriel .A. Maher’s work centres on critical and analytical approaches to design and research – and, more spe­ cifically, on the effects of design on bodies and the shaping of identity.

‘Queer and Feminist Pedagogical Frameworks within Art and Design Education at KABK’ Using KABK as a site of research, and a set of feminist/queer method­ ol­ogies, Maher and Bedford iden­ tified three pedagogic situ­ations of direct interpersonal engagement, and de­veloped a set of tactics aimed at trans­forming them, with a view to co-creating the conditions for an in­stitutional safe space and for open­ing out other spaces of

Research Group Members, 2018-2023

being and becoming.

Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, social design, power dynamics of education, need for institutional safe space, need for rest, performance, intersectionality, allyship, interviewing, queer pedagogy

Design Lectorate Research Group 2020 Hannes Bernard tutor, BA Graphic Design Hannes Bernard is the founder of SulSolSal, a design and research prac­tice based in Amsterdam, Cape Town and São Paulo. He investigates the complex relationship between design, economics and society, cre­ ating communal spaces, publications, video installations and performances, while reflecting on the spectacle of global development. ‘ The Kindness of Strangers’ Bernard’s research project probed the emergent social practices of familiarity and estrangement facili­ tated by (and through) online plat­ forms, services and interfaces that increasingly function as proxies for services once provided by the state or social functions once shared amongst closely integrated commu­ nities. By collecting and collaging social media artefacts into multi­me­ dia stories, he parsed new digital, socio-economic dynamics.

Key Terms and Concepts Media art, graphic design, social media, media appropriation, gig economy, technocracy, hauntology, scraping, sampling, collage Katrin Korfmann tutor, BA Graphic Design [See pages 28 – 31 for a Q&A] ‘Wastescapes’

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Key Terms and Concepts Post-photography, Wasteocene, waste processing, image editing, image storage, experimentation Dr. Silvio Lorusso tutor, BA Graphic Design Silvio Lorusso is a writer, artist and designer who teaches creative coding at KABK. He holds a Ph.D. in Design Sciences from Iuav Universi­ ty of Venice and his first book, enti­ tled Entreprecariat, was published with Onomatopee in 2019.

‘The User Condition’ Lorusso’s research project inter­ sected multiple levels of user en­gage­ ment: from the minimal agency af­ forded by gestural interactivity (click, scroll, swipe), to the high-level agen­ cy which requires the invisibility of the system employed, centred on the ques­tion: What are the online reali­ties today of the user-as-labour­ er, the user-as-artisan and the useras-politician?

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, coding, user agency, techno-social systems, platforms, productivity, autonomy, entrepreneurialism, precarity, failure Vibeke Mascini tutor, BA Fine Arts Through sculptures, installations, video and text, Vibeke Mascini explores a scaling of abstract phe­ nomena into a sensorial scope, with the intention to seek agency from intimacy. In long-term collaborations with scientists, engineers, govern­ ment employees and musicians she proposes a conscious understand­ ing of interconnectedness and en­ tanglement — between species, me­ dia and nature, matter and energy.

‘Instar’ Mascini is interested in electricity as a statement of ecological inter­ con­nectedness. This research pro­

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ject was conducted alongside a reading of Karen Barad’s under­ standing of mattering — ‘simulta­ neously a matter of substance and significance’ — and with reference to theoretical and biological no­ tions of (electric) entanglement as a situation of being intra-related.

Key Terms and Concepts Sculpture, philosophy, electricity, batteries, energy from waste, environmental damage Dirk-Jan Visser tutor, BA Photography Dirk-Jan Visser is a documentary photographer whose work examines the consequences of geopolitical decision-making. He is on the super­ visory board of the World Press Photo Foundation and a co-initiator of Atelier aan de Middendijk, a small farmhouse in Groningen that pro­ vides a base for artists, designers, researchers and journalists to create new work.

‘Landscape in Conflict’ By combining the practice of photog­ raphy and the outcome of walking as a research method which, as an­ thropologist Anna Tsing argues, pro­ vides the tempo for noticing and thinking, Visser hypothesised that physical immersion in a landscape in the north of the Netherlands could allow access to how the hu­ man and non-human aspects of the Anthro­pocene are intertwined.

Key Terms and Concepts Photography, Anthropocene, environmental humanities, landscape, insects, walking as a research method, Groningen, climate change

Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Group 2020 Dr. Renske Maria van Dam tutor, BA ArtScience

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Renske Maria van Dam holds a PhD in Architecture, conducted through the Radical Materiality Research Group at KU Leuven. Her work draws on her amateur background as yogi, theatrical performer and zookeeper as much as it does on her profes­sion­ al engagement with the archi­tecture studio Herman Hertzberger, Amster­ dam and Atelier Li Xiaodong, Beijing.

‘Spacious’ Van Dam reflected on her previous pedagogical practice, that combined architecture, performance and phi­ los­o­phy, and particularly her research lab ALEPH, which foregrounded ‘tiny perceptions’ as a design and research tool. She created a frame­ work for a post-graduate practicebased research atelier to enable re­ search collaboration between stu­dents, lecturers and practitioners at KABK.

Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, art-science, performance, cognitive science, research atelier, tiny perceptions, moving body Dr. Marion Tränkle tutor, BA ArtScience Marion Tränkle’s work in the field of performance art and integrating elec­tronics into scenographies for stages engages systems thinking, cross-disciplinary perspectives, and experimentation. She holds a PhD from Brunel University, London, where she researched material agen­cy and performative dynamics in the practices of media art. ‘ CoLab’ Using a set of teaching situations where she deployed systems think­ ing and systems theory, Tränkle’s research explored the potential of a systems-based teaching tool to further collective thinking, moving and making, and in the specific con­ ditions of COVID-19 social distancing regulations. Furthermore, Tränkle

hoped to focus a systems lens on the ways in which the members of KABK, as a complex learning and teaching system, reflect and com­ municate shared efforts.

Key Terms and Concepts Art-science, spatial practice performance, electronics, lighting, systems theory, scenography, choreography, risk Laura van Santen tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design [See pages 32 – 35 for a Q&A] ‘Finger Exercises’

Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, material science, half-fabricaats, environmental damage, extractive industries, haptic knowledge, workshops, touching, experiments, bio-based building materials Sabin Gârea instructor, KABK Metal and Wood Workshop [See pages 36 – 39 for a Q&A] ‘Craft Exploded’

Key Terms and Concepts Craft, wood, carpentry, loss of craft skills, haptic material knowledge, workshops as spaces for research and learning Shailoh Phillips tutor, MA Photography and Society Shailoh Phillips has a background in cultural anthropology, philosophy, cultural analysis, interaction design, and arts education. She is part of the international Tools for Action artist collective, working with inflat­ able sculptures in collaboration with protest movements.

‘Critical Tools’ Phillips aimed to better align theo­ ret­ical coursework with material

and technical instruction. Together with workshop instructors and teach­ ers from different departments, she created a set of practices for new ways of teaching transdisciplinary collaboration, with an emphasis on developing criticality around the af­ fordances and genealogies embed­ ded in the tools of art and design making.

Key Terms and Concepts Art and design pedagogy, materiality of theory, transdisci­ plinarity, tool development

Design Lectorate Research Group 2021 Hannes Bernard tutor, BA Graphic Design ‘The Long Now’ With his second Research Group project, Bernard examined the im­ po­sitions of an ‘Anthropocene Me­ dia’, whereby deep time (and its vast geological scope) bursts into the present as a series of shocks and stu­tters across social media posts, timelines and news headlines.

Bernard coded scripts to prompt new and original montages and musical compositions to emerge from a set of databases of text, im­ ages and video footage.

Key Terms and Concepts Media art, accelerationism, Anthropocene, (cyber) time crisis, deep time, technocracy, political fiction, generative narratives, design imaginaries Jasper Coppes tutor, MA Artistic Research [See pages 40 – 43 for a Q&A] ‘Shallow Lake’

Key Terms and Concepts Filmmaking, artistic research, fertile sediment, environmental debris, New Nature, metabolic rift,

Research Group Members, 2018-2023

vegetal and geological thinking, fiction as a tactic, landscape, contamination Katrin Korfmann tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Non Linear Narrative [See pages 28 – 31 for a Q&A] ‘Collaborating with Image Ruins’

Key Terms and Concepts Post photography, digital photographs, image waste, compositionism, image ruins, experimentation as research, materiality of image data Vibeke Mascini tutor, BA Fine Arts ‘The Caretaker’ A practice-oriented research project that investigated the legal role of a ‘caretaker’ in relation to a container of whale fat derived from a strand­ ed whale (a natural resource that by law cannot formally be owned). With the help of a legal adviser, Mascini speculated about alternatives to nature as ‘property’ in which the notion of responsibility has a cen­ tral role and caretaker-ship initiates a more mindful relation between beings and so-called ‘things’.

Key Terms and Concepts Sculpture, philosophy, whale oil, salvage laws, legal contract, caretakership, Texel Louis Braddock Clarke tutor, BA Graphic Design [See pages 44 – 47 for a Q&A] ‘Out Of Focus’

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, sound-making, ice, weather, rocks, radio frequen­ cies, paleomagnetism, extractive processes, environmental damage, indigenous knowledge, spectral thinking

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Design Lectorate Research Group 2022 Louis Braddock Clarke tutor, BA Graphic Design [See pages 44 – 47 for a Q&A] ‘ Weather Gardens: Active Listening to Drifting Geographies’

Key Terms and Concepts Sonic ecologies, telluric currents, sampling, full-spectrum listening, amplifying, DIY science, witnessing Alexander Cromer tutor, BA Graphic Design and PhDArts candidate [See pages 48 – 51 for a Q&A] ‘Voicing Unverifiable Realities Beyond the Archive: Ecological Crisis and the African Diaspora’

Key Terms and Concepts Voice, writing theory through performance, poetry, research output as material source, academia as artefact of coloniality, Black ecologies, ancestral communication, climate injustice, critical fabulation Rana Ghavami tutor, MA Industrial Design and tutor, IST program [See pages 52 – 55 for a Q&A] ‘ Ethics in Methods: Aesthetics, Sense-making and the Ongoingness of Colonial Histories’

Key Terms and Concepts Design history, theory, material as witness, tracing as method, story­ telling, sensing and sense-making, ethics, decolonial aesthesis, dispossession, displacement Carl Johan Högberg co-head, BA Fine Arts [See pages 56 – 59 for Q&A] ‘Madder: We Are All Pigments’

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Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, pigments, dyestuffs, decoloniality, storytelling, toxicity, material sustainability, traceability, speculative material research Victoria Meniakina tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design [See pages 60 – 63 for a Q&A]

‘Situating the Postnatural: Material (An)Archaeologies and Displaced Bodies’

Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, postnatural, botanic gardens, loss of biodiversity, ecofeminism, intersectionality, practices of care, maps, plants, multispecies attunement Benjamin Earl tutor, BA Graphic Design [See pages 64 – 67 for a Q&A] ‘Coding-In-Situ’

Key Terms and Concepts Information design, coding, network, place, infrastructure, dominance of proprietary software, digital intimacy, unproductivity

Art Theory Practice Research Groups Research Group 2021, chaired by Prof. Dr. Janneke Wesseling Dina Danish tutor, BA Fine Arts Dina Danish is an artist and educator.

Her work is inspired by overlooked historical moments, by language and structure, and instances of humour and misunderstanding.

‘The Interrupted Performer’ Danish researched four historical

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

cases in which performers were interrupted by their audiences: the Futurist Marinetti during his lecture on motorised poetry by the Egyptian Surrealists in Cairo, for example, and Charlie Chaplin, during a press con­ ference for his movie Limelight by Guy Debord and the newly formed Lettrist International at the Ritz hotel in Paris. Danish argued that such interruptions mirrored the affiliation of the performers with certain political ideologies, which were on the verge of collapse.

Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, history, language, interruption, ideology Maya Rasker tutor, BA ArtScience and IST program and PhDArts candidate Maya Rasker is a writer and novelist.

As a PhDArts candidate at Leiden University, she investigates the rela­ tion between creative writing and academic research by means of com­ posing an ‘academic novella’. She designs and teaches courses on writ­ ing and (artistic) research, on the transformation of the autobiography, and on the notion of ‘the beginning’ in art production and research. ‘ The Footnote: Zipper or Snag?’

Rasker posited that the chain of footnotes used to anchor an acade­ mic text, can also be read as a sec­ ond­ary narrative alongside the main text. She wanted to better under­ stand if the footnote can also be applied as a connecting rather than a dividing apparatus (as a ‘zipper’ rather than ‘snag’), and thereby be used to join the artistic and the schol­arly components of the writ­ ing process.

Key Terms and Concepts Artistic research, writing, footnotes, ‘the beginning’ Ludmila Rodrigues tutor, BA ArtScience

Ludmila Rodrigues is an artist, sce­ nog­rapher, educator and occasional performer who makes spatial inter­ ventions and haptic instruments that become interfaces for activating the senses and exploring relations of trust, vulnerability and agency.

‘Mediating Presence’ Through this research the artist re­ flected on her assumptions about mediated human encounters, tap­ ping into her own doubts about digitising sensations in relation to her artistic practice in which the audience is engaged in unusual forms of social and kinesthetic in­ ter­action. She developed a series of experiments with sensors and actu­ ators in order to assess touch and movement over a distance.

Key Terms and Concepts Art-science, media technologies, communication, interaction, non-verbal cues, gestures, temperature, smell Loek van Vliet tutor, BA Photography Loek van Vliet works on long-term photographic projects about the experience of landscape shared in exhibitions and books such as Earthly Windows: the experience of the European landscape throughout the ages, Sacred Grounds: quiet areas in the Netherlands and Flanders, and Natural Climate Buffers.

‘Landscape: Maker and Shaper of Identity’ Reading a broad range of texts, ranging from Francis Fukuyama to Auke van der Woud, van Vliet ana­ lysed the role of the landscape in shaping identity. Focusing his ques­ tion on one particular area, the Gelderse Poort and river Rhine, the result was a Socratic dialogue with the river, in which he explored the terms ‘landscape’ and ‘identity’, and the interaction between its

natural and cultural elements.

Key Terms and Concepts Photography, identity, experience, landscape Lua Vollaard tutor, MA Artistic Research Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer interested in the broad intersection of technology and ideology and with a background in architecture re­search, image theory and human rights research. Since 2018 she has been a curator at Stoom Den Haag.

‘Models of Climate Fiction’ Vollaard analysed instances of climate fiction and deployed a speculative approach to rethink the Anthropocenic museum.

Key Terms and Concepts Curating, writing, climate fiction, museums

Research Group 2022, chaired by Prof. Dr. Anke Haarmann Maarten Cornel tutor, BA Graphic Design and Research & Discourse Maarten Cornel tries to combine his lifelong passion for art history and the arts — especially for paint­ ing and music — with cognitive investigations into (mainly conti­ nental) philosophical discourses.

Ingrid Grünwald coordinator, BA Graphic Design Ingrid Grunwald studied English Language and Literature. She tries to incorporate her passion for lan­ guage within her work in art edu­ca­ tion, with an emphasis on re­cruiting and nurturing students with different cultural backgrounds.

Research Group Members, 2018-2023

‘The Dialogue as a Research Method’ Cornel and Grünwald investigated the Socratic method of dialogue as a means to create new knowledge.

In performative sessions such as ‘Chairs of the Table’, they enabled participants to explore dilemmas collectively in the role of a dilettante.

Key Terms and Concepts Dialogue, Socratic method, philosophy, discussion, creating new knowledge Eric Kluitenberg tutor, BA Interactive Media Design and BA ArtScience and MA ArtScience ‘ A Different Sense Of Time – Reading Tactical Media’ Exploring the complicated relation­ ship between time and activist and artistic practices around digital and online media, this research was pre­ sented as a visual essay with an ar­ gument that builds through histori­ cal footage originating from the vid­eo archives of Tactical Media Files.

Key Terms and Concepts Art-science, interactive design, theory, video, tactical media, art activism, eternal now Winnie Koekelberg tutor, BA Fine Arts

Winnie Koekelbergh is team leader of the Critical Practice Group and teaches critical practice. Her main interest is in the dialogues between research and theory. Her own re­ search addresses the reper­cus­sions of colonialism and the (im)possibil­ ities of decolonisation.

‘To Dismantle “The Congo, I Presume?”: A Writerly

Performance’ The research project explored how artistic interventions, conversations and meditations can offer alterna­ tives with which to question con­ temporary approaches to the dis­ mounting of colonial monuments.

9

Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, sculpture, decoloniality, colonial history, artistic interventions, activism Anastasia Loginova tutor, BA ArtScience and MA ArtScience Anastasia Loginova is a cultural pro­ducer and part-time artist with a keen interest in holistic and spiri­ tual practice. In her artistic prac­ tice she likes to connect different worlds and communicate with other entities including plants, cabbages, cows and the sea.

‘Anthology of Poems about Artistic Research’ Loginova interviewed twelve art­ ists and professionals in the field of artistic research. The interviews took place in the form of meetings, voice notes and email exchanges and were transcribed and compiled into a body of text, which she then further processed into the form of poems.

Key Terms and Concepts Art science, artistic research, interviews, poetry, text Sophie Allerding tutor, MA Photography and Society Sophie Allerding is a multimedia artist and designer driven by an interest in versatile modes of story­ telling. Allerding’s work delves into power dynamics and relationships between humans and their environ­ ment, the art of constructing real­ ities, and the exploration of magical realms through various visual, audio and participatory media.

‘Role-play as an Inquiry Method and Tool for Knowledge Production’ Allerding’s research centred on the utilisation of role-play as a tool for knowledge production, particularly in accessing embodied knowledge that often remains concealed within

10

our everyday personas.

Key Terms and Concepts Photography, multimedia, LARPing, roleplay, serious play, embodied knowledge, fictional scenarios Wieneke Bremer instructor, Textiles Workshop Wieneke Bremer is an artist who specialises in (industrial) knitting and natural dyeing with plants.

As part of the community gardens of Ginkgo, the Green Office of KABK, she initiated a garden whose plants can be used for both education as well as natural dye and ink making purposes.

‘Pigment Garden @ KABK’ Bremer argued that choosing the slow and mindful way to extract colour, through making a connec­ tion to plants, is a form of activism, or colour activism.

Key Terms and Concepts Textile design, colour activism, pigments, natural processes, plant-based materials Johanna Ehde tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Artistic Research lisabeth Rafstedt E tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Artistic Research Graphic designers Elisabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde work together as Rietlanden Women’s Office. They are interested in re­ search, education, and publishing from a feminist perspective. Their design works often take the form of (applied) research intended to dismantle the distinction between theory and practice.

‘Printworks’ Their research focused on current and historical issues connected to (reproductive) work and collabo­

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

rative graphic design, considering ornament not simply as added decoration, but as a trace of the specific conditions under which a work was made.

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, textile design, printing, ornamentation, feminist activism, publishing as praxis, collaboration Zuzanna Zgierska tutor, Preparatory Courses Zuzanna Zgierska is an artist and researcher working at the inter­ section of art, science, transmedia storytelling, and digital culture.

Her practice is driven by the need for critical narratives in the age of ‘ex-’ (extraction, exclusion, and ex­ tinction). She untangles the plan­ etary tongues through fieldwork, geo-hacking, and interdisciplinary exchanges.

‘Rock Rewriting and Rock Restitution’ In this project, shaping mineral magnetism became a strategy for the restitution of geo-matter and the return of indigenous stories.

Through a series of fire rituals in Inugguit Nunaat and art-scientific experiments at the Paleomagnetic Laboratory in Utrecht, some sam­ ples of Innaanganeq Meteorite were re-magnetised and their magnetic histories re-written.

Key Terms and Concepts Art-science, alternative modes of restitution, decoloniality, looted history, minerals, meteorites, ritual, indigenous stories, magnetism

'

Luna van Schadewijk, MA student researcher, in conversation with Alexander Cromer, tutor researcher, 'Fault Lines: KABK Research Forum', 2022.

Ritvik Khushu, MA student researcher, sharing his approach to research with tutor researchers, 'Fault Lines: KABK Research Forum', 2022.

Research Group Members, 2018-2023

11

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Rachel Bacon Tutor, BA Fine Arts, since 2008 IST tutor, Drawing Lab, since 2019 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2018 Rachel Bacon is a visual artist concerned with the position and uses of drawing in landscape, geol­ ogy, extraction industries and the aesthetics of the climate emergency. She has an MA in Drawing from the University of the Arts London and an Advanced Masters in Artistic Research from St Lucas School of Art, Antwerp.

‘Undermining Value’ Bacon’s research project examined the relationship between the mark-making activity of drawing and the extractive one of mining, and how an understanding of this relationship might lead to an art practice capa­ ble of responding to ecological crisis.

12

Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, drawing, graphite, landscape, fault lines, geotrauma, environmental injustice, ecofeminism, radical intimacy, open mines, fieldwork

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe How has your research practice developed since being in the Research Group?

Rachel Bacon I have seen an incredible growth in my research. When I started with the Design Lectorate Research Group, I was only just beginning to look into environmental issues. They had always played a role in my work, but I didn’t have any idea about the discourses. So, I came into it really as a studio artist, where for me research was just about working in the studio, trying things out.

I think that’s how many artists would understand re­search, in fact. I didn’t have the methodological theo­ retical components as part of my understanding, and all that really started with the Research Group.

I started to really think about time and the temporal clashes between this ancient geologic time and then this panicked time of climate crisis, these environ­ mental feedback loops that are spiralling out of control.

Even while this economic time is always speeding up, I’m invested in the artistic timescale of slowing down, which is what my drawing practice is all about. I’ve also continued to develop the method of researching I started in the Research Group, which was to connect my studio practice with field trips to mining areas.

As part of the Research Group, we presented our re­search at the “Fault Lines Research Forum” in 2018.

Someone came to see my presentation and invited me to take part in a Creative Industries Fund research proj­ ect on landscape in Russia. It lasted for around two years, from 2019 to mid 2021. There were 10 people involved — artists, designers, architects, and writers, and half of us were from the Netherlands, and the other half were Russians. We were collaborating on looking for sites in Russia where we could do individual proj­ ects to uncover the stories and narratives behind the landscapes.

I ended up focusing on the diamond mines in Siberia.

I got funding from Mondriaan Fonds and Stroom and was all set to go there, and then everything was can­celled because of COVID-19 and then the war. But because I had this funding, I asked if I could look for alternative areas. And so, since then, I’ve been focusing on coal mining. These sites are very, very damaged, but also beautiful and fascinating. So, I am now fo­ cusing my research on a really specific location, and establishing a geo­logic connection, where it becomes a kind of source material for the drawings.

The thing that came very directly from the Research Group was the Russia project, titled "What Do Land­

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Rachel Bacon

scapes Say?" It had two exhibitions, one in Moscow at the Na Peschanoy Gallery and one at Het Nieuwe In­ stituut in Rotterdam, both in the Fall of 2020. I also did a bunch of lectures, including one at the Drawing Re­ search Network at Loughborough University in the UK. One of the participants, Sarah Casey, invited me to give a lecture at Lancaster Arts in June 2022. And she also was the guest editor of the next issue of the peerreviewed Tracey journal, with the theme of “Drawing the Anthropocene”, and she invited me to submit a paper for that. That paper has been accepted, and it’s being copy-edited for the next issue, sometime later in 2023.

In 2022, I also took part in an exhibition at Pictura Dordrecht on climate called “Troubled Waters”, with the artists Anja de Jong and Suzette Bousema [a tutor and graduate of KABK]. And then later there was also a drawing residency at Drawing Center Diepenheim, funded by the Mondriaan Fund. So, I spent three months in Diepenheim, and we had an exhibition, “Deep Drawing”, that ran until May 2023.

Alice Twemlow How do you go about trying to embed, not only your research but also, ways of researching in your teaching?

RB It’s been a real struggle at times, I have to tell you.

I teach the first year in BA Fine Arts and so we get the students who are quite young, trying to figure out their own visual language, trying to figure out who they are. And with my class, “Drawing Notations”, my inten­ tion for really the last sort of five, six years has been to try to bring the world into the studio, to get them to think about the world in a way that becomes part of their work. And they have, in general, a really big resis­tance to this, perhaps because the KABK has a repu­ tation as a place of material practice — it’s well known for painting, for instance, and it’s a very sort of nonpolitical space, I think. But if you look at the art world, politics is informing everything, all contemporary art.

So, my question was always, why is this missing from the final exam shows that I see here? And then I realised that the students have a really hard time combining ideas and making because they’re two different pro­ cesses. So, I started to introduce what I called the “visual archive”. I asked them to collect images and, from those images, do visual research. And then from that research, they make drawing projects. So, we start from this level of any personal fascination or ob­ ses­sion — the really tacky things you like, the really old-fashioned things, creepy-looking masks from old horror movies, ancient art, writing, scribbling — almost

13

anything goes. And then they collect and collect and collect. And then I ask them to explore the artistic con­ text for these things, because they need to know how to translate these references into something that is also contemporary, elegant and interesting and beau­ tiful to look at. So, they sud­denly see that they can make something that’s very visual. And they can see that this is part of this con­tem­porary conver­sation, and it also has theoretical and social connections.

the other students. The non-Fine Arts students often want to learn to draw, and I have to kind of bring them back to doing research. So, there’s sort of a dis­connect between the different desires from the different departments.

RH To which domain do you think your research contributes?

RB

Once they’ve collected all these images, I ask them to organise everything. And when they organise all the images, often themes start to arise. And then from those themes, you can say, “okay, well, from here you can look at these thinkers, these writers, this particu­ lar area of interest”. I think it’s an effective method for getting them to connect to something personal with something that’s part of the world beyond them. And it’s through visual research.

The other thing that’s wonderful is that my colleagues have started to use it as well. So, we started with drawing, but it goes into all the other areas. So 2D, or 3D, or whatever else they’re doing, and when we see them starting to connect things up, it gives them all a way to talk and think about their work in more depth.

AT Do they make a collective visual archive?

I think my research contributes mostly to pro­fessional art practice and society. As part of the exhibition that’s on now in Diepenheim, they made a little film of the artists talking about their work and I was describing the trips that I’m taking to these coal mines and people were really interested and engaged with that. I’ve also been approached by a couple of artists who are also working with materials and raw materials who wanted to talk about this connection between the mine and the artwork, the transition from the raw material to the interpretation. So, there’s a lot of people interested in how material can have agency and become visible.

In how I contribute to new ways of knowing the world, it's probably in how I think about the open pit mine as a form of drawing. The idea of these digging machines making drawings, and how we might think about that in terms of how to re-draw or un-draw this damage to our planet.

RB They’re all individual. If I had more time, it would be great to be able to make connections that could work together.

RH And how does this relate to the work that theory tu­tors are doing in the first year? Is it also integrated into theory courses?

RB I would like to collaborate with a media theory teach­er on making this way of doing visual research much more sort of layered. And the other thing is we could also just choose a theme, like ecology. When I’m en­ gaged and learning myself, I’m also a better teacher.

So, focusing on art and ecology would be sensible.

And then I would ask them to look at artists working in those areas, we would collect examples, we could do that using the same method, but then focus on what it all means in terms of ecology.

RH Does teaching the Individual Study Track course allow more room for research?

RB I saw the IST as this possibility to teach a more indepth form of research, but for me the ISTs have not been functioning so well. There’s a big difference in the approach between the BA Fine Arts students and

14

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Drawing of Ashby Wolds coal basin, Leicestershire, England, by Orra White Hitchcock, pen and ink on linen, 34 x 62 cm, 1828 — 1840.

Lignite mine, Inden, Germany, 2019. Photo by Rachel Bacon.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Rachel Bacon

15

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Niels Schrader Co-head, BA Graphic Design, 2013 – 2021 Co-head, MA Non Linear Narrative, 2017 – 2021 Head, MA Non Linear Narrative, since 2021 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2018 Niels Schrader is a concept-driven information designer, founder of the Amsterdam-based design studio Mind Design and co-founder of the Queer Computing Consortium (QCC). In his role as an educator, Schrader focuses on social, political and environmental processes driven and influenced by digital technologies.

‘Acid Clouds’ Using tools such as Google Earth and published online media, in combination with site immersion and visual analysis, with this project, Schrader sought to under­stand more fully what happens when the resources needed to create, share and store our daily output of 2,5 quintillion bytes of so-called ‘virtual’ data en­ croach on the physical environment.

16

Key Terms and Concepts Information design, digital debris, data storage, physical effects of digital systems, environmental damage, information overload, server farms, mapping, photography

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe Can you describe in one or two sentences your prac­tice and your research practice?

Niels Schrader I run my own design studio in Amsterdam focused on information design. Next to that I have my educational practice at the KABK, and which entails two days a week giving guidance to the MA program and half a day a week of teaching. I also write for Grafikmagazin.

Most of my research concerns the digital world, be­ cause I believe that’s a domain where we face a lot of challenges that we are not yet aware of. I might devel­ op software or explore the unexposed data sets of the iPhone or, as in the case of my project with the Design Lectorate Research Group, the effects of our digital infrastructure on the physical environment.

I also con­duct research through education. I believe, for example, that the extensive col­labo­rations we ini­ tiate through the MA Non Linear Narrative every year are a form of research. We collaborate with NGOs, mu­ seums and institutions that are socially or politically or culturally involved in practices that I see as connected to what we do as designers. The research includes ex­ ploring how to de­sign collaborations, how to connect education to a practical, embedded experience, and how to provide the framework of research to help stu­ dents conduct their own research. There’s no blueprint for this, given the fact that every collaborator has dif­ fer­ent goals and ambitions.

Alice Twemlow What kind of adjectives might you use to describe the type of research you do?

NS I always find it incredibly difficult to frame it properly.

As an information designer, I think what attracts my attention is the exchange of information by digital means. I think there’s a lot to explore there, because it’s about exposing what’s hidden – the hidden infra­ structures of information exchange, which of course, have been moving very much to the digital realm.

RH How did your project develop in the Design Lectorate Research Group?

exchange thoughts but also to learn some very con­ crete methods.

AT I think yours is a good example of a project that lived on beyond the group. You presented your work in pro­ gress at the Fault Lines Research Forum 2018, then we put together the Fault Lines exhibition in 2019. You published on Open!, Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain. And what am I missing?

NS It definitely lives on. I’m currently developing a book about it, titled, Acid Clouds with nai010, an architec­ tural publisher in Rotterdam, that will be published at the end of this year. The project was also part of the Waag’s “Expedition: Future Technology Festival”, during which I did some guided walking tours of the data tow­ers in Amsterdam. It was even published in the news­papers NRC and Trouw. I think that why it has lasted so long is firstly because it’s a very emer­ gent topic and it im­pacts so many aspects of society, but also because, for me, it grew so gradually. With every step I would discover, oh, there’s even more behind, right? When Roel Backaert and I first started photo­graphing data centres here and there, little did we know that this would grow into a project of docu­ menting 200 buildings all around the country.

AT This collaboration is key to the project, right?

NS To make these investigations actually happen you need to have expertise at hand that goes beyond what the graphic design discipline can do. I believe collabo­ration is the essence of the research I’m doing.

Otherwise, I would just probably just circle around in my own bubble. But, seriously, an essential step to get outside of your practice is to really collaborate.

RH What about sources of funding beyond the 0,1FTE you received for participation in the Research Group – I guess you also applied for other funds to continue the research?

NS That’s probably the most disappointing thing to talk about because research is not supported in this coun­ try. Despite having really very clear goals and budget planning, the funding bodies don’t seem to support practice-based research. Sometimes we get it for a concrete thing, like to pay an author to write the text for a book. But we never would get the budget for an open-ended research project.

NS The idea existed before that, but through the Design Lectorate Research Group I was able to condense it into a very specific research question which focused on the extent to which the exponentially increasing amounts of data that we save is having an effect on our physical environment. I entered the Research Group with a hunch and came out with a question!

The Group gave me a really fantastic opportunity to

It’s the same here at the KABK. We need research to be structurally sup­ported. Because if you are going to put it on the side of your building that this is a place to conduct research, then you need to actually make

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Niels Schrader

17

that happen.

When you were co-head of BA Graphic Design, how did AT you attempt to seed research within the curriculum?

NS We considered research to be an essential part of the design process, and therefore an essential part of the program, and that thinking was implemented in all facets of the course. Our definition of graphic design was centred on communication, on helping students figure out what they wanted to say and how best to do that, and I think we managed pretty well. We have a nice legacy of students and teaching and practicing in all corners of the world.

AT Did you have to hire different kinds of tutors to fulfil these aims?

NS We hired a lot of faculty with research practices. But I also think we had a nice balance of people who were very much practitioners, people who were very theo­ retical and people who would combine these two prac­tices nicely. Somebody like Lauren Alexander is a good example, someone who approaches research from a practice-based perspective.

AT So, when you and Roosje Klap started Non Linear Narrative I can imagine that it was such an exciting moment for you because you got a blank canvas to work with. And here the whole program is based on research. So how did you go about designing that MA? NS

e both believed in a practice that is socially and W politically engaged, because we didn’t see the per­ petu­ation of systems of exploitative practices could have any future. And then we wrote an extensive plan.

The name Non Linear Narrative combines the idea of technology along with the idea of the stories that need to be told. Together with all the other three masters, we managed to get this umbrella of the MA Art and Design. And we, of course, had our knowledge from the bachelor program from which we could ex­ trapolate. At first we thought that the BA students would continue into the MA, but actually we get more international applicants.

also have the time to conduct research.

AT Can you imagine this approach applied to other master’s programs at the KABK or is this distinctive and specific to Non Linear Narrative and would never work anywhere else?

NS I think each department has its own unique approach.

But we are also starting to look across the programs carefully and together to see what might be transfer­ able. We did this for the recent accreditation process, and we found we have quite a bit in common, which we want to build on.

RH How do you experience the research culture at the KABK? Do you think it has changed since 2017 and if so could you describe the change?

NS A lot of kudos to Alice. I think that she has managed incredibly well to bring a systematic approach to what research is at the KABK. It has also become much more visible. I think the Design Lectorate is really try­ ing to connect these different departments on a very high level and trying to inject these seeds wher­ever possible. I believe what the KABK misses is more struc­tural support for this kind of work.

Looking forward, I’d like the next director to work on collab­o­ration with external partners, because if you think of Art­Science, and how innovative it can be when you bring together two different methods of thinking, I think that’s something that should also be happening elsewhere – let’s say, for example, we could do that with the Leiden School of Law, or other institutes.

AT And in terms of teaching research in Non Linear Narrative?

NS We have so-called “labs”, which are sort of very materialand skill-based courses, then there are theory and philosophy courses, and there are the design courses, which are in fact the connection between these two.

We still consider research to be part of the design pro­cess. And within their design projects, students

18

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Data centre, ‘Acid Clouds’, by Niels Schrader. Photo by Niels Schrader and Roel Backaert.

‘Acid Clouds’ by Niels Schrader in ‘Fault Lines: Some Research Methods in Art and Design’, an exhibition of research projects developed in the KABK Research Group 2018, KABK, December, 2019.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Niels Schrader

19

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Lauren Alexander Tutor, MA Non Linear Narrative, since 2017 Tutor, BA Graphic Design, 2012-2021 Co-head, BA Graphic Design, since 2021 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2019 Lauren Alexander’s practice as a research-driven media artist is partly in collaboration with Ghalia Elsrakbi under the name Foundland Collective. Based between Amsterdam and Cairo, the duo explores, analyses and re-narrates migration and displacement stories uses existing historical and institutional ar­chive material but also actively generates subjective and participatory interventions or ‘counter-archives’ to provide a home for the marginalised perspectives often left out of dominant his­ torical and media narratives.

‘Memory Archive’ Building on two of Foundland Collective’s prior archivebased commissions, which aimed to amplify previously unheard voices and stories, this research asked how design might be used as a tool to (re)dis­cover, (re) interpret and (re)distribute these narratives related to the archive. Alexander identified research methods that allow for more nuanced excavation of archival material and the generation of subjective and partic­ i­patory interventions, or ‘counter-archives’.

20

Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, media art, video, archival records, displacement, migrancy, archives, interviewing, counter-archiving, storytelling

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow Would you say that you do research from the perspec­ tive of a designer — designerly research, maybe?

Lauren Alexander

My practice is under the name Foundland Collective [in collaboration with Ghalia Elsrakbi]. Here I work from the perspective of a designer, but in creating autono­ mous commissioned work mostly for cultural spaces or for cultural institutions. A lot of the research that we’ve done is based on collections of archival material — in an institutional, official sense, but also informal collections of material. We use video, publications and installation-making to communicate our findings.

Much of our early work related to observations of the conflict in Syria. Originally we wanted to talk about issues related to migration, about how media narrates ideas of migration, about how to examine issues of being a refugee and the identity of refugees within the Netherlands. This was at a time when political issues weren’t really on the radar in the design scene. Now, of course, many designers and design students touch on social and political topics.

We developed a way of counter-mapping, which is I think a designerly way of interpreting topics. We would reformulate data or collections of information with some fictional elements, and we also started to make more video work, diving more into narrative storytell­ ing. I think the work in general relates to design be­ cause communication, and often translation, remains an important goal, while still being personal and subjective.

A question that would come up all the time was: are you an artist or are you a designer? This came to a head in 2015 when we were nominated for the Dutch Prix de Rome prize [a prominent art prize in the Nether­ lands]. Until that moment we had been operating as independent designers and responding to research ques­tions that we found interesting with the tools of a designer and suddenly you’re in another arena where the people looking at your work (such as the director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) have quite fixed ideas about what constitutes art, and are wondering if you will have any longevity within the realm of art, will your work sell, can it become a product that circu­ lates in the art market?

sense that it opened our eyes to how different audi­ ences perceive the value of the final outcome of work.

AT If you can remember back to your time in the Research Group, what were some of the benefits for the project and for you, and what was challenging, perhaps?

LA I used the Research Group to reflect on the projects that I had worked on with Foundland Collective, be­ cause all of those commissions came in so hard and fast for a period of three years that there was no time to think. I appreciated that the Research Group allow­ ed me time to contextualise the work and explore the themes again using the readings and discussion that we were doing. And just as we were wrapping things up, COVID-19 was upon us which forced a break in our practice because exhibition-making completely stop­ ped and we couldn’t keep travelling to the Middle East.

What followed was a period in which we mobilised the thinking from the Research Group to apply for grants.

Looking back, the Research Group period was a pivotal period for me personally.

Something I remember about being in the Group, which was quite confronting for me – and I hadn’t really realised it until then – is that I’d always worked in a duo, to the extent that I had internalised the per­ spective of being a duo. This brought up some inter­ esting questions for me about how to write about the work that I had done together with someone else. It’s still a relevant question for me, in fact, related to iden­ tity politics. The collective mode of making provides an anonymous identity to some extent, and gives one freedom to play with identity roles. With Real-Time History, for example – one of the projects that I was thinking about during the Research Group period – we were able to open it up for many others to partici­pate in, whether they were from academia, anthropol­ogy or journalism. I think that was also a new way of ap­ proaching the project that we’d not really tried prior to that. We’re still working on how to publish the outcomes.

AT You mention using research methods like interviewing and analysing video footage. Are these the kind of things you brought into your teaching as well?

LA We didn’t win! But it was a valuable experience in the

LA Yes, because of my roles in both a BA and an MA pro­ gram, I have had a platform to develop different teach­ing methods and themes and to test them at different levels. With the BA programme, the founda­ tional building blocks for research and theoretical skills are essential. So much learning takes place within ex­

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Lauren Alexander

21

AT I think many researchers at the KABK can relate to this dilemma of being caught between art and design.

So what happened?

perimenting with different tools, workshops, materials and techniques, which can be just as exciting as the discursive side of things. I have had fantastic experi­ ences developing shared projects with fellow tutors, and many teaching proj­ects came to life as exhibitions.

In the MA Non Linear Narrative we get deeper into in­ terviewing as a method – how to use interview material as a source, how to interpret and intervene – and think­ ing about what that means.

Roosmarijn Hompe Since you’ve been a co-head of BA Graphic Design, what modifications have you made to the curriculum?

Especially in relation to research?

LA Research has always been relatively strong in BA Graphic Design, especially in the graduating year.

COVID-19 had several impacts regarding research.

Whereas before the idea was always to look beyond the context of the school and produce work and re­ search in collaboration with others, students became more hermetic in the type of themes that they were working on. Understandably so. The graduation work after 2020 was less related to the idea of communi­ ca­tion or of trying to reach a particular audience — students began to let go of functionality and the ap­ pli­cation of their research. We’re trying to bring back connections with external organisations and to expose the students to a broader set of research per­spec­tives.

During the Research Week in January 2023, for years two and three, Design Lector Alice Twemlow was a guest to help us develop research questions in line with excursions that the students experienced. The intention is to work on a solid foundation for situated research from an earlier stage in the study, so that when we get to the thesis and graduation project in the fourth year, the student is more accustomed to methods of research. Or at least they’re equipped with some tools to get started.

ening and renewal, and we work hard to create mo­ ments with the tutor team to reflect on our shared objectives and methods.

RH What would be your recommendations or desires for the future with regards to how research is facilitated at the KABK? LA I think the way the Design Lectorate is enabling tutor research is really helpful. It is apparent that this feeds back into the curricula of all the departments. So I hope that can continue. I noticed that at the “Fault Lines Research Forum” event last December, not many students were present. It’s such a shame that more students were not able to learn about what their tutors are doing in relation to research.

RH Yeah, I think it’s just because of jam-packed schedules and their jobs; there’s really no room for students to do anything outside the department.

LA Students often ask for more engagement with institu­ tions or with experts outside the academy. There are many lectures and initiatives which are arranged here already. My recommendation would be to create syn­ er­g y between each department’s research curriculum and plans for public events and sharing, to stream­line things but also to pool resources more effec­tive­ly.

If we worked together, we could get more high-profile speakers as part of a program that everyone will be able to benefit from. In general, I think there can be far more transparency and collaboration between departments.

Within the assignments throughout the programme research skills are applied within the practice dis­ci­ plines such as typography and coding. In the past tutors used to constantly reinvent their assignments every year or every semester; now we really try to deep­en and strengthen skills and research topics not to stay static, but to really work on bringing certain fundamentals into the courses.

For research, we have two “vertical captains” – Maarten Cornel and Els Kuipers – tasked with paying attention to how the research components are built up over the four years of study. The captains or custodians within all disciplines keep a close eye on what needs strength­

22

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

‘Groundplan Drawings’, 2014-2019, selected drawings of homes left behind in Syria, project by Foundland Collective

‘Groundplan Drawings’ exhibition, Amman Design Week, 2019.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Lauren Alexander

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Lyndsey Housden Tutor, BA Interactive Media Design, since 2017 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2019 Member, Interdisciplinary Research Group, 2020 Alum, MA ArtScience, 2009 Lyndsey Housden creates interactive installations that intervene between architecture, technology and the human body, seeking the invisible lines and underlying currents that subvert the intention­ ality of architecture and provoke physical interactions and social encounters.

‘360º’ Housden explored the potential for exchange be­ tween the fields of robotics, movement analysis and dance in order to develop haptic, kinetic objects de­ rived from physical modelling and embodied collabo­ rative data. Positioned in between the discrete met­ hods of science and the continuous methods of the performing arts, ‘360º’ aimed to take a third position that seeks to enable new perspectives on, and expe­ riences of, the body.

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Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, interactive media, embodied knowl­ edge, dance, soft robotic matter, movement-based experimentation, computer-human interaction, not (yet) knowing

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow What do you teach here at the KABK? Lyndsey Housden I teach a course called the “Last Lab” together with two colleagues, Adriaan Wormgoor and Florian Mecklenburg. It is a year-long course supporting the graduation process of students in BA Interactive Media Design. The course is built around individual tutorials, group workshops offering research methods and de­ sign tools to support the graduation phase, and group feedback sessions. I teach professional prac­tice skills to third-year students and, since 2019, I have also worked as a study coach for years 1 and 2, with a focus on students’ personal and professional development. I want to support students in their under­standing of how they learn best and the tools they need to get the most out of their study. I teach yoga for everyone at the KABK, and this year I started teaching an elective at the Conservatoire called “Yoga for Musicians”.

AT I would also suggest that your methods are often participatory. I remember doing some lovely move­ ment exercises with you…

LH Right. It’s not only about a philosophical reflection on movement research. I find it important to share this re­search with an audience using any means that en­ gage the haptic and proprioceptive senses. This re­ quires participation from the “reader” to then find lan­ guage through a creative pro­­cess which is essentially non-verbal.

AT

re there any funding sources outside of the KABK A that have supported your research?

LH

I received a starter grant from Stimuleringsfonds in 2019, which greatly facilitated my research. Addition­ ally, I collaborated with ICK, a contemporary dance or­ga­nisation in Amsterdam, where I had access to dance studio space and worked with one of their dancers, Arad Inbar. The Grey Space in The Middle in The Hague supported me through a residency in 2019, along with some funding towards production of a public event.

I was a guest researcher at AMOLF, a physics re­search centre in Amsterdam. These affilia­tions opened various opportunities for my research. But in the first place, they were opened up by being able to say I was a mem­ ber of the Research Group at the KABK.

AT Let’s discuss your practice and research practice and how they relate. How would you describe your practice?

LH My practice has evolved significantly through the Re­ search Groups and my work as a study coach. The Design Lectorate Research Group led me to delve deeper into the theory of embodiment, the history of knowledge, and different ways of knowing. I started seeing my prac­tice as a translation between embodi­ ed knowl­edge and language, and I began to create both poetic and academic reflections. The Interdisci­ plinary Research Group and my training as a coachcounsellor have also sparked my interest in wellbeing within higher education and its connec­tion to study coaching. I’m particularly intrigued by the challenge of holistically integrating wellbeing into education.

AT

Where and how do you conduct your research?

LH Initially, it was mainly conducted in my studio, as desk research, reflections and sketches; but now it takes place on location, such as in scientific labs and the dance studio.

AT Are there certain methods or data sources you often rely on in your research?

LH I often explore physical sites and locations, especially man-made architectural spaces. I focus on the expe­ rience of the lived body in those spaces. My research methods include interviews and movement-based experimentation, and video reflection.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Lyndsey Housden

AT How do you disseminate the results or findings of your research?

LH

I find that participatory workshops are the most effec­ tive way to disseminate my re­search, as they provide diverse perspec­tives and lived experiences. Writing also plays a crucial role, although I’m still working on finding my voice in that aspect.

AT Talk me through a project — your collaboration with ICK Amsterdam?

LH The research at ICK Amsterdam was self-initiated, with me taking on the role of the lead researcher. The project was supported and facilitated by Suzan Tunca, who was Head of Academy and a researcher at ICK. ICK Amsterdam provided studio space and time to work with a dancer. The goal of the research was to translate the lived experience of dance and movement into an interactive installation based on soft-robotic technology. In the translation of movement research into a prototype for a soft-robotic artwork, I found that I could not achieve the quality of experience of my movement research through representation alone.

I concluded that experience and representation are two quite different things.

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AT Were there any specific outcomes or outputs from this project?

LH The goal was to develop a set of keywords that could serve as programming tools for the behaviour of a selfpropelling robot or object. The project resulted in pro­totype artworks, documentation, and a durational per­formance at the Grey Space’s interdisciplinary sympo­sium, in collaboration with writer Emily Besa and mu­si­cian/composer Ryan Teague. The event also included a movement workshop by choreographer and educator Ria Higler from AHK, and a lecture on haptics by Dr David Abbink from TU Delft. It culminated in a panel discussion moderated by Dr Marijn de Langen, a per­forming arts theorist and historian at AHK specialising in mime. In addition, there was a sharing of work-inprogress at the ICK Festival, an expert meeting for choreographers and researchers.

And, thanks to the Design Lectorate, I presented at the Fault Lines Research Forum and I wrote about the project on Open!

AT How were these outputs used in professional artistic practice or other contexts? To what fields or disciplines did this project contribute?

LH This project had connections with human-computer interaction (HCI) and technology in the context of medical care.

AT And what about dance and performance?

LH There may have been some feeding back into it but for me dance is more about understanding how you ac­ cess that knowledge in the body, not necessarily how you perform it to an audience as an art form.

of research. In particular, recognizing that phase of “not knowing (yet)”. The moment when design and artistic ideas develop through a process of making, where philosophical or theoretical notions and insights begin to take form through materials. The challenge I notice for some students is the transition out of the realm of desk research, language and rhetoric and into the messy, analogue or digital realm, with all the uncertain processes, mistakes, accidents, and plenty of serendipity.

The Research Group was really the first time I learned about research. About how to go through that phase of not knowing with a supportive group of peers, how to establish the research context, work out the specific question, find or invent a research method... All this meant I could better understand what some of my stu­dents are going through when developing their re­ search projects.

AT How has research at KABK evolved so far? Are there any areas that could be improved?

LH Research at the KABK has grown and diversified since I’ve been working here. But I still see a need for more clarity regarding what research means in different con­texts and departments. Additionally, the way research is integrated, not just in education but in all aspects of the academy, could be further explored — and not only for faculty but also for students. This can help foster a sense of belonging and cohesion within the institution.

Research support should be more readily available and user-friendly. It would be beneficial if there were a dedicated support structure to help navigate the administrative aspects of research, such as grant applications and documentation.

AT How did this project influence your teaching at the KABK? LH The project enhanced my ability to integrate theory and practice in teaching, and particularly in empha­ sising the importance of an iterative research process.

It encouraged me to support students in developing their research skills.

AT How do you explain the importance of research to students?

LH As research is a key aspect in the curriculum at BA In­teractive Media Design from the first year on, there is no need to explain the importance as such. What is interesting, however, and what I have learnt from the Research Group is recognizing the stages or phases

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Research process, ‘360’ by Lyndsey Housden, 2019.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Lyndsey Housden

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Katrin Korfmann Tutor, BA Graphic Design, since 2016 Tutor, MA Non Linear Design, since 2022 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2020 and 2021 Katrin Korfmann is an artist working on the cutting edge of photography, post-photography and in­ stallation art. Attracted to the spectacles of everyday life, which often occur in the public space, she captures people in metropolitan motion. With a critical attitude towards the world around her, and explicitly in relation to contemporary visual culture, Korfmann uses a myriad of self-photographed images to investigate its historical, social and visual contexts.

Korfmann conducted two research projects as a Research Group member.

‘Wastescapes’ Every day, millions of photographic images are pro­ duced, shared, ignored, discarded and forgotten.

Korfmann explored the relationship between how waste is sorted and how photographs are edited, and how the visual, conceptual and technical as­pects of photography might be used to critically reflect on the Wasteocene. Her research took her into the field, to visit waste processing plants, but also deeper into her own practice, where she experi­mented with the juxtaposition and entangle­ment of waste processing procedures and variants of image production, editing and storage.

‘Collaborating with Image Ruins’ ‘Collaborating with Image Ruins’ used the image trash produced in ‘Wastescapes’ as the basis for a series of iterative multimedia experiments whereby Korfmann probed the meaning of the concept of de­ le­tion and the materiality of image data. The pro­ject generated knowledge about authorship and owner­ ship in relation to photographic image debris.

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Key Terms and Concepts Post-photography, digital photographs, image waste, image ruins, Wasteocene, recycling processing plants, collage, compositionism, experimentation, materiality of image data

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe What role does research play in your teaching?

Katrin Korfmann I have been teaching in the MA Non Linear Narrative for two years now, and that is really something I think I owe to this Research Group. Because as well as chang­ing my practice, it also changed my way of teach­ing. I was able to set up a whole course called “Post Photography” which stems from the research I did in the group.

RH What does the course look like?

KK

tudents are exposed to different techniques and meth­ S odologies of what photography means or could mean at a time when the number of images that are in cir­ cula­tion is increasing enormously, and because of how photographic imagery is processed and net­worked, the entire medium and the profession is in transition.

What we do is look at how photography is used for purposes other than purely visual art, for example in science, documentation or registration, and examine how you can allow that to flow back into design and art. What I do is I look for themes that I find interest­ ing or where I think it’s important to investigate them further, then I look for the experts in that field, invite them in to deliver workshops. Yes, and then students get to work after that.

RH Do you notice that what happens in your teaching starts to influence your studio practice?

KK Definitely. First, I learn an awful lot myself too, through these experts I bring in and the work the students do.

But also, since being in the Research Group, I am doing research in a completely different way. It’s really about thinking much more theoretically about how and what I make, and reading and writing about the topic along­ side the making and allowing that to con­ceptually fall into place with the creation of the art.

RH What is the name of the exhibition?

KK “You Shall Be Spam”. In BA Graphic Design we have a new way of teaching graphic design in block systems.

So I’m now doing the second year of collaboration with Maarten Cornel, a theory teacher, where we really bring theory and practice together in one assignment, also resulting in an exhibition and a website.

We spend two days on image and one day on philoso­ phy, and it’s actually because of the Research Group that I have much better tools to set up a collaboration with philosophy, for example. Or now, for instance, for this exhibition they all have to write a text about their work, and we start with keywords. What I’ve noticed is that I now know a lot more about how to find and work with theoretical sources.

RH How did you share the research you did in the Research Group?

KK Well, we are in the process of making a publication [titled A Fray of Messays] to document our research.

Alice found a publisher and a designer. We just need the funding, I think.

I mean, we have already shared our research in the "Fault Lines Research Forum". The first year, during COVID, we did it online with Zoom studio visits. I did a performance-presentation at my studio with a live camera, which is weird of course. But it was also ex­ cit­ing to do something different for once. And for the second year we did it at West in The Hague. At the last moment, a change in COVID restrictions meant we ended up not being able to host an audience any­ more, so we had a small group in West with some guests and students to respond to our research, and it was streamed online. We had no audience, but that worked really well. Because it was so intimate, there was a whole different atmosphere. I really liked that symposium.

RH What was your original research question?

RH And you teach the “Image” course together with a the­ory teacher?

KK When I started in the Research Group, I was photo­ graphing waste treatment plants. And then the re­ search question was about how the processes used in those plants relate to my own processing of imagery.

KK When I was in the Research Group I was there with a colleague from our department, Hannes Bernard, and because our research connects quite well, we designed an assignment together. It was about visual digital waste and how you can use it creatively. We made an exhibition at the end of the year. That’s all not so easy because it was all still during COVID, but we were able to do it. The students also made a website out of it, which is also still online.

When I do a shoot, I go to a location and photograph a whole series of images of the location and I make collages, so ultimately only one image comes out.

A collage, a composition. But a lot of images remain unused, and I don’t dare throw them away. And of course, I have to maintain them, because they are on

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Katrin Korfmann

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my server, they cost data. This is my image waste.

In the second Research Group I decided to focus on the image waste I had created in the first project. And that was very interesting for me, that second research project, because I tend to be very focused on images and the aesthetics of images. Now, I had to let go of that completely. I invented a set of experiments that played with various attempts to translate or reduce or delete my leftover images.

RH Can you see how what you did in the Research Group feeds into your teaching?

KK Yes, definitely. All those experiments I did; I’m using those in my lessons now. And it’s also about the kind of knowledge that I have built up. What is also very valuable is all this knowledge about the different ex­ periments I have done, which are also sometimes really not obvious, but also perhaps a creative way of dealing with certain methodologies. I noticed that after a few months of being out of the Research Group how much I missed that framework. When Alice offer­ ed to chair a PhD Preparation and Study Group, I was the first to sign up!

ing to invest? Because yes, right now, I do see an im­ petus there with what Alice does, but how many teach­ers are there in that group? Four or five? Out of how many teachers at the KABK? And, how can you also maintain your research in a sustainable way after­ wards? What is the afterlife of such a Research Group?

If you say that you take research seriously, you have to prioritise it. And not only by giving some employees one extra day for it. If we took research seriously it would send a positive signal from this institution. I see this with the students, especially with the international students, which are about 90% or so of the students in the year I’m teaching now. A lot of these students have the ambition to go deeper in theory and content.

When it comes to looking to the future, I hope there will be more of a focus on supporting research at KABK.

RH So, you are preparing a PhD proposal?

KK Yes. I used the PhD Incentive Scheme to help in pre­ paring it. And I am now in the process of applying for the second one.

RH What improvements can be made to research at the KABK? KK I think it’s important for the KABK to take a position and have a direction in relation to research.

If I look at the KABK now, I think it’s incredibly valu­ able that this Research Group exists. But of course, that’s also why this kind of initiative needs to be main­ tained in a sus­tainable way. I was lucky to be able to do that for 2.5 years. But most only do it for one year.

And I person­ally find that, for me, that would have been much too short.

I notice how what I learned in the Research Group is bearing fruit in my teaching and in the qual­ity of my teaching. And I think it’s very important that the KABK should invest more in research for teachers, as a way to benefit the students.

So I think the executive board just really needs to make a clear choice. Does it think research is important?

And if so, what is the strategy? And what are we go­

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

‘Wastescapes’, by Katrin Korfmann, 280 x 397 cm, hand-cut archival pigment print, 2020.

Research process, ‘Wastescapes’, by Katrin Korfmann, 2020.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Katrin Korfmann

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Sabin Gârea Instructor, Metal and Wood Workshop, since 2017 Member, Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Research Group 2020 Alum, MA Artistic Research, 2017 Sabin Gârea is a Romanian visual artist and a member of the coordinating staff of the metal and wood workshops. Using his practice as a medium for investigation, he explores how craft knowledge might be embodied, and techniques used, to make works that critically analyse his cultural background.

‘Craft Exploded’ Recognising that the spaces where theory is taught and the spaces where the fabrication of the projects takes place are still separate at KABK, Gârea pro­ posed routes and resources by which this divide might be bridged.

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Key Terms and Concepts Craft, wood, carpentry, loss of craft skills, haptic ma­ terial knowledge, workshops as spaces for research and learning

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe Apart from working here in the KABK Metal and Wood Workshop, do you have your own artistic practice?

Sabin Gârea It’s a struggle to keep it afloat, but yeah, it’s still there.

Since I work here four days a week, I try to look at my position as an instructor in the workshop as an integral part of my art practice; otherwise, I would feel discour­ aged by the amount of time I can allocate to it, and I would stop doing it. It is not easy because instructing in a workshop is sometimes not that glorious. You must deal with the basic needs of the student and that does not leave a lot of room for actual stimulation of their creativity. But there are also some that come up with amazing ideas. These give you that drive to try to push them to innovate, to try to teach them more. At this point, there are still plenty of students coming to me with challenging questions, enough to make the job creative and demanding.

RH What are your research interests?

SG I have always been very much focused on craft and understanding how craft can exist and evolve in a so­ ciety that doesn’t have time for craft.

RH Was this already a topic for you when you were a stu­ dent in MA Artistic Research?

SB My topic in MA Artistic Research was more about un­der­standing the, let us say, existential crisis of the craftsman who is ready to trade their secrets, their biggest assets, in exchange for the survival of their trade. If they would still be practising their trades and applying the teaching models of the nineteenth or even early twentieth century, plenty of crafts would be lost. One had to help a craftsperson and work with them for four or five years to learn some of the trade secrets. I think very few people would have the stamina, the resources and time to invest in such an educational model.

My father is an artist, a sculptor, and is the owner of a small company centred on making ornamental furni­ ture out of oak for churches. His business is in Roma­ nia, a more religious society than the Netherlands, where a lot of churches are still being built in the old Orthodox tradition. Specific hand-carved furniture is required and there is still quite a market for his craft.

The biggest impediment is the huge shortage of crafts­ people. He used to take pride in the hand-carved quali­ty of his products, made without using com­ puter-con­trolled machinery like CNC. In the end, being left with­out workers, he was forced to embrace

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Sabin Gârea

the newer digital production methods.

RH You also experienced this firsthand? Did you collabo­ rate with your father?

SG I worked alongside him and yes, I saw how society was changing. As we moved from a communist to a capital­ ist regime, there was a lot of social ambiguity and crafts­men slowly started to quit their trade, emi­grating to the western European countries, ready to work at whatever was available there. So much knowledge disappeared. Carving wood is a time-consuming, at­ ten­tion-consuming activity; you must dedicate your­ self to it. Having all this firsthand experience, I wanted to research: What is craft now compared to what it was a hundred years ago? What are the traces a crafts­ man leaves behind nowadays? Is it the outcome? Is it the process?

RH How do you experience the integration of workshops in education at the KABK? I mean, as the coordinator of a BA department, I have a sense that there could be more mutual reinforcement…

SG Yeah, in my opinion this aspect has a lot of room for improvement because we are still functioning under the assumption that these are two quite different do­ mains, and that students learn the thinking within the classroom with their teachers and then they go and execute it through some unknown miracle in the work­ shops. And there is a nameless guy, known generically as “the guy from the workshop”, who will take care of it. I am trying to really push the departments to rethink how they interact with the workshops from the first moment they direct first-year students to us.

The way departments address the workshops often defines how students later understand and interact with the workshops. If one comes and says, “I need a small plank with a hole in it”, I will just give them a plank with a hole. I do not know what it is for, and I do not care. The best way is if the student starts by sharing the whole project with me, sharing their con­ cept. Then I can tell if they need a plank with a hole, or a totally different thing, and then we can decide together. Now, that’s education. It is an approach that can spark a conversation, followed by a teaching mo­ ment like the one a teacher in a classroom is doing.

RH When you were a part of the Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Research Group, what were you working on in particular?

SG I embarked on a project of documenting the work of certain students who were using aspects of slow craft

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in their work. I meant to try and understand how the craft itself finds its place in the mechanism of crea­ tion. The students I interviewed were interested in instrument-making techniques applied to sculp­tural objects and were creating sculptures that also could be played. They were exploring this through an Indi­ vid­ual Study Track course run jointly by the KABK and the Conservatoire [“Soundscape”]. Unfortunately, as soon as the Research Group started, COVID-19 struck, and we had to do all our meetings online and I could not continue working in the workshops with students.

RH But, as a Research Group, you still did a symposium, right?

SG The year I was in the Research Group, COVID-19 meant we had to do the “Fault Lines Research Forum” online, so we made it so that each researcher gave a tour of their studio space, their site of research. I was in the Wood Workshop, of course, and after I gave the tour and talked about my research, one of the students I had interviewed, who had made a xylophone in such a way that eventually it would break while being played, gave a live performance ending with the moment when the instrument broke into pieces.

workshop should not be seen as a separate entity which students enter only to get things pro­duced, but rather, as a huge part of the education process with instructors being seen and rewarded as educators, not as technical consultants.

RH Would you define your practice as artistic research?

SG That is a question I am trying to answer myself. Artis­ tic research is more of a mindset or a way of looking at things, and I think as a follow-up to that moment of education in my life (MA Artistic Research), I continue to do that, to look at things in that framework. In a sense I try to investigate my practice and I start by not taking my creative actions for granted. What is the act of making? What makes you a maker and how?

These questions pop constantly in my mind, together with many others, and they sometimes give me the power to create critical distance from my work. I need to see things from a broader perspective to find new ways of diving into a subject I am busy with.

I would love to have continued working on the research after the Research Group was over, and to assemble a sort of catalogue of the documentation, but I didn’t find the time or the resources.

RH

I think this would be incredibly useful for the workshops but also for the KABK more generally. We could then evaluate the methods we use to teach students spe­ cific skills through certain exercises. And then we can see what they lead to.

SG But workshop staff are not seen as teaching person­nel, and you can look at the salary scale and see clearly who and what is. In our universe, administrative skills are better rewarded than teaching and researching.

So then, yes, it is difficult to conduct research in that context.

RH So, there is an organisation and hierarchical disconnect between where and how research and teaching hap­ pens and where making happens?

SG Exactly! Earlier this year we went to an ELIA confer­ ence held at the Royal College of Art in London, through the KABK’s International Office. We took part in the European Workshop Instructors (ETHO) meeting that was part of the conference. What came across in most of the presentations was that, in gen­eral, workshop instructors are thinking the same thing – that the

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Student project by Jesse Greulich developed in KABK Wood Workshop, 2020.

Mechanical device for tightening a steel string, part of ‘Latent Noise’ by Sabin Garea, 2017.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Sabin Gârea

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Laura van Santen Tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, since 2016 Tutor, MA Interior Architecture, since 2020 Member, Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Research Group 2020 Featured tutor in ‘Touching: A Research Method in Art and Design’, 2021 Laura van Santen collaborates with Diederik de Koning in the architecture and furniture design prac­ tice la-di-da. The design duo combines knowledge of industrial building processes with a love for craft and the use of bio-based building materials.

‘Finger Exercises’ Van Santen invited artists, designers and experts from various material fields to contribute to an archive of finger exercises to help students experiment and gain expertise in working with techniques and materials.

Such an andragogic model defines the creative design process as gathering and sharing material knowledge rather than presenting end-products.

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Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, material science, half-fabricaats, environmental damage, extractive industries, haptic knowledge, workshops, touching, experiments, biobased building materials

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe Laura, how many years have you taught at KABK? Laura van Santen I’ve been here for almost seven years now. It’s actually a concept in business, I think, where you take two years to get acquainted, two years to reach your peak, two years to be productive, and two years to transfer knowl­edge.

Alice Twemlow

But maybe minus the two years for a pandemic and multiple institutional crises?

RH Tell us about the role of research in your studio practice.

LvS Our practice, la-di-da, where I work together with my partner Diederik de Koning, is rooted in materials and matter. One large research focus in our practice is bio based building materials, which is a bit more compli­ cated than bio-based materials in design because ar­chi­ tecture has so many more rules and regulations. And another emphasis of ours is about having an im­pact.

So, the bio-based research is actually about under­ standing resources, grondstoffen in Dutch, and the impact research is about understanding industrial pro­cesses and prefabrication processes and where, as an architect, you can intervene. As an architect you deal with the site where you build but you also deal with the site where something is produced and where it’s mined.

AT

oes this research ethos and process feed into com­ D missions?

LvS A great example is the project that started as a Euro­ pean Ceramics Workshop Centre residency. I was re­ searching the maximum size of a wall tile depending on the different percentages of iron in the clay. This led to the development of a testing method for clay glaz­ing recipes based on the triaxial test, and I de­ signed a triangular tile that could support that test.

Then, some architects I had collaborated with on a textile installation were designing a museum in Waalwijk, Brabant, and needed a ceramic wall of around fifty square metres. At the same time I was in contact with Cor Unum, a ceramics workshop in Den Bosch where they have plenty of waste glaze, so we decided to make the tiles out of this waste product.

And Cor Unum has this very nice dimension because it’s a social workplace. Together with Lotte Landsheer, we applied to the Stimuleringsfonds for funding to do a prototype, to test the product.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Laura van Santen

AT We’re hearing quite often that Stimuleringsfonds doesn’t really have a category devoted to research, but people very often use the funds they get there to do research.

LvS Absolutely. With the Metallotheek project, where I ex­ plored the casting, finishing and patination of bronze in the Make Eindhoven workshop, we also received a grant from the Stimuleringsfonds (through their Ruimte voor Talent programme). And it was a bigger one — we had €25,000 to work with — so we could fund the whole research endeavour as well as the photography and graphic design for a publication.

AT The ways in which these tiles are both the result of, but also embody, your research process, is really inter­ esting. Does a project like this also need a more tradi­ tional type of documentation to make the motivations and thinking behind the research legible?

LvS With the Metallotheek project I made a book and an online recipe database to accompany the project, be­ cause I felt it had a more didactic element and I wanted to make sure that was passed along. But with the tile research, things were more complex.

During the process, Cor Unum realised they didn’t have enough waste glaze to make 2,500 tiles because usually they just do vases and stuff, so they had to col­ lect waste products from other ceramic ateliers in the area. For me this was the most successful part of the pro­ject – the fact that the wall is made up of the ce­ram­ic waste of the area.

RH And is this process of collecting waste glaze from other workshops, is this now something Cor Unum has con­ tinued to do?

LvS If they have big commissions like that again, yes. So part of the research ended up being the creation of a network of waste collection as a resource.

The entire project was quite fluid in that we would change things according to circumstances. If I had to make a general conclusion about my approach to research, I think I would want to highlight the impor­ tance of being open to what might happen during a process and of listening to the people that you’re col­ laborating with.

RH How have you shared your research output, like the wall at the museum?

LvS I’ve given lectures on the wall project to audiences such as the Association of Dutch Designers (BNO)

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and the Mosa Tiles Conference. It was also nominated for various awards, including the ARC award, the Dutch Design Award, and the Architectenweb Award. The project’s narrative has been shared, but not extensively.

We also had an article in Architect magazine discuss­ ing the process.

On the Metallotheek project I collaborated with my sister, Heleen van Santen, who is a metal conservator, and she did a poster presentation on it at an Inter­na­ tional Council of Museums (ICOM) conference in Hel­ sinki. The patina library I created is now on display as a permanent physical installation at MAKE Eindhoven, for use by Design Academy students as well as resi­ dent artists.

RH How does your research influence your approach to teaching and to education?

LvS My aim is to ensure that students consider materials throughout the design process, not just at the end.

I am a studio tutor and year head, overseeing the first year’s curriculum. Here we need to instil an attitude of responsibility towards resources and processes.

We’ve completely changed the studio setup because of my participation in the Teaching Tools Research Group, where I had the time to research how to put these ideas into a curriculum and what kind of “fingerexercises” that way of working requires. Now it’s implemented and it’s really interesting to see how it will pay off in the work and criticality of students.

For me, the Research Group was also a context in which to distil what it is that I actually do through all the really nice discussions and also to really think about the didactic translation which is so tricky and which I'm also still kind of figuring out. I think some­ how that teaching is also research because we’re always experimenting and learning through teaching.

lot to take on. I want to find a way to turn it around and make it into a positive question as well, even though it’s quite complex material.

AT What you’re describing is a philosophical dilemma at the heart of pedagogy, right?

LvS Yes, I think that some of the students might prefer ex­ clamation marks, but we are giving them question marks, because with these they have the potential to make something much stronger.

AT I know you like to work with recipes for techniques and materials. How do you integrate these into your teaching?

LvS We encourage students to experiment with materials, often using waste or renewable materials. We docu­ ment the recipes they develop, creating an open-source recipe library. This approach promotes openness and collaboration and helps us break away from the com­ peti­tive culture in design.

RH How do you envision the role of workshops in research and teaching at the KABK? LvS Workshops play a crucial role in both research and teaching.

I think the workshops are the most fertile parts of the academy. They offer opportunities for experimentation, collaboration and the sharing of knowledge. They are especially vital for the first year students.

Integrating workshops effectively into the curriculum can really enhance the learning experience. The tradi­ tional mod­el is that you design something in the stu­ dio and then go to the workshop to execute it. But we want to change this mindset and remind students and tutors that workshops can be where a project begins.

AT Can you say a bit more about that?

LvS Teaching is also a form of experimentation. Feedback from a class of students from such diverse backgrounds helps us refine our methods. It’s a continuous learning process.

Something I’m struggling with now is that with climate change and air pollution and the resulting habitat loss for all species, collapse of the food chain, injustices and individualism due to the capitalist and colonial ethos embedded in our history and current time, it can be really negative for a student. And maybe if you’re 18 and just left secondary school, you know, that’s a

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Stills, ‘Touching as a Research Method’ video, Laura van Santen, Cor Unum ceramic workshop, Den Bosch, 2021.

Photo by Roel Backaert and Niels Schrader.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Laura van Santen

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Jasper Coppes Tutor, MA Artistic Research, since 2013 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2021 Jasper Coppes is an artist, writer and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. His practice is rooted in longterm dialogues with specific sites, people and other entities and explores the material and immaterial conditions that shape our environment.

‘Shallow Lake’ By drawing on the work of philosopher Michael Marder and the Marxist concept of a ‘metabolic rift’, this pro­ ject asked whether an art project could kick-start the halted metabolism of contaminated granite sediments, dumped into Dutch lakes, and if art could initiate a process transforming the indigestibility of polluting materials into nourishment.

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Key Terms and Concepts Filmmaking, artistic research, fertile sediment, environmental debris, New Nature, metabolic rift, vegetal and geological thinking, fiction as a tactic, landscape, contamination

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe How do you describe your practice?

Jasper Coppes I see myself as a visual artist and my research practice – I do not see it as something I do in addition. They are one and the same thing. I am a visual artist doing in­ vestigative research through artistic means.

RH In general, how do you do your research?

JC I research through the medium of film and text mainly, so I consider filmmaking as a form of research where the research tools are the camera, image and sound, but also the relationships between maker and subject and the relationships that emerge during the produc­ tion of such a film – so the humans and non-humans that the film is about and the relationships that I build with those entities as a visual artist. These collabo­ rations are part of the research for me.

RH How do these two media, film and text, typically go together in your projects?

JC Often, a film is preceded by a text, or the other way around. An example of this is a short film I shot in 2017 in Scotland with an archeologist. Our collabo­ ration influenced the way we recorded that film – we merged an archaeological survey with the shooting of an analogue film.

RH Do you also have some examples of national collabo­ rations and more specifically, collaborations at the KABK? JC I am now working on a film called Shallow Lake about toxicity in the Maas and Waal area of the Netherlands.

This project started during my participation in the De­ sign Lectorate Research Group. The idea was to make a film in collaboration with the people from the area who were worried about the pollution in their back­ yard, but they were afraid of lawsuits. Local inhabi­ tants received emails telling them they were being fol­lowed on the street, and a former minister who had spoken out was dragged to court. I had to adapt to this reality, so the collaboration took on a different form than I had originally imagined.

RH When dealing with such a topic, how does your work relate to journalism?

JC

With a hot topic such as this one, there is a lot of media attention. Especially after the recent provincial elec­ tions, the topic of water quality and industrial and ag­ ricultural pollution in the Netherlands was getting a

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Jasper Coppes

lot of coverage. Within that discussion, I tried to make a place for fiction, and to figure out what you can do with fiction that you can’t do with journalism.

RH With your participation in the Research Group, what impact has it had on your research and artistic prac­ tice and on how you teach research to students?

JC Well, the impact was quite big, because we had meet­ ings with the group on a regular basis and I had a lot of feedback from peers, and gained lots of new refer­ ences, books, perspectives, new questions. Alice also helped me a lot to look less at the topics and more at possible strategies or methodologies, and to think in verbs.

Regarding my teaching, in the MA Artistic Research we have days where we focus on research methodolo­ gies within a thematic framework. I organised a day about toxicity with a lecture by the curator Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, a film by Alexandra Navratil about a polluted lake in Germany, and a workshop with Benedetta Pompili, who was hired shortly afterwards by the Ceramic Workshop.

RH Are there any other outputs connected to Shallow Lake?

JC When it’s complete we’re going to submit it to several film festivals. But we’ve also been exploring how to share it in the middle of production.

For example, in September 2022, I was part of an a, “Our Living Soil”, at Zone2Source in Amsterdam. I col­ laborated with Esmee Geerken, who was part of the 2021 "Fault Lines Research Forum", and I used the exhi­bition as an opportunity to test something with anima­tion for Shallow Lake. Two visiting scholars were in­vited to reflect on the exhibition. Anna Krzywoszynska was one of them. When she got a position as Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oulu, Finland, she invited me to come over and talk about my work and the film project in the con­text of a conference on citizen science. I brought in storyboarding as a way to prepare research. And it opened up some interesting perspectives for some of the scientists.

Last November I showed excerpts from the film at POST, an artists’ platform in Nijmegen. Around Nijme­ gen there are several areas where we had shot the film so that location felt very relevant. POST organised all kinds of public programs around the show, including a workshop with students from a secondary school. That was very successful as an interim output I would say.

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The idea of using the exhibition itself as an editing space is also something I took with me from the Re­ search Group – the perspective that the making of a film can be almost more interesting than the final film itself. And how can you show that process of making?

Alice Twemlow Could you talk a bit about how you define research or how you explain the importance of research to students when they’re working on their thesis?

JC Because the students in our department are artists, we want them to write the thesis as artists. So it fits to have an artist like me guiding that journey. I see writing as part of my practice, and how I do research.

What I tell students is that they are not writing about their work or about their research. It’s not a separate line of reasoning that happens outside of the work, but it’s something that happens parallel to making art­ works and is highly influenced by the process you have in the studio or however you do your work. We think through making as much as we think through writing.

In the end, the thesis should be a tool to think through your practice in the space of the text. I like to call this process developing an essayistic awareness.

RH How did you experience research culture at the KABK during the past six years? Did you notice any changes?

JC My experience is based on being in two different kinds of Research Groups. The first one, in 2016, had much more em­phasis on reading and writing. It helped me to write a couple of texts and we published a little booklet. In that group, I missed having the space for practice, sharing practice. I felt a little underwhelmed – maybe it was where I was at that moment, but it felt a bit vague.

universities. So that it is actually part of your contract to develop new knowledge, and that you also must actively think about how you channel what you learn in your own artistic practice into your teaching, and how you hand that over to another generation. I think you would still need the Research Group because that’s part of professionalisation also, that you create these scenarios for peer review and feedback.

AT We shouldn’t have to think of what you’re describing as utopian. It’s quite basic really.

JC I’ve noticed that in our department, when tutors are asked to share their research interests, it increases the sense of community and helps students under­ stand shared discourses and to see who participates in them and what kind of work emerges out of that.

It makes it much more tangible for students to think about what communities they feel they could fit into after they graduate.

AT Is there anything you haven’t yet had a chance to say?

JC

I think this question of how research could be further developed at the KABK is a very important question.

The KABK needs to devote time, to block out time, to sit with that question. And not just a little evaluation and then carry on as usual, but to use this process to create a thinktank to really activate the field of knowl­ edge and experience within the KABK, across all de­ part­­ments and workshops and staff.

And so, the second research group, I liked it a lot more.

We were much more active. I loved that we went to the Rijksakademie to visit Vibeke Mascini in her studio, for example. And the emphasis was much more on meth­ odology. And I really think that’s more important maybe than the emphasis on text or on reading. I thought about it yesterday, actually. It was one of those moments on the bike that I was thinking “yeah, that really makes a lot of sense”.

AT How could the research culture at the KABK be further enhanced? What would make it better for you as a practitioner and teacher?

JC For me, the ideal – but this is in a utopian fantasy – is that there would be a research element within every contract for tutors at the KABK, like you have in some

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Production process, ‘Shallow Lake’ by Jasper Coppes. Photo by Jasper Coppes.

‘Jasper Coppes: Fragments from Shallow Lake’, exhibition, POST, Nijmegen, 2022.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Jasper Coppes

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Louis Braddock Clarke Tutor, BA Graphic Design, since 2020 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2021 and 2022 Alum, BA Graphic Design, 2019 Louis Braddock Clarke is an artist, who uses listening and amplification to explore sonic ecologies.

Interpreting notions from the domains of art, geography, physics and philosophy, he identifies geological and atmospheric locations where layers of human activities such as electromag­netism, bio-mineralisation and geological sonics can be listened to.

‘Out Of Focus’ ‘Out of Focus’ looked at shifts in iron magnetism at Cape York (Greenland) as a frame through which to imagine ways of designing and building live inter­faces for sampling Earth’s changing textures.

‘Weather Gardens’ Following on from his previous project, ‘Weather Gar­ dens’ was a proposed method, discourse, and space for plural acts of listening at sites of geological distur­ bance. Immersing in an active mode of telluric-drifting, Braddock Clarke aimed to better understand the sonic signatures of the Earth as it goes through rapid shifts due to the climate emergency.

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Key Terms and Concepts Graphic design, sound-making, ice, weather, rocks, radio frequencies, paleomagnetism, extractive pro­ cesses, environmental damage, indigenous knowl­ edge, spectral thinking, sonic ecologies, telluric cur­ rents, sampling, full-spectrum listening, amplifying, DIY science, witnessing

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow If you had to categorise your research practice…

Louis Braddock Clarke …I’d call myself a “field researcher”. I devise methods and build instruments with which to conduct research, so my practice and my research are really closely con­ nected. Most of the time it’s about coming up with ways of understanding the space or site that I’m in.

AT Your data sources include the sites themselves. What are you trying to listen to within those sites?

LBC I try to work with “full-spectrum listening”. You have multiple ways of listening to a site, of taking data from the Earth. Through triggering conversations, through technical data collection, or it can be through fiction­ al writing also.

Group, whenever I write work texts or the caption text for a work, I always include a research question. For this one, I wanted to explore the sonic ecologies that are particularly shaped by humans in the age of the Anthropocene.

As the world speeds up its own signals, we have to retune our own consciousness to this new frequency or tempo of the Earth. My goal is to create awareness around how to be more in tune with something like climate disaster or extreme weather events on a nonvisual level.

AT To which fields, academic disciplines and discourses do you think this project contributes?

LBC

AT Using these methods, then, what is the information you’re trying to get from these sites?

LBC Most of my data is based on inaudible phenomena. For me the interesting thing is the network of phenom­ena.

Not necessarily A or B but whatever is between A and B. On another level, the data would be about mea­ suring the anomaly. And the anomaly can be more scientific, but it can also be more abstract, like how people in that place have been affected because of the presence of a magnetic field, for example.

AT Who do you collaborate with on research projects?

LBC

When I was a student at the KABK my research was quite individual.. But after graduating and being more part of a group dynamic, I realised that research can only happen in settings where there’s a conversation.

Now I always work with big groups of people. I always want to find the specialists and the super nerds. I like to collaborate with Dutch scientific institutes or univer­ sities.

AT What’s an example of a recent research project?

LBC Currently I’m an artist resident at the Venice Music Biennale. This is the first year they are focusing on di­ gital music, or what they call “micro music”. I still had to write a research proposal. I based it on the one I did for the Design Lectorate Research Group. I rewrote it in terms of producing something more concrete. But it’s still called “Weather Gardens”.

AT

Does it have a guiding research question?

LBC Since having been in the Design Lectorate Research

I want to show through my research that science doesn’t have to be inaccessible. I want to help scien­ tific knowledge to seep out. I always start by looking for how a scientist measures a phenomenon, and then I download their open-access PDFs (laughing). I pro­ duce the same thing, the same mode of listening, but on a DIY scale, and with a really low budget. Then I distribute it so that more people can participate. My goal is to really shake up the scientific community, to show them, “Okay, you have an instrument that costs €60,000 and I’ve just made the same instrument for €30. So, what’s going on here?”

But I also want to bring alternative approaches to the scientific community. Because most of the time artists are called in to translate the scientific research, to il­ lustrate it. And that’s so boring. Or the artists and re­ searchers who go into these institutions want to ex­ tract something, they want someone to give them data.

Whereas if you go into spaces with an open mind and willingness to collaborate, it’s way more rewarding.

AT

e’ve talked a lot about the process of research — the W how. What are the outputs of this project — the what?

LBC In the end for me it has to be a piece of time-based media, an experience, in an exhibition or festival which someone can step into, not know anything about, and still get some information from. Then, I always write a text. I think it’s important to provide different levels of entry to a project.

What’s also important for me with dis­semination is that I don’t just wait until the project’s done; that I do it during the process. Like we did with the Design Lec­ torate Research Group, at the "Fault Lines Research Forum", or when we visited OT 301 and with what I showed in collaboration with Zuzanna Zgierska at W 139 in Amsterdam (where the piece was a research

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Louis Braddock Clarke

45

station). Then a research project offers itself as a set of iterations.

AT This is something that I think art and design research at the KABK can really offer: how we share research while in progress.

LBC Right. Dissemination shouldn’t be an afterthought; it should happen throughout the process of research.

Because I do a lot of field research, it’s important for me to bring my audience with me into the field, and that’s why I embrace Instagram. I always really describe where I am, what I’m doing, everyone who’s involved.

And it’s nice because then you get immediate responses from the audience. Some people want to discuss the details, others suggest people I could go and meet.

AT How do you think the outputs or processes of your research are used?

LBC Because all my work relates to climate, and generates new evidence, a lot of it is also used in those discourses.

The instruments I make get distributed to citizen sci­ entists. And this generates awareness, but it also cre­ ates a network, a community…

AT What kinds of research collaborations do you have within the KABK? LBC Students who have valued my teaching ask to work for me. I can’t employ them full-time, but I always in­ volve them in projects. I think it’s important to pro­ vide a support structure for graduates who might other­ wise have to leave The Hague.

With teachers, in the BA Graphic Design department, there isn’t space or time to actually learn from each other as tutors. The Design Lectorate Research Group is the only place I collaborated with people at the KABK. I love that there was this intense trust between us and how we shared everything.

AT So this is their kind of immersion into research the year before their thesis.

LBC As a third-year teacher I feel a responsibility to gear them up in terms of having the right strategies, methods and sources for pulling off a critically-aware gradua­ tion project.

AT And what about the other research activities you par­ ticipate in at the KABK? Either ones that exist or that you’ve initiated?

LBC In my teaching, I push students to find ways to dis­sem­i­ nate or publish their research outside of assessment criteria. My students have to organise a concert where they give a two-minute oral presentation about their research questions and process, before they show the work.

AT How do you experience the research culture at the KABK, and what could be done differently?

LBC One of the reasons I’m in The Netherlands is because of the public access to knowledge. I can walk up to TU Delft, or the Royal Conservatoire, knock on the door and enter a very specific body of knowledge very quickly. ut not everyone does this so at the KABK, we have to B become better at creating these connections to other institutions. For example, we do study trips to museums; but why not libraries, research institutes or science labs? Why not concert halls? I think the knowledge is there, it’s public, it’s accessible, we’re so lucky and privileged in The Netherlands to have all those things happening around us. There should be people at the KABK that make this happen — a department for public collaboration. Can you imagine how cool that would be?

AT How do you feed your own research back into your teaching? And how do you teach how to research?

LBC Teaching is such a big part of my practice, it’s hard to separate them out. I start with an assignment that in itself has research questions, but which also requires the students to come up with research questions of their own. We explore various methods about how to listen to a site, be more sensitive to the place, as a way to understand its geopolitics. I often use the Port of Rotterdam because taking a body of students there is exciting. For most students, finding out that research can be like this is mind-blowing.

46

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Research process, ‘Out of Focus’ by Louis Braddock Clarke, 2021.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Louis Braddock Clarke

47

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Alexander Cromer IST coach, BA Graphic Design, since 2021 PhDArts candidate, Leiden University, since 2021 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2022 Alexander Cromer is a performance artist, storyteller, and critical world-builder, and a PhD candidate at Leiden University. His research focuses on the necessity of the radical imagination to navigate and chart alternative Black ecologies.

‘Voicing Unverifiable Realities Beyond the Archive: Ecological Crisis and the African Diaspora’ The project explored how voice might help us imagine the unverifiable realities of extreme environments and experiences that exist outside of the archive, and how a voice practice can contribute to alternate means of historicizing and analysing the ongoing realities of ecological crisis within the African Diaspora.

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Key Terms and Concepts Voice, performance, spoken word, storytelling, poetry, writing theory through performance, research output as material source, academia as artefact of coloniality, decolonising the curriculum, Black ecologies, ancestral communication, climate injustice, critical fabulation

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe What is your research focused on and how does it feed into your teaching in the BA Graphic Design depart­ ment or into your IST [elective] coaching?

Alexander Cromer In my research I’m interested in the ways that our his­ tories and our futures can be conjured through perfor­ mance and through voice. Sometimes I share with the students things that I’m researching. But mostly, it’s about talking about how we research and how we talk about research. So, it’s like the foundations of research methodology.

For instance, we look at their research questions, their research intentions. We also discuss how you can get lost in research, or how this oscillation occurs when at one point everything seems really clear and then all of a sudden everything explodes and collapses into the ether and then you’re absolutely lost. In fact, in art or design research these moments of vulnerability and of feeling lost can be really productive.

RH How is research integrated in the curriculum of BA Graphic Design?

AC In general, research is heavily integrated into the pro­ gram. There is also an emphasis on researching through form, which I find really beautiful. You can really see how making and theory interconnect. For example, Katrin Korfmann, a photographer and artist, and Maarten Cornel, a philosopher, co-teach a project together and you can see the research extending itself into both branches, which is really nice.

RH And as a tutor, in teaching research to students, on what foundations can you build? Do you see there’s already sufficient attention to research methods within the curriculum, within the KABK?

and how old white males define its terms of engage­ ment. How queer people and people of colour have been treated. And now sometimes in my PhD program at ACPA, I feel like I’m just like the diversity element.

When they ask me to do stuff, sometimes, I’m like “are you asking me because you’re interested in my re­search or is it because I’m like the black dude that’s in the program?”.

I n the Graphic Design department we are talking about the importance of what sources we are giving stu­ dents. How do we make sure that we’re getting a mix of research, not only research methodologies, but dif­ ferent types of research from across the world?

RH And the research you are conducting within the PhDArts program at ACPA: How is this related to what you’re doing in the KABK Design Lectorate Research Group?

AC When I started the PhD, I applied with a project that I call “The Black Arctic”, about an alternate reality and blackness and black ontology and black ecologies and radical imagination and storytelling. And then it became overwhelming; there were so many things to look at or analyse or research or to consider or problematize, that I was getting extremely lost — and not in a pro­ ductive way.

When I joined the Design Lectorate Research Group, I started to focus on voice as a manifestation of a body archive, of a living archive. Then I realised through our discussions and through my reading and thinking and writing about it, that that’s really the core of my PhD. So then I changed my PhD research to fit what I was doing in the Research Group.

RH That’s a lot of credit for the Design Lectorate Research Group.

AC The Research Group is super important.

AC I love research and I feel like there could be more re­ search in KABK in general.

But also at the same time, I have some students that are like, “I just want to be a graphic designer and work for this company”. And that should also be allowed. So, I want this institution to be more research focused. But then I also feel tension. Because with research come the spectres of academia and quite a few of us have a hard time with those.

RH What are the "spectres of academia"?

AC I feel that academia is such an artefact of coloniality.

I love the rigour of academia, but I hate it as a system

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Alexander Cromer

RH How do you now formulate the topic of your PhD since voice has been prominent?

AC Now I’m interested in the ways that voice unfolds dur­ ing performance and how voice can help to inform us or lead to new modes of ecological relations, to create spaces of ancestral healing or conjure up alternative realities or speculative futures. Voice as a way of know­ ing; or voicing as navigating, like a research method.

I think that in the poetry community, it’s all about the language. About whether you’re a good writer. And in the spoken word community, it’s about whether you’re a good performer, if your presence is nice. No one ever

49

really considers how they voice, or what is happening when they voice a thing, or how voice betrays language so many times. Voice is like an ecological artefact be­ cause it only happens in relationship to your immedi­ ate environment.

RH How do you conduct your research?

AC I’m tracing a voice through theory and philosophy. And there’s already a very rich field of writing about voice and what it means and what it does. So right now I am reading a lot of theory. And with every book summary I write, I try to reflect on the other pieces that I’ve read before within the context of this framework. And then I am also trying to envision my practice as a manifesta­ tion of theory. It’s as if I’m writing a theoretical text through my practice, through actually performing.

RH Your performances are your sources that you use for your research, but can they also be considered output?

AC I think it’s always both. I like this kind of like queer idea of research being both output and also material source.

They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Your output is input for others, of course, but I also mean within your own research. It feeds back in. After a performance, I try to just sit there and ask myself, “Okay, what’s hap­ pening here? Let me take a look at this”. And that’s when I’m pulling in bits of the theory that I’ve been reading. So, I’ll say, “When I do this thing with my voice, I see how it’s a bit similar to how Nina Sun Eidsheim writes about critical performance method­olo­gies”. It’s not always successful, but that’s the goal.

AC I got invited to talk about my research at the New In­ stitute in Rotterdam, about using Saidiya Hartman’s concept of "critical fabulation" as a reference point and about how we imagine or reimagine our relation­ ship to our ecological relationships or ecologies.

I have also given lectures at the University of Amster­ dam, Leiden University, University of the Arts Bremen, De Waag, and at Maastricht University. I have an essay [“Apropos Vocal Epistemologies: an Interlude”] which will be in a collection of essays about the imagination, edited by Christian Ernsten and Erik Wong. Also, here at the KABK, the BA Fine Arts department invites me to speak in their Artistic Research symposium b­e­ cause the head of the program is in the Research Group with me.

RH And do you receive any funding apart from the addi­ tion to your appointment from the Research Group?

AC No, I have the hardest time finding funding because I’m caught between being a student and a teacher, between being an artist and a researcher. Artistic re­ search doesn’t fit under scientific research, nor does it fit under art.

RH Do you collaborate within the KABK with other tutors?

AC Through the Research Group, yes.

RH To which area do you think your research contributes the most?

AC I think to knowledge development and the research domain. I don’t know, like, maybe I’ll be an “Alice” after all this!

RH Have you already generated outputs from your partici­ pation in the Research Group?

AC I have been working on a new mode of performance that emerged from sharing my research at the "Fault Lines Research Forum" in December 2022. I have an alter ego named Darius that I perform with. Darius is from the “Black Arctic” alternate reality that I mentioned before. And I’m trying to get Darius and myself into some kind of conversation by recording my voice during a performance, looping it, deconstructing it and then performing a story over that and seeing what happens.

RH How do you make your research public?

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Not all things need to take you somewhere.

Some things just float between then, and now, and the almost now.

They move themselves forward, or back­ward, or they spread themselves across the azure of the present stillness.

And sometimes they do all of that at once.

And they do this with or without you.

He said that to me once, before the time when I never saw Him again.

Excerpt, 'The Black Arctic', Alexander Cromer.

Alexander Cromer, performing ‘Just the Two of Us’, ‘Fault Lines Research Forum’, KABK, 2022. Photo by Silvia Ulloa.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Alexander Cromer

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Rana Ghavami Tutor, MA Industrial Design, since 2021 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2022 Rana Ghavami focused her research at KABK on developing material for teaching design history, research and theory.

‘Origin Stories: Uses of the Past in Design Histories’ Ghavami placed quintessential ‘origin stories’ of mo­ dernity — such as London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 — in tandem with broader emerging forces and anxi­ eties of the British elites in the ‘age of abolition’.

Placing Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament next to the development of ‘free wage labour’ as a utili­ tar­i­an discipline for producing an industrious English workforce, Ghavami explored the proposition that behind the epistemic and visual strategies of the Great Exhibition lies the ‘Babbage principle’ — a sys­ tem of organisation and division of labour — which she traces in the arts and design reforms, where it resulted in new meanings of work, skills, aesthetics and personhood that are still prevalent in design practices today.

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Key Terms and Concepts Design history, theory, labour, craft, skill, aesthetics.

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow In your teaching, what is the relationship between prac­tice, research and theory?

Rana Ghavami Over the years, I have developed lesson plans and read­ ing and writing prompts with which I try to ad­dress and build upon the collective questions and research trajectories that are particular to the department I am part of. n the one hand theory and writing function to iden­ O ti­fy particular habits or methods within a discipline and as a means of understanding, but I also consider them as an active space of materialisation and crea­ tion that can be tested and engaged across other classes. That back and forth is for me crucial in peda­ gogy, and yet quite difficult to establish in the way edu­ cation is organised.

the texts we have read and how they have built a world with them. Or I focus on their writing and how they play­ fully and with rigour implicate themselves, or where and how their writing has affected me.

For me it’s important to be clear about how I evaluate.

It is subjective — in part, it is based on my experiences and interests as a teacher and therefore on my interpre­ tation, and in part it is based on the theories and guides we have grappled with together. It’s a way to turn evaluations into a collective studying process.

AT I think KABK is lucky to have someone so thoughtful and analytical about research-informed pedagogy.

Are there other techniques or strategies or modes of teaching that you are exploring?

RG

To give an example of how I address collective ques­ tions, for a class I teach to second-year MA Industrial Design students, I wrote an outline in which I introduce the theories and practices that carry traction in our de­ partment or in the field and lay out my questions in terms of what can we expect from studying and read­ ing texts together, including our frustrations, our hopes and urgencies — matters that necessitate transforma­ tion whether in our practice or our design histories.

Similar to a research process, it might be that we will need to change our focus or decide to do other things, or it might be that we need more groundwork than initially planned. I think in a good course outline you have to have that space. That’s how I see my course outline — as a research project with propositions.

For the purposes of this research, I find it important to focus on the conditions that enable us to step outside of our classrooms to come together and work through collective needs, concerns and directions. How do we facilitate this conversation? How can a Research Group become such a space?

AT How do you deal with evaluating the work of your students?

RG I like to make presentations in which I share how I have read their work alongside the evaluation criteria, and I try to embed those criteria in the practices and theo­ ries we have read. I include excerpts from the texts stu­ dents have written and show how the structures they have used support the aim and scope of their essays.

hen I was asked to work with students on their grad­ W uation texts and project positioning, I prompted them to write a letter, which was a step towards find­ing reciprocity. I wanted them to think about gradua­tion and what it means to make work public. For some, the work is already part of a community; you could say it’s “public”, even though that term has multiple mean­ings depending on the practice one has. This makes me think about the graduation infrastructure more broadly, and in which way it facilitates reciprocity and engage­ ment.

In preparation for the "Fault Lines Research Forum" last year, I talked with one of my students, Ritvik Khushu, about reciprocal research. If we depart from different “worldings”, if our research engages commu­ni­ties and sites than the ones to which we can be accountable, how do we approach the question of sharing our re­ search with them, and in the context of an education department? What are the challenges and ethical questions?

AT Lastly, how would you characterise your practice?

RG

As a teacher and researcher.

AT In that sense, in this country you’re quite rare. Most people seem to have a practice as an artist or a de­ signer or a researcher, first, and, as a teacher, second.

But you put education firmly at the centre of your practice. Right up front, in fact!

I also like to reflect upon on how they have brought in

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Rana Ghavami

53

Origin Stories: uses of the past in design histories

Tracing origin stories

“Reading objects and context with attention to what they say about lost histories, and layers of occlusion which have resulted in a forgetting of the intimacies of four continents” - Lisa Lowe

land relations, sociality and affective life 1851

severing

control new aesthetic principles

“the workshop of the world” “knowledge transfer”

multifold contact zones and relations across continents

outlawing imitating against imitation

knowledge, skill, community, work, worship, rhythms, designs, artistry refined over 200 years

the reframing of history as novelty and European modernism “innovation & mechanisation”

Slides from ‘Origin Stories: Use of the Past in Design Histories’ by Rana Ghavami, 2022.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Mechanization, copying and new skills “practices of ‘deskilling,’ theorized by Charles Babbage, serve to accomplish and naturalize significant feats of control and degradation while maintaining the presumption of freedom”.

Pin factory, 18th C., France

Adam Smith’s division of labour

division of labour in Gaspard de Pony's logarithm workshop

Charles Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers (1832 )

Mechanization, copying and new skills severing knowledge and labour relations

The tree pattern was a design that evolved out of Islamic, Chinese, and European sources, whose hybridity expressed the contact, conflicts, and exchanges of the preceding centuries.

principles

Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones, 1856.

against imitation / copying Chintz palampore, made in Coromandel Coast, ca. 1770 - 1780

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Rana Ghavami

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Carl Johan Högberg Tutor, BA Fine Arts, since 2021 Co-head, BA Fine Arts, since 2022 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2022 Carl Johan Högberg is an artist based in Amsterdam. His work is, in large part, about the ethics of interpretation and the medium of mediation. He asks if it is possible to speak with another, or on behalf of another, through a kinship felt across history. He has exhibited widely in mainland Europe and Scandinavia, and in 2010 was awarded the Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting.

‘Madder: We Are All Pigments’ This research asked what a student-driven, academywide, speculative pigment research laboratory would look like. Taking its name from Madder Lake, a red pigment made from plant roots, Högberg explored how pigments could act as agents and carriers for environmental storytelling, for the critical, and for the poetic.

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Key Terms and Concepts Fine art, pigments, decoloniality, dyestuffs, story­ telling, toxicity, material sustainability, traceability, speculative material research

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow How do you describe your practice?

Carl Johan Högberg I’m a painter. But a research-heavy paint­er, in that I spend a lot of time in archives and doing writ­ing.

I have this heap of stuff that I do and only a frac­tion of it comes out as a painting. One of my ongoing re­ search interests is the 19th-century Swiss medium Hélène Smith, and I’ve been working for years on a speculative biography project about her.

In the sense that my practice and my research are com­ bined, perhaps I’m an artistic researcher. But mostly this has all come together through being a mem­ber of the fantastic Deep Futures Research Group! I loved being part of the Research Group and knowing that I had this one day a week that I could reserve for my research. It was really helpful for the development of my own research and my own theory classes, but also for the curriculum development in BA Fine Arts.

AT What was the project you worked on in the Research Group?

CJH It’s about pigments and tracking the various connec­ tions between material research and pigment and painting. How can we do that sustainably? The spec­ ulative element comes in because rather than wanting to make an actual library of pigments, I want to con­ sider how we talk about them. How we weave stories around pigments.

We all use pigments, whether as designers or artists or consumers. But, I feel there is this distance, at least my students seem distanced, from the material­ity of their practice — about how pig­ments are pro­duced and in what conditions.

The framework for my research is storytelling. Is it really about the pigments? I don’t know. I like to re­search and think about things from a slight angle. I like to take something that should be there, in acade­mia or in art school, and see what I can do to rethink it.

AT What are the urgencies around this project? Why should we be spending time thinking or speculating about pigments?

CJH Pigments are often used unthinkingly, and they may have been made and distributed in very unsustainable, problematic ways. But I think my research interests have changed during my time in the Research Group.

At first, as an artist and a tutor, I thought I could weave in my research into my classes. But then I became co-

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Carl Johan Högberg

head, and I started thinking a bit more institutionally.

Now I have more agency within this place, so how can I use that and the resources I have access to sort of reimagine things, to question things, and then try and inspire the students and tutors to do similarly?

AT How does your research relate to the gardens being developed at the KABK? CJH I’m very grateful for all this gardening work going on at the KABK. The Green Office has started a pigment garden, together with the Textile Workshop. They’re so knowledgeable about extracting pigments for dyes.

As a clear consequence of my participation in the Re­ search Group, I aim to start a research collaboration with participants from the Green Office and the Tex­ tile Workshop on a series of classes for our third-year students at BA Fine Arts.

AT Your research practice, your art practice, and your teaching practice seem very closely interwoven. How is research understood and taught in the BA Fine Arts department?

CJH Until now research has been ill-defined. And in fact, most people had bad associations with it. There hasn’t been any focus on methodology. There was theory and I think people thought that meant research. There have been tutors who’ve really tried to change that, of course, but for the former head of this department, even though he saw that art was moving toward re­ search, it was not a priority.

So, when we started as heads, one thing we immedi­ ate­ly noticed was that research was separated from the rest of the teaching. It took place on a different day, and so I think the students never really saw a con­ nection between what they did on that day and the rest of their classes and their practice. While we under­ stand that there are specific research skills and met­ hods that need to be taught, we want to embed them throughout the whole program. It’s the same with the­ ory – we are taking steps towards how to mesh that a little bit better.

So, among the changes: How we are framing research as something connected to every aspect of practice.

How we are talking about research methodologies right from the start of the program, integrating writing as much as possible, introducing blogging and docu­ menting vocabularies already from year one. Then we will be able to have a better sense of a student’s learn­ ing curve over the four years and to have ways to log it.

We’ve also introduced study groups. Until now, the

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only didactic tool was the tutorial, but now tutors are coming up with themes and focuses for these groups.

Some of them are practical in nature, like doing a print­ making workshop, for example, whereas others are more theoretical, on postcolonial theory, for example.

But some of them try to bridge practice and research, like Rachel Bacon’s group class on “Drawing as a Research Tool”.

It’s going to take a few years, but we want studio re­ search to be better integrated with thesis research and to see that shift manifesting itself in the gradua­ tion show. We are also trying our best not to be so isolated as a department – we started a relationship with MA Artistic Research, and we will be collabo­rating on a series of lectures for 2024. We have invited Jack Halberstam and Lisa Robertsson to give lectures and studio visits.

We will also introduce something we call the “Festival of Ideas” – a full week devoted to research and to the love of ideas. A celebration! Part of it will be on artistic research, with lectures, methodologies, processes, play, sharing and writing, among other things. Anke Haarmann, the ATP Lector, will also teach a class. And if I can convince you to come in too, that would be great!

AT That’s a smart move, to ask me during an interview!

I can’t refuse now, can I? What is your experience of the research culture at the KABK more generally and how could it be improved?

AT In the Theory Platform, you’re part of a working group looking at the thesis assessment criteria. Any progress to report there?

CJH We’ve only met a few times, but we all feel it needs to be updated to reflect how research is done these days.

And it could be made more exciting and creative as well. One change that has been made is that it is now called the “Graduation Research Paper”. It needs to be more connected to studio practice, though. What’s always bothered me with theses is that we spend all this time training students to be artists, celebrating creativity etc. and then when it comes to the thesis, they end up becoming like LARPing historians.

They’re not trained to do that; not trained to write these long dissertations. So I want to explore how we can make the link to the studio research clearer or in­ tro­duce other formats such as position papers where they reflect on theory and social issues or whatever in relation to their role as an artist. And then for the final submission, it can be an artwork, or podcast, or any­ thing in which they summarise and reflect on the pro­ gress of that positioning.

AT I hope we can discuss this kind of thing going forward.

I’d like to see more connections between a student’s graduating body of work, the documentation of their research and how both elements are presented to­ gether for public dissemination.

CJH I feel the KABK research community, you know, it’s a little bit in the shadows. I really want to help to change that. I haven’t been here long enough to have a full answer on this, but I get the sense it’s underdeveloped.

Researchers shouldn’t have to fight for space in the KABK or for financial support needed for the produc­ tion and dissemination of research.

Maybe we need to group together more. Whether that would be assemblies or applications or like, a dream would be to create a space like a kind of Forensic Ar­ chitecture group, the kind of thing that would put us on the map.

And it’s also why I’m interested in a PhD trajectory now, sort of seeded by our Research Group.

AT Will it be in artistic research?

CJH Could go either way. It’s not material research, per se.

It’s more keyword research, so it could be within a more traditional cultural studies or humanities PhD program.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Research images, Carl Johan Högberg, ‘Madder: We are All Pigments’, 2023.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Carl Johan Högberg

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Victoria Meniakina Tutor, BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, since 2017 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2022 Victoria Meniakina is a researcher, educator, creative director and strategist. With a background in architecture and brand management, her practice spans academia and the private sector and she is currently researching the role of design in the postnatural era.

‘Situating the Postnatural: Material (An)Archaeologies and Displaced Bodies’ Meniakina’s project investigated the role of design in containing, altering and controlling nature as a part of the colonial project. Through an exploration of the concept and designed reality of the botanical garden she sought to understand notions of ‘natural’, ‘artificial’, ‘native’ and ‘exotic’ and to envision new ways of build­ ing ecological awareness.

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Key Terms and Concepts Architecture, postnatural, botanic gardens, loss of biodiversity, ecofeminism, intersectionality, practices of care, maps, plants, multispecies attunement

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe How do you teach students the discipline of architec­ ture while it is in transition, while they are also looking for this fixed idea of what the discipline entails?

Victoria Meniakina If you want to make a change in architecture, educa­ tion is the right place for trying things out. In a big firm, making change is a long, complex process. And I feel here, we can be much more immediate in adapting, ad­ dressing change, and introducing new ideas.

So, if we talk about my research; it’s also multifaceted.

There’s one facet – that I worked on in the Design Lec­ torate Research Group – about how to map and cre­ ate new narratives about the built environment by tuning into ecological thinking, decolonial thinking, thinking about matter. That’s more connected to the regular kind of curricula of design education and archi­ tecture education, in how it combines theory, research, and practice.

This theme of how to transition continues into my research, which has become a way to explore these questions about the ethics and extractive nature of the profession, be­cause it’s quite difficult to engage with these ques­tions in other contexts. For me, research is the place where you are not looking for solutions per se, but trying to explore and open up these issues for discussion.

And then there’s another aspect of my research that’s on more of a meta level, and this concerns the notion of a post-designer. From this perspective, I’m looking into the political infrastructures and systems of archi­ tecture, education, firms, institutes and so on, and asking how we can compare that to the ethics of the damaged ecology, and climate issues that we face and so on. So that’s very meta research and that’s actually the kind of consulting work that I do with my clients — architecture firms, design firms, institutes, where we look into how to change, how to turn things around, because the old ways are not okay anymore. So, it’s really addressing the current issues in a more struc­ tur­al way and considering how best to guide processes that can create change. But then that comes with a change of terms, right? I think exploring what it means to be a post-designer is interesting. That’s also part of my research.

AT Even though you are critical of the professional archi­ tectural discipline, do you still see your research con­ tributing to it because you want to change it?

RH Perhaps we could zoom into a specific research pro­ ject to understand your process, and then also the outcomes and how they might be used and valued.

VM

e cannot practise architecture and design as we used W to. We have to do things differently, and without re­ search you cannot do things differently. You cannot just keep on making things, saying, “Oh, there’s a bio­ material so I’m just going to use it and make a new thing”. It’s just not going to work like that. You need research in order to change the thinking about the pro­cess and attune people to the wider environment and context.

RH

or your own research, typically how and where do you F conduct it? And how does it relate to your practice?

VM I do a lot of writing, reading, interviewing architects, designers and cultural institutions, and facilitating workshops for these clients. I really value peer-to-peer exchange and knowledge exchange as a part of my research. With my Research Group project, my re­ search site was the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam.

I worked with their archives and seed libraries, as well as their other archives at the University of Amsterdam.

I interviewed people and I spent time there, observing, sketching, mapping, writing. So, it’s kind of field re­ search.

Alice Twemlow Even literally, in the case of the “Salon of Ideas” you are organising?

VM Yes! It’s a two-part event and a document that will come out afterwards, with recommendations about the transformation of the department’s curriculum and the department name to fit with that.

RH And what was the research question for this project?

VM My practice is quite multifaceted: it includes research, education, consulting, writing, making and creative direction. But it always revolves around the same crit­ ical intersection where the systems, structures and economies of art, architecture and design meet with climate, ecology, social and species justice, and decol­ onization. So the themes are the same, but the means and methods are different.

VM It was basically about how I can research and tell a story of the Hortus through an ecological-decolonial lens. It starts with architectural history because it’s in the middle of the city. So how was it even set up?

All these displacements, how all these plants and crea­ tures from across the world took all these jour­neys with the VOC ships to arrive in Amsterdam, and how

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Victoria Meniakina

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ful new things. I mean, there are still quite some stu­ dents who think that way. But the point is the pro­cess, the point is the thinking, the point is collaboration, and the point is… as a designer, the ways in which you are looking for solutions. So, each process of looking for a solution is, in a way, research, and that can be done through making. That could be through being in a work­ shop and trying to find out what works, and what doesn’t. Or that can be on a more theoretical, intellec­ tual level.

the Hortus became this marketplace for so-called “exotic” plants. What was the role of design in con­ taining, altering and controlling nature as a part of that colonial project?

RH And as data, you use the seed library and the archives from the Hortus itself? And then do you also track the seeds back to their countries of origin?

VM Actually, yes, I have an ambition to make a map of all these travels, of these seeds. There is a digital library where I can access some information about the plants, for example, about when and from where they arrived.

AT Speaking of seeds, in what ways have you disseminated your research?

VM I think it’s mostly through working with my clients.

AT And that’s a very direct channel, considering you want to feed back into this profession in transition.

Do you consider this to be more direct than writing in a publication?

VM It has been quite fulfilling to see how my research ac­ tu­ally gets directly applied in my clients’ work, and in that way also contributing to the transition in the pro­ fession. One example is Urban Maestro. This project is about mapping new urban governance strategies in collaboration with the chief architect of Brussels, UNHabitat and University College London’s Bartlett School for Urban Planning. The outcome of this research and strategy project entails open-source tools, case studies and resources for different types of so-called New Gov­ernance Strategies for Urban Design, as well as accompanying events, talks and a publication.

AT How do you experience the research environment here at the KABK, and what could be done better?

VM

I t is crucial that future artists and designers understand the role of research in their own work and get access to the full diversity of research activities. That’s much more important than getting good grades or getting a diploma and entering the professional field. Because the professional field is constantly moving and chang­ ing. Knowing how to think in this precarious world, that is super important.

I think specifically at the KABK, it’s about providing options, right? So, somebody who wants to be a good designer can focus on that with some exposure to re­ search. And somebody for whom research is more important can focus on that, but also with some expo­ sure of what it is to be a good designer.

At the KABK I think there has also been quite a big de­ velopment in the field of research and in the curric­u­ lum of our department in particular — I feel like it’s getting much more integrated. I think the thing that could still use improvement across the KABK is that we need more research opportunities for staff and teachers.

RH In that sense, your practice is an example for the IAFD students of how research is part of the practice, right?

VM Yeah, I think an interesting example is the “Reality Check” course I teach, where the students designed the Design Lectorate research space in 2019. It was heavily research-based because the students did quite good research on bio-materials, on circularity, zero waste, how we can build differently, how we can make our own materials, how we can reuse resources that are available in KABK, that are available in The Hague.

AT How do you explain to students the importance of research?

VM I think my assignments make it clear that we’re not only interested in the end product, you know. And be­ ing a designer is not about just making shiny, beau­ti­

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Slides from ‘Situating the Postnatural: Material (An)Archaeologies and Displaced Bodies’ by Victoria Meniakina, 2022.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Victoria Meniakina

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KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile

Benjamin Earl Tutor, BA Graphic Design, since 2021 Alum, MA Non Linear Narrative, 2019 Member, Design Lectorate Research Group 2022 Benjamin Earl is a Rotterdam-based designer and media artist with an interest in the digitisation of everyday life, the rendering and simulation of physical environments, and knowledge sharing prac­ tices. His work looks closely at how life is rendered in digital environments, such as depictions of nature on screen, mass group communication and the precise methods of synchronising clocks around the world. He was one of the co-founders of Mushroom Radio.

‘Coding-In-Situ’ This project was an examination of ways in which the writing of code and programming could be used to reflect a locality and co-construct a sense of physical place in a digital space. Through conversations and the testing of tool prototypes, Earl mapped the rela­ tionships between researchers, groups, equipment, protocols, students, routines and schedules, and ar­chives within various networks in and beyond the KABK.

64

Key Terms and Concepts Information design, coding, network, place, infrastructure, dominance of proprietary software, digital intimacy, unproductivity,

KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Roosmarijn Hompe How does your practice as a designer and researcher relate to what you teach?

Benjamin Earl For me, designing, researching and teaching are inex­ tricably linked. I teach an elective course for second and third years called Design Research. The aim of the course is to reimagine what research could be outside of scientific and traditional approaches. We help stu­ dents think through methods and ways of doing things that can bring out new knowledge. Whether it’s about themselves or about a certain topic or their relation­ ship to that topic, we consider the student as the ini­ tiating point of the research.

First, we give students a lot of input: we take them on trips, we do workshops with them, we bring in people from outside of the KABK. And then during that time they’re documenting a lot but not necessarily making things. Then there’s a kind of switch halfway through the semester where they begin to translate those things into their own forms and make new meaning with those forms.

Alice Twemlow What are some of the methods and what do you visit?

BE Each year we have a different theme. Last year we looked at “unproductivity”, the idea of doing nothing.

We started the semester by visiting Varia, a communi­ ty tech space in Rotterdam, and looking at things that were somehow unproductive in terms of computing.

We visited an exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly about rest and communal care, and arranged a workshop by an artist called Kirsten Spruit who works around the idea of nonproductivity. We did a choir workshop to emphasise the idea of starting from your body as a site of research. Singing became this act of doing, making sounds together to explore what it means to make sounds collectively, do something communally.

we can start with the exhibition you just had at the Goethe Institute in Rotterdam?

BE The Goethe Institute has a program called “Passages en Passant”, which is where they invite two artists with research-based practices to make an exhibition together. They paired me with Daniela De Paulis, who works with the techniques that amateur radio enthu­ siasts use to communicate. In the end, we figured out a show where she presented works that were about beaming radio transmissions up into outer space, and I was doing work that was about receiving transmis­ sions from outer space. For me the whole exhibition became a site of research. I used it as a place to gather people. I took groups to the roof of the building to listen to a weather satellite as it passed over and then we would come down and we’d make these maps of the relations of the different sounds that we had heard and how the sonic traces of the satellite had affected our experience.

RH How did you help them to do this listening? And how did you document their experiences?

BE Each workshop had about five or six participants. I took them to the roof, and first I asked them to do a deep listening exercise. We started by listening to what is close to the body, then on the roof, the street, and the city, and then as far away as they can listen. About 10 minutes after that, the satellite would begin to pass over. I had tuned the satellite into a big speaker. It would start beeping. I asked people to think about the space that they were in at that moment and what hap­ pens when listening to something 500 miles above our heads. As the satellite passed over, the sound faded away.

We’ve found it’s very useful for students to realise that the body is always the starting point of research – of having conversations, doing fieldwork, experiencing a site. From there they might iterate their own research methods. Each student finds their own way through, depending on what the topic is. And we just try to sup­ port that in whatever way we can.

We went downstairs, and I asked them to map out all the different things that they heard during that first listening exercise. And oftentimes it was just this huge mess of, like, diagrams and lines and stuff like that. But when people begin to place themselves within the map, it becomes super interesting because some people can put themselves as dots, really precisely positioned.

And other people will draw themselves around every­ thing. We took three or four minutes per exercise. And while they were making these maps, I was on my lap­ top decoding the sound into an image so that they could see the image that the weather sat­ellite had just made of us from above. The images the participants made of themselves and the one made by the satellite were at odds, because you can’t see yourself in the satellite image.

AT Let’s talk about your own research practice. Perhaps

RH How would you identify all the different ingredients of

RH This idea of your body as a site of research and knowl­ edge, was it specifically for this nonproductivity theme, or do you always take that as a point of departure?

BE

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Benjamin Earl

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doing research in this specific example?

BE For me, it usually starts with having an interest in using some sort of technical hardware or device. This time it was an antenna that you could tune into any kind of frequency. I start out just trying and testing it, playing with this one piece of technology. And then afterwards I begin to imagine its potential. For this project, the data points that I became most interested in were the other people’s way of experiencing the situation and the drawings that they made.

I really love the idea of taking things that could be con­ sidered just tools and then transforming them into something that could also be considered an artistic output.

RH You are also highlighting that these tools which may seem to create objective data are actually not so ob­ jec­tive, even when they are used for their original purposes.

Are there any other activities related to research that you engage with at the KABK? BE I co-founded Mushroom Radio (with Jack Bardwell and Esther Vane), and I’m still involved in an advisory capac­ ity. At the time I was looking at peer-to-peer networks and ways of sharing knowledge that don’t have to go through all these different dependencies that we rely on now. It became a thing where we were interviewing people around the KABK about extra­curricular activi­ ties that they were doing that weren’t recognized by the academy. And we also wanted it to be an archive of that particular time dur­ing which we were study­ ing. Because you have this four-year roll­over of students where, as soon as the fourth year leaves, a whole body of experience and knowledge is gone. We wanted to find ways to pass that along to the next generation.

So Mushroom Radio was a few different things at once.

It was an archive. But it was also a research tool. And it also spawned a few other radio stations I’ve been involved with since graduating.

kind of conversation about research.

RH How do you experience research as part of the KABK’s culture and how do you think it could be improved?

BE I’ve experienced it as a student, as a tutor, and as part of the Design Lectorate Research Group. As a student, I felt that my department was very supportive of re­ search. Because we were given an elite set of tutors, all of whom had great research practices, and we had the time and space to do things. What I struggled with, was trying to get the support of the institution itself.

With Mushroom Radio, for example, there was never any recognition of what it was, and quite often, it would just be forgotten about or not supported in any way. So, it always had to be self-initiated and selfmaintained which, as a student is fine, but as a tutor, it’s less so, I think. The Graphic Design department gives tutors four hours every week to work on the con­ tent of their course, to read and talk to people and figure out what the course could become. So that was super helpful. But what I miss is a way to find out about and discuss each other’s research within the department.

I was also thinking that the workshops could be made more accessible for tutor research. Not everyone can have access to all these tools and equipment in their own private studio so it would be nice to think of the KABK as a hub for making. I only know about what’s possible because of the Research Group. But it would be great for all the other tutors to also be able to have that same knowledge of what’s possible here.

RH How is the Mushroom Radio archive accessible to the current students?

BE Everything’s recorded and uploaded to a Mixcloud account.

AT Mushroom Radio makes a very significant contribution to the research culture at the KABK. We use it quite often with the Research Group. We did that show called "The Research Question" where we paired up each tutor-researcher with a student to trigger a different

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Research process, Benjamin Earl, ‘Coding in Situ’, 2022.

Data from weather satellite, by Benjamin Earl, 2023.

KABK Tutor-Researcher Profile: Benjamin Earl

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KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Lisette Alberti Graduate, MA Non Linear Narrative ‘The Bricks Keep the Record’ Key Terms and Concepts International Relations, design, nonlinear, prison, building, archive, performance, narrative, soundscape, historical reenactments, war criminals

Installation, ‘The Bricks Keep the Record’, graduation project, Lisette Alberti, MA Non Linear Narrative, 2023. Photo by Roel Backaert.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow What does your multimedia installation look like, what’s it about and how did it all start?

Lisette Alberti

It has a big brick pillar, roughly two metres high, and a large collage on the wall. There’s a soundscape in­volved as well. My background is in International Rela­tions, and I think what Nonlinear Narrative is really about is finding ways to deepen an existing practice or interest.

I come from quite a traditional academic background, and most of my research begins with reading. But I wanted to push myself with this MA to try working with different media.

I was really intrigued by historical reenactments. His­ tori­cal re-enactments are often based on battles, spe­ cifi­cally of the First and Second World Wars, and I found that a bit strange, that people find entertain­ ment in these instances of violence. When I saw the prison in The Hague, I saw it as a stage for the per­for­ mance of justice.

AT

Which prison are you referring to?

LA There’s a building in the dunes close to The Hague which is used as a prison by the Dutch government, which also contains the detention cells for the Inter­ national Criminal Court. During the Second World War it was used as a prison by the Nazis. I became kind of interested in this building, seeing it as a stage upon which all of these different versions of justice are performed over the years.

AT

How do you research a prison?

LA The problem with a prison, of course – even though the oldest part that was used during the Second World War is currently a museum, so that part is accessible to the public – is that it isn’t publicly accessible. I started to look in the archives.

The Municipal Archive, but also the National Archive.

And the problem there is that the pictures are only from the outside. There’s very lit­tle public information available about what happened on the inside.

I think that’s why I ended up really approaching this building from that same perspective; positioning my­ self on the outside. That’s why I really focused on the bricks, on the physicality of the building, because, as an outsider, that is what the prison is to me.

What other kinds of research methods did you use?

LA I tried to talk to as many people as possible. The peo­ ple from the museum were really very willing to speak to me, but when I tried to get in touch with people cur­ rently detained there, it turned out to be really hard.

In my installation soundscape I use the music of a rap­ per called Scoffer. During large parts of his teenage years and adulthood he was detained in this prison, and he now writes music about it. There’s large parts of his own retelling, his own words, his own music, in the soundscape.

AT So in fact, the challenges and the dead ends of re­ search­ing this building forced you into new interesting directions...

Tell me about how you envisage people interacting with your graduation project. Do you have an audi­ence in mind for that? Are you trying to speak to the prison system in some way? Or is it to create more general awareness?

LA I hope that when people look at my work, they feel a bit uncomfortable. Resistance fighters were kept in the prison during the Second World War. While today, there are people detained there because of war crimes.

They’re all classified by the physicality of this building in the same way. I hope that when people look at my work they feel this discomfort a bit, and maybe I hope that they think about, okay, why do we work with a prison the way that we do and what do we rely on it for? And also, who decides who is on which side of the cell door? The history of this building shows that that can be quite arbitrary – it changes a lot.

AT Do you have a sense of what you’re going to go on to do after graduation and how you will include or inte­ grate research in your practice?

LA Research has always been at the centre, at the base, of my practice, which I think I'll carry on with. I would love to keep researching this building for now, because I think there’s a lot still there that I haven’t been able to explore. I hope that next year I have the space and the time to work through the things that were difficult to access, and also to pursue some of the interesting tangents in this project.

AT So, you've gone to the archives and then you’re doing stuff like visual analysis, working with photographs.

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Lisette Alberti

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KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Christine Hvidt Grønborg Graduate, MA ArtScience ‘Edaphon’ Key Terms and Concepts Listening, soil, installation, senses, other life forms, situations, land

Installation, ‘Edaphon’, graduation project, Christine Hvidt Grønberg, MA ArtScience, 2023. Photo by Lilli Weinstein.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow What is your graduation project and what role does re­ search play in it?

Christine Hvidt Grønborg It’s a sound installation, and it’s still very much an inprocess project that I will continue to work on after graduation. I want to know how we can become more familiar with other life forms on this planet, and how I can establish artistic situations that facilitate encoun­ ters or meetings with other life forms. I think it’s impor­ tant that we include these voices and perspectives in our human consciousness and experience.

For me, one of the main issues here in the Netherlands and in my homeland, Denmark, is that the farming in­ dustry employs all these extractive processes. And so I wanted to look at, “okay, how do we relate to the land?

And how do we farm the land?” We’re not the only spe­ cies farming the land, but we are doing it at a scale that has such an enormous impact. As part of my re­ search I met with many ecological farmers in the Neth­ er­lands and it really opened my world to see how they relate to the land and how they farm with what they call a more “eco-literate” perspective. All of which led me to the soil and the life forms in there. The real chal­ lenge is to try to find an artistic language to deal with this topic and to engage with things like the soil, that are beyond our human senses.

AT I was excited to see that you're working with listening because it’s actually one of the topics that we’re ex­ ploring through the Design Lectorate right now. Tell me about listening in relation to the edaphon, or life in the soil. You’ve also mentioned something called “long-term listening”, which sounds very interesting...

CHG I have developed a listening practice where I sit in one place for four, six, or eight hours and listen. And it’s listening not just with your ears, but with your body.

You try to enter other timescales by just being in the place and being open to what comes to you in that space. In the dunes there is a wonderful place with this tree that has all these tangled roots and branches going in and out of the soil. I would lay in the forms of these root systems, or in the branches, and laying like that for a few hours, you become quite numb in parts of your body and you really become aware of your own body and you become aware of what you lack in terms of what other bodies around you have, like the tree and the insects and so on. What do they have that allows them to be in this environment for a long time? And through that wondering you start to tap into other kinds of ways of being.

AT Do you use any devices apart from your ears and your body?

CHG Yes, in another aspect of my work I listen to the soil and activities in the soil through sensors. The installa­ tion that is my graduation project has lots of little ce­ramic sculptures that act as speakers for sensors in the soil. When there is a vibration in the soil it activates a little magnet that moves and makes a click sound.

AT Would you be able to discern what caused the vibration?

CHG No, but if you really listen to different fields you learn that there are specific patterns. And if you had many installations, you would have a higher resolution of these patterns. By spending more time with this in­stal­ lation, I also become more familiar with it as an instru­ ment. Installing it here at KABK is only the first step.

AT There are quite a lot of other students at the KABK getting interested in soil, whether as a material or as a kind of site or as an inspiration or whatever. Do you have a kind of soil research club?

CHG We were joking about making a soil route for this year’s exhibition. The groups that have activated the KABK gardens are becoming quite a community.

AT How do you imagine your relationship to research after KABK? CHG I’m already setting up collaborations with the eco farmers and going to their specific landscapes to set up the installation and develop these methods. From there I want to figure out how to approach more con­ ventional farmers that might not be as open to these ideas. I’m also interested in monitoring biodiver­sity through sound, so bioacoustics in a way. There could be an interesting collaboration with people from the earth sciences.

AT Well, that’s what’s interesting about ArtScience, isn’t it? Because I guess it’s up to you where you decide to position yourself on that spectrum, whether you are the art, looking to collaborate with science, or whether you embody both art and science, in yourself and your research. Where do you think you fall on that spectrum?

CHG I think when I started, I was very focused on being the artist and approaching science. But now I see every­thing is much more ambiguous. And yeah, maybe I don’t even want to classify myself into any fixed position. I think it’s a process of being aware of this and continuously ask­ ing yourself about these things but staying in motion.

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Christine Hvidt Grønborg

71

KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Pavel Pavlov Graduate, MA Type and Media ‘Panik / Kalm’ Key Terms and Concepts Type, drawing, Bulgaria, punchcutting, letter, language, process, historical

Research process, ‘Panik / Kalm’, graduation project by Pavel Pavlov, MA Type and Media, 2023. Photo by Eric de Vries.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow

This masters is different from the others at the KABK because it’s one year as opposed to two. Does that mean you have to start your graduation project, basi­ cally, as soon as you arrive?

Pavel Pavlov In a way, yes. In the first semester, we do historical re­ search. That is the revival project when we pick some metal type from, let’s say, the 17th century, and we re­ vive it into digital type. Then in the second semes­ter your graduation project can be on literally anything.

AT

What was yours about?

PP

ell, in fact, mine was linked to my historical research W from the first semester. I became obsessed with the 17th-century craft of punch-cutting, where type was made with metal punches. People would make these very tiny, few millimetres-tall letters. I tried to do it my­ self by cutting in soap, just to figure out how these let­ ters are carved from the material, and this in a way gave me the idea for the master project in the second semester.

It’s a way of thinking of the letter as something materi­ al, so it turns suddenly into a three-dimensional object.

AT Did you design a typeface based on this hands-on research?

PP Yes, I developed a type family. It started from devel­ op­ing digital tools inspired by this Renaissance craft of punch-cutting. With some coding I could interpret these approaches, and then using drawing I made a lot of experiments. What I made in the end is a text type family where the inner part of the letter is slanted, slightly rotated, and the outer part of the letter is ro­ tated toward the other side, so it creates a weird, in­ teresting, textural shape.

AT So the letter itself really draws attention to its own materiality?

PP A text face also has to be very legible so it’s inter­est­ ing, within these constraints, to find a way to be crea­ tive and to find a way to make a text typeface that is inter­esting and appealing to the eye. That was some­ thing that I put a lot of attention to.

AT

How did you research the history of text type?

draw on your prints, and then redraw them digitally.

And even when you do some things that involve some coding and appear to be very digital and very polished, they have often gone through a lot of cycles of drawing as well.

AT Do you test the legibility of the typeface not only on different paper stocks and sizes, but also by getting other people to read it?

PP I sent it to some friends, designers, to see how they would play with it, because type designers are in sym­ biosis with graphic designers. They are the ones who hopefully will use your typeface.

AT Type is intimately connected with the nuances of lan­ guage. And here you are, coming from Bulgaria, study­ ing in the Netherlands, and yet speaking English. How does this all have an impact on your type design? And do you ever design type in Bulgarian cyrillic?

PP Yeah, for sure. My graduation project supports the Bul­ garian language. I have to say that even though the MA Type and Media is still very Latin-centric, we do try to diversify. We had workshops in Korean, in Arabic, in Cyrillic as well, so we could learn different writing systems and different scripts, or at least have some insights into them.

AT What are some of the things you like the best about the Bulgarian language as it appears in typography?

PP It has a not very long but quite vivid typographic heri­ tage, because Bulgarian Cyrillic forms are different from other Cyrillic. Around 50% of the letters have different forms. They come more from handwriting, more from the rounded and curved shapes.

AT That’s interesting considering how much you liked to integrate the process of drawing in your type design.

Do you know what you’re going to do afterwards? And do you think research will play a role in what you do?

PP Definitely. I love doing historical research, and I am looking forward to some projects that I’m going to do back in Bulgaria.

AT Do you have a tip to give to someone who’s going to be starting to do some research?

PP Well, just to be curious and explore...

PP I visited archives to see punches, and I researched through drawing. Drawing is something you always return to throughout the process, and you can print,

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Pavel Pavlov

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KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Marieke Peeters Graduate, MA Artistic Research ‘Orifice’ Key Terms and Concepts Wallpaper, horror, form, material, space, disintegrate, making, critical, hands

Installation, ‘Orifice’, graduation project, Marieke Peeters, MA Artistic Research, 2023. Photos by Paulina Winiarska.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Marieke Peeters My graduation work is an immersive installation made completely from wallpaper. And yeah, as you can see, this one has a very skin-like quality. It’s almost like meat.

And the other one — Alice Twemlow — I should explain that Marieke and I are separated by a roll of rather nasty looking wallpaper. Where did you find this? What’s it made from?

MP I’m just really into finding material in second-hand stores. There was a wallpaper shop that was going out of business and selling all these vintage wallpa­pers very cheaply. Among them I found these two very gross, or weird-looking wallpapers that I found intriguing.

I’m interested in materials that have a kind of ambigu­ ity in them, that can be quite pretty but also have some­ thing very brooding about them. Like, the flowers on this pattern can turn into mould or leathery skin.

AT I can imagine that in your situation, questions about research are extra complex because you have been studying on a program called Master Artistic Research.

Is there any time when you’re not researching? Is there a distinction at all between when you are making art and when you are researching?

MP I think doing this MA has broadened my perception of research. There’s the theoretical research for my thesis, but in my artistic work the works are themselves also a form of research, and me working with the material, closely zooming in and doing experiments with it, that’s also a type of research – it’s just with my hands, rather than with my brain. I think they feed into each other quite nicely.

AT What makes the zooming into materials and working with your hands research rather than making? Is it that you reflect on it afterwards, that you document it, that you do it intentionally, or what?

MP Reflection is important, and criticality is also always at play. Even though I can be deep in making, I am also able to have critical distance as well.

AT What about your thesis? And what have you been busy reading?

me when creating this work, as it tries to disintegrate form. And without being completely abstract – he doesn’t mean that something is literally formless but rather that it tries to undo form, or kind of rebels against form. And I think this opens up the idea of wall­ paper as a kind of agent, as a kind of dissembler of spaces that can make the domestic realm into a place of horror.

AT Is wallpaper a recurring trope in horror fiction?

MP Yeah. There’s a short story, a gothic horror story, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, about a woman who is driv­ en mad, symbolically through the wallpaper but really because of the patriarchy. The wallpaper is like a cat­ a­lyst for the pressures of patriarchy and for the con­ fines of the oppression of women. And yeah, it’s really interesting to me how wallpaper is used as an unset­ tling kind of agent that disrupts very safe spaces. The main character's bedroom becomes her prison. She be­comes so terrorised by the pattern on the wallpaper, in which she starts to imagine the figure of a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. In other horror films wallpaper suddenly starts to grow mould...

AT As I understand it, artistic research is about researching your own practice, but perhaps a bit about researching yourself as well. Was there anything you found during this process that surprised you?

MP I realised that sometimes I tend to cling very, very strongly to a conviction. And then I’m really annoyed when that conviction is not right. For example, I came into the project believing that fear could be a positive emotion and that people can like, learn from actually talking about their fears. But then I realised that actu­ ally, and research also shows, that you can also be really re-traumatized when you have to relive a fear or reopen certain very traumatic experiences. I realised, “okay, I need to be more open towards unexpected or unwanted resolutions, too”.

AT I think what you describe is a fairly common experi­ ence for all kinds of people doing research. There’s a delicate balance between wanting to have a position, a critical take on something, and yet still remaining open and making sure your research question is a gen­ u­ine question.

MP My thesis was about horror fiction and its relation to reality, so I looked a lot at horror sources. I read a lot of fiction actually, together with other theoretical sources such as Georges Bataille’s formless form. It’s an interesting concept that I really took along with

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Marieke Peeters

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KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Charlotte Savine Graduate, MA Interior Architecture ‘Crafting Space’ Key Terms and Concepts Process, craft, grandmother, family, reflection, making, cultural background, space, question, ornaments

Installation, ‘Crafting Space’, graduation project, Charlotte Savine, MA Interior Architecture, 2023.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Charlotte Savine My project, “Crafting Space”, dealt with the question of how craft heritage can become space. I started off by diving into my family tree. My family are from En­ gland, Hungary and Germany, and I learned my ances­ tors’ craft skills as a kind of way to try to find belonging and identity and soften the boundary between crafts and identity and space, because I feel there’s a divide.

I used ornaments from the different craft objects in the different parts of my family, such as Hungarian weav­ ing, English tea sets, and gave them new kinds of func­ tional applications within the spatial world through the act of tufting.

Alice Twemlow What was the research process behind this project?

Can you remember where it all started for you?

CS I really wanted to work with materials. I’ve always been interested in textiles and getting into production and making stuff. And I was even wondering if it was too late to become a beginner again. But I really wanted to make with my hands, and topic-wise it made sense.

This mix of cultures in my family is a very big part of me, but I don’t find a representation in space. That was kind of the initial thing; can I create some kind of connec­ tion between our cultural identity and space?

AT In front of us we’ve got some exciting fabrics. Would you consider these to be part of the outcome of your project? Or are they part of the process of research?

CS What we’re looking at is one of the textiles that I was working on, a tufted piece. What you just hinted at is a very good question, because that is kind of the thing that’s been blurred for me in this entire process. What is research? What is process? What is outcome? When does making as a research transition into a design out­ come? Does that even have to happen? In a sense this was research – I was really making as a research, which is very new for me. I’d say these are research byprod­ ucts, but they also fed into my final outcome. Which I also wouldn’t consider a final outcome. Because I’m still continuing to work on it.

All my tutors really encouraged me to go down a more autoethnographic route and use making as a way of researching. Until then I thought research was just about working with theory.

AT Like it’s something that happens in another room.

The library, perhaps?

CS Yeah, very much so.

AT You mentioned autoethnography as a method. As you were in the process of tufting these designs, were you reflecting on your process as you were going? Were you documenting it?

CS When I started my research I went back into my family history and discovered that most of them were crafts­ men. I wrote a kind of diary on what I’d been doing, but also looking back into their history, at the same time researching and talking to my grandparents.

Writ­ing was really important to me, so I did a lot of writing in the workshops themselves, about my pro­ cess, add­ing in information I found on the internet and from my family. I documented everything. I filmed ev­ery­thing, I took photos of everything. It’s become how I work. It started as a way of understanding, but now it’s kind of developed into a method: Make, ar­chive, and then reflect.

AT Make, archive, reflect. I love that! Are you interested in doing a PhD after this? I could imagine you doing a PhD in some kind of practice-based research.

CS I had never ever considered it but this year I found out I actually really enjoy researching and writing with the making, and, yes, I looked into a PhD for the first time.

AT I think you’ve just defined research right there! You mentioned that you’d be continuing with this work.

Does this mean you want to integrate research into your practice when you graduate?

CS Yeah, very much. In my BA I never did any research, and I didn’t really know what it meant. And I also strug­gled quite a bit this year with it. You know, at first I thought it’s theory, and it’s tons of footnotes I didn’t even know how to write!

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Charlotte Savine

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KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Alexey Yurenev Graduate, MA Photography and Society ‘Silent Hero’ Key Terms and Concepts Memory, war, images, Ukraine, machine learning, gaps, Friedrich, veterans, practice, publication

Images, ‘Silent Hero’, graduation project, Alexey Yurenev, MA Photography and Society, 2023.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alexey Yurenev I come from a documentary and photojournalistic back­ ground, and four years ago I learned about a project called ‘This Person Doesn't Exist’, which was one of the first manifestations of generative AI intervening in the photographic realm. Instead of looking at the pitfalls of this technology, I wanted to see if there was a specu­lative potential for me to fill in gaps in what can be vi­su­alised.

AY This process made me re-situate and rethink my prac­ tice. I was showing the veterans my images, including ones made with this emerging technology, images from WWII, and this created a prompt for reimagining these historical events. How can you reconfigure a future past, you know, to circle it back to photography? It’s not just about photography; it’s more about providing a multi­ modal and multi-vocal production of knowledge and history, and an acknowledgement of many histories.

I immediately thought of my grandfather, Grigoriy Lipkin, who fought in WWII. He never spoke about his experience in the war. This created a per­fect match, using these technologies to fill in the gaps. I trained my own machine on images of WWII, to try to fill in the gaps in history that were never told to me.

AT Is there a parallel between the work you’ve been doing on WWII and what will be the aftermath of the war in Ukraine? Is there any similar work that could be done as a sort of reparation or to create a more just sharing of memory? Is this something that you’ve been think­ ing about?

Alice Twemlow As well as machine learning, you use quite a lot of other research methods. You interviewed some WWII sur­ vivors, right? Can you tell us about some of the chal­ lenges and successes of these interviews?

AY The war in Ukraine deeply impacted this project to the point where I started asking myself, “is it right to con­ tinue this project? And how do I position myself in re­ gard to this war?” It is interwoven into my project – I did some fieldwork in Ukraine last summer, and my grandfather won a medal against Nazis in the same place as the current invasion, so it’s like his memories are being used to invade.

AY Alongside machine learning I did field work in Russia and Ukraine, in the places where my grandfather fought, and also did a lot of archival research. The last step was interviews with surviving Russian WWII veterans who are living in a Russian neighbourhood in New York.

The idea was to create a methodology for investigating gaps in history, historical silences. Memory is not a stable medium – every time you remember something, you distort it. It is a reconstruction of a fragmented past projected into the future, and it’s happening in the present.

The thing that comes to mind all the time is the cy­ clical nature of history and how, in 80 years, the grand­ son of somebody who’s fighting the war right now might be doing similar work. And that’s pretty scary.

AT I’ve also interviewed quite a lot of elderly people as part of my research but sometimes they will repeat things, and sometimes they will say something that doesn’t align chronologically. Did you come across that kind of thing in your research? And how did you negotiate that?

AY You know, I’ve encountered these kinds of inconsis­ ten­cies at every single step of the research. But it’s really hard to point to this authentic, original moment.

All this havoc that I’ve unleashed through these met­ hods just reveals the fallibility of everything. And that’s okay.

AT I think by revealing these inconsistencies you show the need for a multiplicity of documentation. Does that track through to photography too, the idea of the single photographic image becoming a relic of the 20th century?

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Alexey Yurenev

79

KABK MA-Student-Researcher Profile

Ritvik Khushu Graduate, MA Industrial Design ‘The Apsara's Seat’ Key Terms and Concepts Industrial design, artistic research, consequences of colonialism, resurfacing imaginations, 3D printing, objects, digital archive, culture, stories, beings, Kashmir

Still from Salvation Army campaign film, 1925, ‘The Apsara’s Seat’, graduation project, Ritvik Khushu, MA Industrial Design, 2023.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023

Alice Twemlow Tell me about your graduation project and how research fed into it.

Ritvik Khushu It’s a multimedia installation containing found footage and some designed objects, images, and sound pieces.

The aim is to thread back into relation certain severed, disfigured or veiled imaginations which were doubly severed as a consequence of colonialism in South Asia.

AT Can you tell us a little about your family background and why South Asia is important to you?

RK I come from a Kashmiri Pandit family, from one of the northern states of India, but I grew up in Bangalore, in South India, not really having access to Kashmiri cul­ture and not really knowing what my roots were.

It seemed as if every access to my culture, every book, every piece of literature, every song was somehow clouded with a misinterpretation. I wanted to under­ stand why I had no access to my ancestry, my history, my culture. And this became an avenue for me to under­ stand and uncover layers of the self.

AT

here does design fit (or not fit) into this? Is “threading W things back into relation” a new possibility for design, do you think?

RK Definitely. I think the domain of design dominates ex­ perience today and it has usurped the crafting of ex­ perience for itself. Design as a discipline emerges from very specific trajectories of thought and traditions of thinking and sensing. In my research I also uncovered the ties that design has with Imperial practices or worldordering practices, or world-destroying practices. It is important for a designer to question the ethical foun­ dation of this discipline.

How do we sense the world? And how do we sense it differently? And how do we live with that difference?

I think we need to radically reimagine what design is and can be and even where it comes from.

AT You’ve brought in some objects. What are they and why are they important to you?

RK One of the stories that I resurface in my thesis is the story of the Salvation Army in India. This image is from a Salvation Army campaign film made in 1925 in which an officer is seen coercing an Indian woman to give up her traditional jewellery. This jewellery is then later found in museum archives. But there’s a misinterpre­ tation of what these “objects” are. They’re described in an empirical way, purely in terms of their physical

KABK MA Student-Researchers: Ritvik Khushu

appearance. But these objects have much more presence.

AT And how do you restore that presence? You’ve got some things that look like a piece of brick and plaster and metal. What are these?

RK So to bypass the archive, I make 3D-prints of the pieces of jewellery, and then silicone or plaster moulds of the 3D-printed jewellery and cast them in clay and alumin­ i­um. This is the process of me trying to materialise these digital objects that have been forgotten and pushed away in the digital archive, and also impress them into the context that they belong in, which is earth. The object is no longer an object — it’s the pre­ sence of something, of ancestry, of a being.

AT You seem very interested in the imagination as both a conceptual realm and domain, but also as a material, perhaps. How do you go about researching, and re­ searching with, the imagination?

RK That has been tricky. But I do believe in the transfor­ ma­tive power of research, especially in transforming the self – that what I research and the ways I do it re­ flect my own inner experience. And when I recognize this back and forth between inner experience and outer manifestations, then things become like poetry, you know, and then imagination becomes tacit, tac­ tile. I think of the imagination as an ecology. Every ecol­ ogy has this ancestry and abundance, and plurality.

And we see this in the imagination. Also, the ways that we imagine something has multiple origins, and multiple layers, and also occupies multiple heights in psychology.

AT Will there be any opportunity for you to reinsert this research back into that absence, that loss of family culture, you described at the beginning?

RK I certainly hope so. I see all my work as an offering, so it would mean a lot for this offering to be met with appreciation from the other side. In some sense, it is already being threaded back through these stories, into the self. The story of the observer, for instance, becomes a way of threading back these beings that have been outcast and, through me, they are threaded back into these cultures of imagining. At least, that’s what I hope.

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KABK Research in Art and Design: People and Projects, 2018 – 2023 We are grateful to all the featured KABK researchers and MA students for sharing their insights and experiences in these interviews with such candour and care.

For more details about the lectorates and all research projects please visit: Art Theory Practice Lectorate & Design Lectorate subsites at www.kabk.nl.

Interviewing Alice Twemlow and Roosmarijn Hompe Editing Alice Twemlow, KABK Design Lector Editorial assistance Will Boase, researcher, MA Photography and Society Design Jungeun Lee

Note on the making of the interviews In the Netherlands every six years the quality of research in universities of applied sci­ ences is assessed through the Sector Protocol for Quality Assurance in Research. The basis for the assessment is a self-evaluation report in which an institution discusses the research output of the past six years, ambitions for the coming period, as well as how research is defined, organised, and supported in order to achieve these ambitions. In 2023 the University of Arts the Hague presented a unified report in which each faculty has its own chapter.

As part of the preparation for the chapter about research at KABK, policy advisor Roosmarijn Hompe and Design Lector Alice Twemlow conducted in-depth individual interviews with several KABK tutors and staff who were Research Group members be­ tween 2018 and 2023. A set of questions was used, geared to elicit data for the required standards of assessment, but also adjusted for each researcher’s unique situation. For this publication, the transcripts were edited down to about 20 % of their original length and each interviewee made any necessary adjustments and approved the edits.

Lengthier versions of these interviews, and new ones, are available in the Research section of the KABK website: www.kabk.nl

Copyright © 2023 KABK This publication is an initiative of KABK Design Lectorate: lectoratedesign.kabk.nl